8. George Eliot: The Unmapped Country

Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: — in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact …

George Eliot's novels can be described as successive attempts to image and contain the truth about emotional experiences, and to participate in the drama of psychic development. This fundamental goal directed the workings and reworkings of similar conflicts and preoccupations in each of her ‘experiments in life’,2 though they belonged by her own account, to ‘successive mental phases’,3 and as such represented rather different models of the mind.

Her central commitment never wavered: it was to find a basis for meaning in human affairs. Meaning lay in the truth of feeling, however much in conflict that position might be with the implications of the rationalist psychologies, methodologies, and social theories to which her intellectual side demanded an important, if partial, assent. The attitude she describes on reading Darwin's Origin of Species on the eve of its publication in 1859, remained essentially unchanged, although the respective weighting she gave to the different emphases varied considerably as her novel writing developed.

We have been reading Darwin's Book on ‘Origin of Species’ just now: it makes an epoch, as the expression of his thorough adhesion after long years of study, to the Doctrine of Development … the book is ill-written and sadly wanting in illustrative facts…. This will prevent [it] from becoming popular

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… but it will have a great effect in the scientific world, causing a thorough and open discussion of a question about which people have hitherto felt timid. So the world gets on step by step towards brave clearness and honesty! But to me the Development theory and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes.4

These comments are suggestive of the continual dilemma of her position. She was attracted to the type of