'Her Accomplishments Were Wide': Henry James on George Eliot (1981)

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University.

Abstract

George Eliot (1819-1880) and Henry James (1843-1916) were – literally – worlds apart: she a well-established Victorian writer and he an aspiring American writer at the beginning of his creative life. Furthermore, James’ interest was in the form of the novel and dubbed many nineteenth century English novels as ‘loose baggy monsters’. However, though he did criticise the ‘form’ of Eliot’s major novels, indeed he wrote of Middlemarch as “not gratifying the reader with a sense of design”, yet from his earliest critical writings to the last volume of his autobiography, he never ceases to admire the ‘great’ George Eliot. He bestowed on her his greatest accolade – “a painter of life’, and marveled that ‘this quiet … English lady … should have produced such rich, deep, masterly pictures of the multifold life of man”. Amongst her achievements, James singled out and remained in awe of Eliot’s unconventional morality and her ability to make “small … female fry, insist on mattering”, and he quotes Eliot: “In these frail vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection”. James in turn was to make the “frail vessels” his “fine central intelligences”. This last accomplishment of Eliot’s recognised by James is particularly what resonates with modern readers.
Foreword by Hoda Gindi.

Keywords

Published in Cairo Studies in English: Centenary Essays on George Eliot, ed. Magdi Wahba, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University (1981), pp. 37-67. 

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