This week marks the bicentenary of the birth of one of England's greatest novelists, George Eliot. She was born on 22 November 1819 in Nuneaton, not far from Coventry, the city that was to play an important part in her life and be immortalised in her novel Middlemarch. Coventry was where I discovered George Eliot. We lived there from 1987 to 1995 when I was Precentor of Coventry Cathedral. In that time I was asked to go to Nuneaton to dedicate a memorial to its greatest daughter. By then I was reading the novels, and someone must have overheard me exclaiming how marvellous they were. And indeed, what prompts this bicentennial blog is precisely the revelation these great books proved to be when I opened them for the first time. I read through all her mature novels in the space of a year and wondered why it had taken me so long to discover them. Or, I think it's as fair to say, to be discovered by them. I'll try to explain.
In 1994 I gave a lecture at Nuneaton's George Eliot Hospital to mark the 175th anniversary of her birth. I posted it last week (on my other website where I post lectures and sermons) as I gave it at the time. The title was "Mary Ann Did Not Go". Mary Ann Evans was of course her real name. And "did not go"? It referred to a diary entry of her father's lamenting her refusal to attend church with him one Sunday morning in 1842. The church in question was St Michael's, Coventry that would later become the Cathedral and be bombed in the Luftwaffe raid of November 1940. You'll understand my keen interest in that episode. It belonged to the story of my place of work. And anyway, we clergy are as interested (or should be) in why people don't go to church as why they do.
Middlemarch was the first of her novels that I read. It was a good place to begin. It's not a perfect novel (is there such a thing?) but it's undeniably a very great one. Was it Virginia Woolf who said that it was one of the few novels written for grown-ups? In Middlemarch, many of the themes of her novels are worked out on a large canvas: human lives being lived out in small communities of dense networks and intricate relationships; the contrast between the intimate scale of ordinary human concerns and the broad sweep of a history that was, always is, changing the nation irrevocably; the place of church and religion in an industrialising and increasingly sceptical society; the portrait of a flawed clergyman surrounded by his books and driven by the need to uncover "the key to all mythologies". Was he, the unlikeable Casaubon, relentless pursuer of the inexplicable, too close for comfort? And was it significant that the book's beautifully drawn heroine Dorothea, a fictional creation Mary Ann must have been particularly fond of, had the same name as my mother?
If you are a priest, you live and work on these kinds of threshold all the time. Your task is to try to interpret how the various narratives we are part of interact and converse with one another: the larger, universal story of God as he is in the world in relation to the more intimate stories of who and what we are as men, women and children living ordinary human lives at particular times and in particular places. Of these, the church is a symbol that looks in both directions: worldwide and local, belonging to every place and to my place. "Mary Ann did not go" to her local church. But she never lost her interest in, her fascination with, religion. Church and clergy feature in most of her novels, as I point out in the lecture. Her last novel, Daniel Deronda, was as explicitly about religion as any English novelist of her century got.
In this respect, George Eliot brings an implicitly theological perspective to her characters and their settings. She knew enough about organised religion to respect it as an irreplaceable social glue and catalyst of moral good. Though she had also read the writings of honest doubters like Renan, Strauss and Feuerbach and knew not to invest religion with a metaphysical reality it can't sustain. For her, the continued potential of religion lay in the sentient dimension of imagination and feeling. Maybe she never quite grew out of a nostalgia for a secure and happy childhood in which religion played a central role. There's something rose-hued about Adam Bede and Scenes of Clerical Life as there is about the prelapsarian world of The Mill on the Floss before the flood. She was perhaps the quintessential embodiment of the Victorian crisis of faith: intellectually troubled but emotionally more attached than she might have admitted.
In all this, George Eliot is, I think, a theologian's novelist. Her range, intelligence and depth of insight are perhaps the closest an English novelist has ever got to Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Cor ad cor loquitur. A theologian recognises a kindred spirit, even when a theological heart is manifested in a different discipline. It was this, as much as anything, that first drew me to her writings. She was as important a discovery to me as John Henry Newman had been twenty years earlier, about whom I wrote a blog last month. And looking back as I do now, I see that the kind of Christianity I'm increasingly drawn to - liberal, questioning, generous, socially concerned, inclusive and above all, humane - owes more to her than I realised at the time.
I guess I recognised in George Eliot a novelist with a sense of place. I came to think of her as a geographer of the human spirit, at home in the landscape of the mind and a reliable guide to reading its map so as to chart our paths across it. But I also warmed to her physical sense of place. I'd moved to the Midlands from North East England and had felt the loss of its regional distinctiveness, its strong, definable character, the accents of both people and place. I think I was looking for a native voice who could help me find my home in "Loamshire", as Mary Ann called it. I came across these words in Daniel Deronda, new to me then though, I discovered, much quoted long before it became fashionable for some of us to describe ourselves proudly as "citizens of the world".
A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakeable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.
Has the elusive idea of "sense of place", of the importance of being nourished by attachment and belonging, ever better been put into words? Every great novelist has this sense of place, whether it's Dickens' London, Hardy's Wessex or the Bronte's West Riding. But I hadn't realised how literature can help bond you to the particular geography you call your own until I needed it to do that for me. And although I now live a long way from Goerge Eliot's Midlands, I can't revisit them in my mind without construing the shapes and patterns of the human textures she laid over them in her writings. Only the greatest of writers achieves this to the point of depositing ideas and images in the mind that you know you'll never forget.
To mark the anniversary of her birth this week, Kathryn Hughes has been presenting A Life in Five Characters on BBC Radio 4. George Eliot never wrote an autobiography (if only she had! - wouldn't it have been one of the most luminous and intelligent of all nineteenth century lives?). Instead she wrote her life into her leading characters: Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, Janet Dempster in Janet's Repentance - a novella which was a new one for me, Silas Marner in the novel that bears his name, and finally, on her day itself, Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda.
Kathryn Hughes has also written an engaging piece in The Guardian in honour of the bicentenary, "What George Eliot's 'provincial' novels can teach today's divided Britain". She writes with the Brexit referendum in mind, and the current election campaign. "This recent habit of reducing people to types would have appalled Eliot. Her chief message is that we must learn to identify and honour the particular differences between us while acknowledging our shared humanity. Art is the nearest thing to life, she wrote in an essay in 1856. It is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.... Until we have understood what life is like for the Tullivers and the Dodsons, we are in no position to judge them for holding preferences and opinions that are so different from our own."
Verb sap. The great writer still speaks. Two hundred years on, we need to listen carefully.
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