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George Eliot and the Unified Sensibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

N. N. Feltes
N. N. Feltes*
Affiliation:
Kenyon College Gambier, Ohio
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Extract

“I have been reading Newman's Apologia pro Vita Suâ,” wrote George Eliot in 1868, “with such absorbing interest that I found it impossible to forsake the book until I had finished it. ... I have been made so indignant by Kingsley's mixture of arrogance, coarse impertinence and unscrupulousness with real intellectual incompetence, that my first interest in Newman's answer arose from a wish to see what I consider thoroughly vicious writing thoroughly castigated. But the Apology now mainly affects me as the revelation of a life—how different in form from one's own, yet with how close a fellowship in its needs and burthens—I mean spiritual needs and burthens.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 1 , March 1964 , pp. 130 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1964

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References

1 The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven, 1954–55), iv, 158–159. Hereafter cited as Letters.

2 Recounted by F. W. H. Myers, “George Eliot,” Essays: Modern (London, 1883), pp. 268–269.

3 Letters, iv, 65; cf. Basil Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies (London, 1949), p. 237.

4 Apologia pro Vita Sua, Riverside ed. (Boston, 1956), p. 16.

5 Ibid., p. 169.

6 “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton,” The Works of George Eliot, Cabinet ed. (Edinburgh, 1878–85), i, 120. All references are to this edition of the novels.

7 “Unity Through Analogy: An Interpretation of ‘Middlemarch’,” VS, ii (June 1959), 306–307.

8 The Great Tradition (London, 1948), p. 103, n. 1.

9 “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 3d ed. (London, 1951), p. 287.

10 The Saturday Review, l (14 August 1880), 210, 209.

11 Problems of Life and Mind, 3d ser. (Boston, 1880), ii, 84–85.

12 J. Kaminsky, “The Empirical Metaphysics of George Henry Lewes,” JHI, xiii (June 1952), 327, 328.

13 Problems of Life and Mind, 1st ser. (Boston, 1880), i, 127–128.

14 Barbara Hardy does not mention the connection between “sensibility” and “sensation” in her discussion of the importance of sensibility to George Eliot's heroines in The Novels of George Eliot (London, 1959), p. 53.

15 Middlemarch From Notebook to Novel: A Study of George Eliot's Creative Method (Urbana, Ill., 1960), p. 101.

16 Quoted in Beaty, p. 109.

17 Problems of Life and Mind, 1st ser., i, 431–432.