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When she was working as a literary reviewer, just before she started writing fiction, George Eliot wrote about Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister:
He is in no haste to alarm readers into virtue by melodramatic consequences; he quietly follows the stream of fact and life; and waits patiently for the moral processes of nature as we all do for her material processes.
She was describing something she particularly admired in a great writer, and strived to do when she was writing her own novels, some of which are among the greatest ever written.
One of these, the much-loved The Mill on the Floss, has a much-criticised ending. This is what she wrote in the last part of the novel, when she must have known, whilst simultaneously not knowing, that she was, exactly, ‘hasting to alarm readers into virtue by melodramatic consequences’ (she was responding to Novalis’s ‘Character is destiny’):
But you have known Maggie a long while, and need to be told, not her characteristics, but her history, which is hardly to be predicted even from the completest knowledge of her characteristics. For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within
True about life, not true about fiction: the creative writer does have omnipotent control over her story; she is the God choosing to end her novel with this particular tragedy, which is created entirely from within her mind. And yet, at a different level, of course things are not so simple; a great writer has her own ‘tragedies created from within’, and suffers the compelling pull of wishful thinking and fantasising as we all do. Having said that ‘All truth and beauty [should be] attained by a humble and faithful study of Nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination in the mists of feelings, in place of substantial reality’ (Pinion 1982: 67) George Eliot was at that moment unable to protect herself from the danger she understood so well.
That this is her most autobiographical novel must ha