![]() By contrast, he compliments Diana Postlethwaite's Making It Whole: A Victorian Circle and the Shape of Their World (1984) by noting that she eschews "the usual formula for intellectual influence - thinker X directly influenced writer Y - by ranging through an entire intellectual milieu, the true unit of almost all worthwhile inquiry" (17). Noting, for instance, that Myers cavalierly classifies her as a "Positivist" (capital P and all), Fleishman remarks, "This would have surprised Eliot's friends among the leaders of the English Positivist society, who kept urging her to join" (65). In tracking this progression himself, Fleishman declines to situate Eliot within any particular intellectual movement. Such studies, he contends, invariably engage in "summation," presenting a refined and systematized thinker called "George Eliot" rather than tracking the progression of her ideas throughout her life (x). By this, I take it, Fleishman means that biographers such as Haight have failed to see with sufficient clarity how Eliot's wide-ranging intellectual engagements informed the making of her fiction.īesides critiquing the work of Haight, Fleishman faults more specific studies of of Eliot's intellectual history such as Valerie Dodd's George Eliot: An Intellectual Life (1990), William Myers's The Teaching of George Eliot (1984), and Michael Wolff's unpublished dissertation, "Marian Evans to George Eliot: the Moral and Intellectual Foundations of Her Career" (1958). ![]() Despite this compilation of "copious data on her activities and writings," however, Haight's biography fails - in Fleishman's estimate - to achieve an "integrated account of intellectual activities and creative production" (2). Haight, whose George Eliot: A Biography (1968) set the standard for subsequent Eliot biographies, and whose edition of Eliot's letters remains the primary critical source for such lives. In his approach to Eliot, Fleishman challenges the tradition initiated by Gordon S. By focusing carefully on the history of her reading - rather than on generalizations about the intellectual movements of her day, or on her personal relationships - he generates a provocative series of readings of her works. In the present book, Avrom Fleishmann sheds new light on Eliot. It is easy to see why: in her relationship with George Henry Lewes, her translations of dense works of philosophy, and not least her justifiably famous novels, she appears as a social revolutionary, a noted intellectual, and perhaps above all as a great artist. The figure of George Eliot has been a topic of some fascination to biographers. ![]() GEORGE ELIOT'S INTELLECTUAL LIFE by Avrom Fleishman, Reviewed by Patrick FessenbeckerĬlick here for a PDF version.
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