Back when I was in elementary school, ranking one’s friends – best friend, second-best friend, third-best friend – was a popular pastime. But then I got older, and I realized that because people are individuals with different strengths and weaknesses, it doesn’t make sense to rank them on some imagined mono-dimensional scale. I love my close friends for their unique combinations of qualities – combinations that make them entirely incomparable and unrankable. I feel the same way about writers. Since I wrote a book about Jane Austen fans, everyone assumes Jane Austen must be my favorite writer. But she isn’t. She’s one of my favorite writers. She has qualities that, say, Charles Dickens and Emily Brontë can’t match. But they have qualities that she can’t match, either. All of which is by way of explaining why today’s post on my Jane Austen blog is about George Eliot. Turns out that this year marks the bicentenary of the birth of Mary Ann Evans, who would grow up to write, under the name of George Eliot, seven striking and important novels, at least two of which are among the greatest ever written in English. Middlemarch — erudite, profound, empathetic, moving, unforgettable -- is coming with me to my desert island, right alongside Persuasion. For 2019, Eliot’s birthplace, the Warwickshire town of Nuneaton, is planning the kind of extravaganza that we Janeites experienced two years ago, when we marked the bicentenary of Austen’s death. Nuneaton’s plans call for an art competition, a street fair, an interactive walking trail, a couple of new theatrical adaptations, and a Victorian-themed Christmas celebration, tied to Eliot’s November 22 birthday. Sadly, Eliot’s boosters have so far been unable to raise the money necessary to turn outbuildings on the farm where she grew up into a visitors center that might serve as a draw for fans. (The latest plan: raising the money literally brick by brick.) Their travails underline the foresight of the founders of the UK Jane Austen Society, which was created in 1940 with the express purpose of buying and preserving Chawton cottage, where Austen wrote or revised all six of her finished novels. Imagine the Janeite world without the place now known as Jane Austen’s House Museum.* Unthinkable! I’m crossing my fingers that one day we’ll have a similar shrine to the work of George Eliot, who is, after all, one of my favorite writers. * Incidentally, the moving line on the memorial plaque outside Chawton cottage -- "Such art as hers can never grow old" -- comes from an 1859 essay by the literary critic George Henry Lewes, who just happens to have been George Eliot's common-law husband. He's also the guy who recommended Austen to Charlotte Brontë, with -- um -- less than positive results.
2 comments
Mar 4 2019 03:05PM by Baronda Bradley
Here, here, Middlemarch! I can't watch certain later episodes of Downton Abbey without drawing parallels.
Mar 4 2019 03:15PM by Deborah Yaffe
Glad to find another Janeite fan of Eliot! I took an adult-ed course on Middlemarch last year and learned so much -- what an incredible book. I think the Andrew Davies TV adaptation is quite good, although it inevitably leaves out a lot.