There are holidays we all celebrate. In a couple of days, most Americans will join their families for a festive Thanksgiving meal. And there are some holidays sacred to our religions — or our region. And then there are the personal days, the anniversary of a wedding, the day we first met our beloved, the birthday of a friend, special relative or favorite writer. Today, November 22 is one of those days for me. Not only does it mark the anniversary of the birth of a very dear great Aunt, my Aunt Ruth, who would have been 109 today, it is also the 186th anniversary of birth of the greatest English novelist, George Eliot. Last year, I honored her with this post.
Born Mary Ann Evans in South Arbury, England on November 22, 1819, she was particularly close to her brother Isaac as a child. She describes that sweet relationship in her novel The Mill on the Floss. In her early adulthood, she wrote countless essays and translated several works German into English. She, however, did not become the great novelist we know today until after she met George Henry Lewes in 1851. Like her, he wasn’t particularly physically attractive, but like her was charming in person. When people met Miss Evans, they soon forget her looks, more entranced were they by her conversation, her intelligence and her insight, her wisdom.
Even though Lewes never divorced his wife, he and Evans lived together as husband and wife until his death in 1878. While their love produced no children, it did help her “give birth” to many great ideas which she turned into some of the greatest novels, including the greatest novel, in the English language. She did not publish her novels under her own name, taking the name George from Lewes, the great love of her life.
Her greatest books include the aforementioned Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, Felix Holt, Romola, the touching Silas Marner and Middlemarch the greatest novel in the English language. There is much, so much, I could say about this great woman such that I would take up our blog’s entire home page. She had a keen sense of values, understood human psychology, could peer into the human heart and show the positive sides of her villains. Indeed, none of her characters were completely evil and none purely good. Yet, they all performed acts of kindness, cruelty and/or stupidity.
The selfish Bulstrode in the end shows some kindness to his nephew Fred Vincy. And that well-meaning Fred had previously gambled away a loan that Caleb Garth, the father of Mary, his one true love, had guaranteed for him, draining that good man’s family of money they had saved to pay for their son’s education.
She spoke of compassion, of the importance of finding that one person who could “be all” to her heroines. She had lived so long alone, well understand the value and promise of romance and how true love sustains those of us who recognize its power and are willing to work hard to keep it alive. And she exhorted us to understand our fellow man and showing sensitivity to his difficulties: “More helpful,” she wrote in The Mill on the Floss, “than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.” “Fellow-feeling” was one of her treasured experessions.
To honor her birthday, I offer a few more quotes from the writings of this great lady so that you will may celebrate her life with nuggets of her wisdom. Then, as Glenn Reynolds might say, go read the “whole thing” — her collected works! Happy Birthday, Mary Ann Evans, George Eliot. And thank you, thank you for the compassionate, the insightful, the profound, the wise work you left behind.
-Dan (AKA GayPatriotWest): GayPatriotWest@aol.com
The quotations are all below: (more…)
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