“Confound their petty politics!” This is the curse of Tertius Lydgate in the days leading up to the fateful vote for the chaplaincy of the Middlemarch infirmary. He had hoped to remain above such trivial concerns and to concentrate on his medical research and practice. Yet, as in other affairs, Lydgate's character flaws are as much to blame for his unintentional entanglements as are the circumstances into which he is thrown. George Eliot's narrator describes Lydgate's state of mind before the vote by a metaphor that points outward to a greater political scene: “He could not help hearing within him the distinct declaration that Bulstrode was prime minister, and that the Tyke affair was a question of office or no office; and he could not help an equally pronounced dislike to giving up the prospect of office” (ii:18:146). Lydgate's highly rationalized yet spontaneous vote for Tyke and against Farebrother wins him “office,” but he eventually finds reason to regret his desire for this prize, so uncomfortably won by his public display of party loyalty.

Appreciation and depreciation

There is something strange in the account of George Eliot's reputation and influence. For a writer so much appreciated, and, one would hardly doubt, of appreciating fame, it is striking to observe the limit points of appreciation, in both senses of the word. I had not thought to find so much depreciation. Given her own vaunted values of sympathy and connection over time, it is all the more noticeable when she is met short of half-way by readers, writers, and critics over the years.

George Eliot herself knew something about reception - reception from others and from the past - and about accrual and passing along. In the last chapter of Book IV of The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver takes up a little old-fashioned book by Thomas à Kempis and finds that it works miracles to this day. It has gained by its reading over the years, for its name precedes it in familiarity. The corners of pages turned down, the pen and ink annotations now browned by time, mark a way back to à Kempis himself, with his fashion of speech different from that of Maggie's day, but still the voice of a brother.

In Romola, George Eliot's heroine decides, not without a great deal of conscience- searching, to leave her home city of Florence, and to leave Tito, the husband who had disappointed and disillusioned her, and whom she no longer loves or respects. Rather than take a conventional path of flight for an unhappy wife - taking refuge with friends, or in a cloister - “she had invented a lot for herself - to go to the most learned woman in the world, Cassandra Fedele, at Venice, and ask her how an instructed woman would support herself in a lonely life there” (36). The life that lies ahead of her may be one of loneliness and endurance, but it will be one of freedom. As she leaves the city in a wintry dawn, the sun bursts forth in an apparent symbol of hope, “a divine presence stirring all those inarticulate sensibilities which are our deepest life” (36). The installment - installment 7, in the form in which Romola originally appeared in the Cornhill Magazine - concluded with her facing away from Florence and pausing for a moment, “free and alone. ”

James Sully, founder of the first English philosophical journal Mind, wrote a study of “George Eliot's Art” for an early number of the journal. This piece stands out, in a periodical devoted to academic and professional philosophy, as the single article in the journal's history (published since 1876) to treat a novelist or poet. But this fact is not surprising, given how seriously Eliot's contemporaries took her status as a philosopher and a moral teacher. Sully observes of George Eliot that people “are apt to think and speak of her as a discoverer and enforcer of moral truth rather than an artist,” while George Cooke, in his 1884 study of her work writes, “she was an ethical prophet.” Such comments were standard among George Eliot's Victorian readers. Henry James, in fact, saw her work as too philosophical and intellectual, complaining that “the philosophical door is always open on her stage, and we are aware that the somewhat cooling draught of ethical purpose draws across.”

”George Eliot” came into existence on 4 February 1857, as the pseudonym offered by 37-year-old fledgling novelist Marian Evans to her new publisher, William Blackwood, to use as “a tub to throw to the whale in case of curious inquiries” (GEL, ii:292). Of all the pen names adopted by Victorian writers, George Eliot's is the one that has proven the most enduring, the one that did not fade away once the gender and identity of the author became known. Even now, after countless biographies have charted the personal life of the brilliant woman who managed to live always at an oblique angle to Victorian middle-class respectability, “George Eliot” retains its singular power to identify both the person and the writer. Exactly because it is an assumed name, it brings into play the odd quality of a life that could develop its great capacities only under the cover of partly fictional social roles. It is also the only stable name attached to the person who was baptised Mary Anne Evans after her birth on 22 November 1819. Each new stage of her life was accompanied by a change in signature, so that one might tell a version of George Eliot's story by following the series of names she asked her friends to call her. Above all, “George Eliot,” laden with all we know about her through her letters, journals, essays, poems, and novels, represents the triumph of a woman's intellectual breadth and ambition through its expression in writing.

Writing in 1876, Henry James captured his ambivalence towards Daniel Deronda in a spirited “conversation” among three fictitious readers of the novel. Is George Eliot “too scientific,” judicious Constantius wonders? One might as well call her too Victorian, ardent fan Theodora bristles: “So long as she remains the great literary genius that she is, how can she be too scientific? She is simply permeated with the highest culture of the age.” Disgruntled Pulcheria begs to differ: “She talks too much about the 'dynamic quality' of people's eyes. When she uses such a phrase as that in the first sentence in her book . . . she shows a want of tact.” Theodora parries: “it shows a very low level of culture . . . to be agitated by a term perfectly familiar to all decently-educated people.” “I don't pretend to be decently educated,” rejoins Pulcheria; “pray tell me what it means” (CH, 427).

For twenty years from 1856 to 1876 George Eliot was actively engaged in writing novels. The last two, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, are generally acclaimed today as her greatest - they are certainly her longest. But is there a clear dividing line between the early and late work?

Rosemarie Bodenheimer has shown how habits of mind formed well before Mary Anne Evans became George Eliot persisted in her writings to the end; and David Carroll has argued persuasively that from start to last the novels were driven by practices of interpretation to which the young Marian Evans was exposed very early. Telling changes in her life predated altogether her career as a novelist: her loss of formal religious belief, the death of her father, her move to London and work for the Westminster Review, the elopement with George Henry Lewes and return to live openly with him in England, even the turn to writing fiction itself. Characteristically she made her most daring decisions without consulting anyone - not because she was secretive by nature but because she was determined to have her way. Secrecy in fact made things worse when it came to explaining to family and friends who had not been consulted. But the fait accompli became means to her ends. After Lewes died and less than a year before her own death, she consulted no one about marrying Johnnie Cross.

“She is the first great godless writer of fiction that has appeared in England . . . the first legitimate fruit of our modern atheistic pietism,” declared W. H. Mallock in 1879 as he reviewed Impressions of Theophrastus Such (CH, 453-54). In a century of so many doubters, Mallock exaggerates; but he also sees George Eliot's crucial place - even more than Thomas Carlyle's - as (in Lord Acton's words about her) “the emblem of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief” (CH, 463). Her Maggie Tulliver and Esther Lyon and Dorothea Brooke and Gwendolen Harleth are women in search of a vision, of a faith that might sustain and give their lives purpose. But the words that sustained the Bible's Hebrews and Bunyan's pilgrim, that mapped their journeys towards the Promised Land, offer no sure guides. Silas Marner finds his belief in the Bible's truth destroyed by a drawing of lots in the name of what Bunyan called that “book that cannot lie”; Maggie Tulliver, not even reading the Bible, finds no aid - and finally drowns because of it. Silas lives; the hand of a little child leads him “towards a calm and bright land” - in “merry England” (14:130; 1:5).

George Eliot began her career as a novelist in a frenzy of activity, producing from the start works of exceptional quality for a novice. After the initial publication in serial form in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine of the three stories that would make up Scenes of Clerical Life in 1857, her first works of fiction were published at the rate of almost one a year: Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (published serially in Cornhill Magazine from July 1862, and in three volumes by Smith, Elder, in 1863). In addition, she also published her novella, “The Lifted Veil,” in Blackwood's in 1859, and wrote a second novella, “Brother Jacob,” in 1860, although this was not published until 1864. While the rate of production in what we might think of as the second part of this career was certainly intense (six works of fiction and poetry over thirteen years), in comparison with the first it seems almost leisurely. Just five years into the novelist's career, then, the critic Richard Simpson was already in a position to write a retrospective review. In this, Simpson conveys the impact George Eliot's fiction had made on the reading public when it first appeared: “Readers who in 1858 took up the Scenes of Clerical Life . . . with the languid expectancy with which the first writings of new novelists are received, were astonished that, instead of an author, they had found a man” (CH, 221).

George Eliot conducted her prosperous career as a novelist during a fortunate moment in the history of literary publishing in Britain. In the 1840s a generation of novelists somewhat older than Eliot - Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Charlotte Brontë - had found and enlarged an audience of readers to whom fiction became a principal form, even a habit, of entertainment. By midcentury a group of well-managed and solidly capitalized publishing firms had emerged whose proprietors could pay high prices for novels they thought would be popular and who had the resources, if they guessed right, to keep novels in print, and their authors' names before the public, through successively cheaper editions. Magazines like the weeklies Household Words and All the Year Round (edited by Dickens) and the monthly Cornhill Magazine (edited by Thackeray), many of them founded in the middle of the century, used serialized fiction as a principal attraction in their competition for readers. Fiction was also a mainstay of subscription or lending libraries, at the height of their popularity in the 1850s and 1860s, from which by payment of an annual fee readers borrowed books, magazines, and the separately published installments of novels. Mudie's Select Library added almost a million volumes between 1853 and 1862, about half of them fiction, and the purchases by Mudie's and other libraries of hundreds and sometimes a thousand or more copies of three-volume editions of novels assured publishers of a profit on their first printings and made fiction accessible to the many readers unable or unwilling to buy these expensive (31 shillings and 6 pence) books.

From his own day to ours, Keats - as a poet and as a person - has provoked questions about gender, about what it means to be a male or a female poet, about the nature of masculinity and femininity. Hazlitt first raised this issue in 1822, in his essay “On Effeminacy of Character.” Defining “effeminacy” as “a prevalence of the sensibility over the will,” “a want of fortitude,” a desire for “ease and indolence,” and an obsession with the sensations of the moment - as opposed to a “manly firmness and decision of character” - Hazlitt then suggested that there was a corresponding literary style, citing Keats's poetry as a primary example: “all florid, all fine; that cloys by its sweetness.” He concluded,

Numerous contemporary reviewers agreed that Keats’s poetry was effeminate, juvenile, or puerile. Writing for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in August 1818, “Z.” first defined Keats as a “Cockney” poet (vol. 3, 519), slang for an inferior, lower-class Londoner, with connotations of immaturity and effeminacy. It became his theme. In Blackwood’s January 1826 he was still describing Keats as an “infatuated bardling” who wrote “a species of emasculated pruriency that [. . .] looks as if it were the product of some imaginative Eunuch’s muse” (vol. 19, xvi, xxvi).

It is richly ironic that Keats's medical training, once cited as a sign of his low cultural standing, has been credited in recent scholarship for the precision and intellectual sophistication of Keats's response to the momentous scientific and medical developments of his era. “So back to the shop Mr John,” Blackwood's ”Z.” sarcastically concluded a notorious attack on Keats as a “Cockney” poet, mocking him as an “uneducated and flimsy stripling” in the grip of “mania” and “malady,” who would do better as a “starving apothecary than a starved poet.” “Z.” knew that Keats had been an apprentice to an apothecary-surgeon - the standard way for those without university educations to enter medical practice - and his review evoked the dated stereotype of the quackish, low-status apothecary, dispensing “plasters, pills, and ointment boxes” (524) with knowledge gained mainly from haphazard, hands-on experience. What “Z.” ignored (and recent scholarship has painstakingly established) is that Keats became a licensed apothecary at a time when medical education was undergoing significant reform, completing his training at Guy's, one of the most advanced teaching hospitals. Having earned a reputation at Enfield Academy for a brilliant, probing, and retentive mind, Keats found himself at Guy's, an institution that was helping to reshape the profession of medicine with the latest currents in scientific thought. How did this experience mark Keats's thinking and writing?

What kind of topic is this? What else is there? Language in Keats: that wouldn't get us where we need to go, either. Keats in language? Up to his ears in language. Some writers in English, some very few, have written more brilliantly. None has worded more gorgeously. Vowels are for Keats a passion, consonants an ecstasy, syntax a life force. Okay, then: Keats in language. And we respond in kind. There is no way to approach Keats with mere close reading. Proximity breeds immersion. Like his verse, reading operates from the inside out, silent music rippling with inference.

So rapt by the syllables of English verse was Keats that even (or especially) at his most aching, gripped by mortality and stung by frustrated ambition, his words often become his theme. Ideally wielded, they heal. In the process, they become his diagnosed means as well. Trained as a physician, selfschooled as a poet, Keats was an intuitive anatomist of language, its closely articulated skeletal structure, its ligaments and fibers, its muscular tensions and release, its rhythmic corridors of breath – while also a genetic specialist in its origins and mutations. With pen rather than stethoscope, he took the phonetic pulse of his every word through the listening ear of script.

To say that Keats was fascinated by art approaches understatement. The poetry of that fascination is unequivocal. From the early sonnet On Seeing the Elgin Marbles, to the sculptured figures of the Hyperion poems and the odes of 1819, Keats returns to the world of art, haunting its forms in return for the ways in which those forms haunt his poetics. Still other poems include ekphrastic elements: On a Leander, his verse-epistle to Reynolds, and Ode to Psyche. As readers have long recognized, Keats's poetry often takes the mode of ekphrasis, the verbal or rhetorical description of artwork: a funerary urn, the Elgin Marbles, and typically, figures that Keatsian narrators present as though they were art objects - Madeline in The Eve of St. Agnes, the goddesses in Ode to Indolence, the fallen Titans of the Hyperion poems.