Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 17, 1994 TAG: 9404160004
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JESSICA BALDWIN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LONDON LENGTH: Long
``To begin with she is magnificently ugly - deliciously hideous,'' the American novelist Henry James wrote to his father. ``She has a low forehead, a dull gray eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth.
``Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, falling in love with her.''
Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, was fortified both by education and by an enduring but unconventional affair with a married man, George Lewes.
He privately called her Dorothea or Dodo, because she was so like the heroine of ``Middlemarch.''
The novel was one of Eliot's great successes, a best-seller in its day and once again this year following an acclaimed television version. The BBC production of ``Middlemarch'' was an instant hit when it was broadcast earlier this year in England. The series now is airing here on PBS's ``Masterpiece Theatre'' (tonight at 9 on WBRA-Channel 15).
Published in installments in Maga magazine in 1871-72, it became ``the book of the moment, read and discussed by everyone, acclaimed by reviewers, in demand by translators and quickly netted over 9,000 pounds (320,000 pounds, or $480,000 in current value) for its author,'' Ina Taylor wrote in her biography of Eliot.
The author and Dorothea shared a respect for certain middle-class values, including women subjugating their own work to help their husbands.
But Eliot's rejection of provincial life, her bald interest in money and her scandalous living arrangements were a far cry from Dorothea's quiet, pious existence.
Mary Ann Evans, who preferred to be called Marian, was born in 1819, the daughter of a land agent in the English Midlands. She went to school in Nuneaton and later moved with her father to Coventry, which became the model for the fictitious, insulated town of Middlemarch.
Robert Evans, the model for Caleb Garth in the novel, gave his daughter a better-than-average education because he thought her large head, prominent chin and bulbous nose could hurt her marriage chances and she would be left to her own resources.
She studied French, Italian, Greek and Latin so that she could read more widely. Books and new friends exposed her to progressive ideas, including the rejection of religion. The radical move was the first strain in relations with her socially obsessed family.
Her German was good enough to translate ``The Life of Jesus,'' by Friedrich Strauss, published in 1846 by John Chapman.
The death of her father three years later freed her from domestic duties, and she set off for Chapman's boarding house on The Strand, a hub of London's literary world.
Evans earned her living anonymously editing Chapman's influential Westminster Review and working as a journalist for a number of other publications.
After a series of disastrous romances, including one with a man who found her ``morbidly intellectual,'' Marian fell in love with Lewes, a critic and journalist. He was married to a woman he didn't love but couldn't divorce under Victorian law.
Evans adopted her pen name because men were paid more and had greater book sales than women writers. She chose George to honor her lover, and Eliot because it fit, she said.
Bravely ridiculing Victorian values, she lived with Lewes from 1853 until his death in 1878. It was during those years, encouraged by Lewes, that Eliot wrote her eight novels, including ``The Mill on the Floss,'' ``Adam Bede,'' ``Silas Marner'' and ``Middlemarch,'' which is considered the best.
The novel - much like a modern-day soap opera - follows the twists and turns of Middlemarch residents: the saint-like Dorothea Brooke whose mission to help the poor is frustrated by her marriage to the elderly and pedantic Edward Casaubon; the young doctor Tertius Lydgate, whose ambition to make medical history is thwarted by his pretty, selfish wife, Rosamond Vincy; the hypocritical Nicholas Bulstrode whose sanctimony hides a sinister past.
David Lodge, the British critic and author, told the Sunday Times ``Middlemarch'' has ``that splendid balance between the intellectual, emotional, psychological life and a broad panorama of social and political life.''
Eliot, as a woman living out of wedlock with a man, was snubbed by many of her contemporaries and, most painfully, by her family. She refused to have children because of the stigma attached to bastards.
It wasn't until after Lewes died and Eliot, at 60, married John Cross that her family considered her respectable enough to reopen communications.
Cross, 20 years Eliot's junior, realized the marriage was a mistake while they were honeymooning in Venice and he tried to commit suicide by pitching himself into the Grand Canal.
The couple returned to England, where Eliot died seven months later.
The best-seller status of ``Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life'' waned as everything Victorian fell out of favor.
British readers rediscovered the book after World War II when Cambridge critic F.R. Leavis included Eliot in ``The Great Tradition,'' published in 1948, which traced the cultural continuity of English life and literature.
``She is not as transcendently great as Tolstoy, but she is great, and great in the same way,'' Leavis wrote.
by CNB