Open arms
Open armsGeorge Eliot
George Eliot, pseudonym of Marian Evans (1819-1880)
This article appeared in The Times Literary Supplement of 20 November 1919, and was reprinted in
The Common Reader: First Series. Virginia Woolf also wrote on George Eliot in the Daily Herald of 9
March 1921 and the Nation and Athenaeum of 30 October 1926.
To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one knows about her. It is also to become aware of
the credulity, not very creditable to one�s insight, with which, half consciously and partly maliciously, one had
accepted the late Victorian version of a deluded woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more deluded
than herself. At what moment and by what means her spell was broken it is difficult to ascertain. Some people
attribute it to the publication of her Life. Perhaps George Meredith, with his phrase about the �mercurial little
showman� and the �errant woman� on the da�s, gave point and poison to the arrows of thousands incapable of aiming
them so accurately, but delighted to let fly. She became one of the butts for youth to laugh at, the convenient
symbol of a group of serious people who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the same
scorn. Lord Acton had said that she was greater than Dante; Herbert Spencer exempted her novels, as if they were
not novels, when he banned all fiction from the London Library. She was the pride and paragon of her sex.
Moreover, her private record was not more alluring than her public. Asked to describe an afternoon at the Priory,
the story-teller always imitated that the memory of those serious Sunday afternoons had come to tickle his sense of
humour. He had been so much alarmed by the grave lady in her low chair; he had been so anxious to say the
intelligent thing. Certainly, the talk had been very serious, as a note in the fine clear hand of the great novelist bore
witness. It was dated Monday morning, and she accused herself of having spoken without due forethought of
Marivaux when she meant another; but not doubt, she said, her listener had already supplied the correction. Still,
the memory of talking about Marivaux to George Eliot on a Sunday afternoon was not a romantic memory. It had
faded with the passage of the years. It had not become picturesque. Indeed, one cannot escape the conviction that
the long, heavy face with its expression of serious and sullen and almost equine power has stamped itself
depressingly upon the minds of people who remember George Eliot, so that it looks out upon them from her pages.
Mr Gosse has lately described her as he saw her driving through London in a victoria:
a large, thick-set sybil, dreamy and...
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