The Transferred Life of George Eliot

by Philip Davis

Reading George Eliot's work was described by one Victorian critic as like the feeling of entering the confessional in which the novelist sees and hears all the secrets of human psychology--'that roar which lies on the other side of silence'. This new biography of George Eliot goes beyond the much-told story of her life. It gives an account of what it means to become a novelist, and to think like a novelist: in particular a realist novelist for whom art exists not for art's sake but in the exploration and service of human life. It shows the formation and the workings of George Eliot's mind as it plays into her creation of some of the greatest novels of the Victorian era.

When at the age of 37 Marian Evans became George Eliot, this change followed long mental preparation and personal suffering. During this time she related her power of intelligence to her capacity for feeling: discovering that her thinking and her art had to combine both. That was the great ambition of her novels--not to be mere pastimes or fictions but experiments in life and helps in living, through the deepest account of human complexity available. Philip Davis's illuminating new biography will enable you both to see through George Eliot's eyes and to feel what it is like to be seen by her, in the imaginative involvement of her readers with her characters.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Literature

410 pages, Hardcover

First published May 9, 2017

About the author

Philip Davis is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Psychology at the University of Liverpool where he was Director of the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society. His publications include Sudden Shakespeare, Shakespeare Thinking, In Mind of Johnson, The Victorians (volume 8 in the new Oxford English Literary History Series), Why Victorian Literature Matters and Reading and The Reader (OUP Literary Agenda Series of which he is general editor). He is currently editing the complete works of Bernard Malamud in three volumes for the Library of America. He is editor of The Reader magazine.

Reviews

[Rocío G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't think of a better way to express the experience of reading Philip Davis' wonderful blend of intellectual biography, cultural history and literary criticism than to quote George Eliot herself:

'On certain red-letter days of existence, it happens to us to discover amongst the spawn of the press, a book which, as we read, seems to undergo a sort of transfiguration before us. We no longer hold heavily in our hands an octavo of some hundred pages, over which the eve laboriously travels, hardly able to drag along with it the restive mind: but we seem to be in companionship with a spirit, who is transfusing himself into our souls, and is vitalizing them by its superior energy, that life, both outward and inward, presents itself to us for higher relief, in colours brightened and deepened.' George Eliot, Selected Critical Writings, ed. Rosemary Ashton (Oxford: World's Classics, 1992), p.15.

[Brian Willis · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intellectual biography, with moments of the narrative of her life inserted throughout, the author inspects the devleopment of the mind of Eliot and the divide/interrogations between Eliot the author and the similarities with her own creations. This is probably the best biography out there, though it is definitely very academically written. Not for the casual reader. Nonetheless, the truly curious enthusiast will see connections between biography and philosophy in the fictional worlds themselves. Fascinating but at times my eyes watered over and I had to put it down.

[Elizabeth]

Most of all I'm grateful to this book for introducing me to something George Eliot wrote in an essay, 'the greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies’

[Randolph Stephenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eliot’s truest biographer

Davis writes so well and knowingly about Eliot, often in her own words -but you are never quite sure - that I had more the sense of autobiography, as if Eliot’s muse somehow lived on under yet another nom de plume.

[Iqra Tasmiae]

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