The Reception of George Eliot in Europe 9781441190222, 9781474217279, 9781441196347

Table of contents :
FC
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Series Editor’s Preface: George Eliot: Elinor Shaffer
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Abbreviations
Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015
Introduction: A Steady Shining – George Eliot’s Life and Afterlife in Europe: Elinor Shaffer with Catherine Brown
Part 1: Northern Europe
1. The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime: Gerlinde Röder-Bolton
2. George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013: Annika Bautz
3. George Eliot in the Netherlands: Diederik van Werven
4. ‘Spirit of the Age(s)’: The Reception of George Eliot in Sweden: Git Claesson Pipping and Catherine Sandbach Dahlström
5. George Eliot’s Reception in Denmark: Ebbe Klitgård
6. George Eliot in Norway: The Enthusiasm that Petered Out: Marie Nedregotten Sørbø
Part 2: Southern Europe
7. The Reception of George Eliot in France: Alain Jumeau
8. The Reception of George Eliot in Italy: 1868 to the Present: Marialuisa Bignami
9. Romola on Home Ground: Then and Now: Franco Marucci
10. Romola in England and Italy (1868–1924): Francesca Bugliani
11. George Eliot in Spain: María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia
12. George Eliot in the Catalan Lands: The Long and the Short of It: Jacqueline Hurtley and Marta Ortega Sáez
Part 3: Eastern Europe
13. The Reception of George Eliot in Russia: The Start that Determined the Paradigm: Boris M. Proskurnin
14. George Eliot in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia(1917–2014): Natalia V. Gorbunova
15. George Eliot in Bulgaria: Vesela Katsarova
16. ‘An Unspeakable Journey’: Czech and Slovak Reception of George Eliot: Zdeněk Beran
17. The Reception of George Eliot in Poland: Ilona Dobosiewicz
18. The Hungarian Reception of George Eliot: Mihály Szegedy-Maszák
19. George Eliot in Romania: Adina Ciugureanu
20. The Reception of George Eliot in Greece: Georgia Farinou-Malamatari
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Reception of George Eliot in Europe

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The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe Series Editor: Elinor Shaffer School of Advanced Study, University of London Published Volumes Volume I: The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe Edited by Mary Ann Caws and Nicola Luckhurst Volume II: The Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe Edited by Peter de Voogd and John Neubauer Volume III: The Reception of James Joyce in Europe Edited by Geert Lernout and Wim Van Mierlo Volume IV: The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe Edited by Stephen Bann Volume V: The Reception of Ossian in Europe Edited by Howard Gaskill Volume VI: The Reception of Byron in Europe Edited by Richard Cardwell Volume VII: The Reception of H. G. Wells in Europe Edited by Patrick Parrinder and John Partington Volume VIII: The Reception of Jonathan Swift in Europe Edited by Hermann Real Volume IX: The Reception of David Hume in Europe Edited by Peter Jones Volume X: The Reception of W. B. Yeats in Europe Edited by Klaus Peter Jochum Volume XI: The Reception of Henry James in Europe Edited by Annick Duperray Volume XII: The Reception of D. H. Lawrence in Europe Edited by Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn Volume XIII: The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe Edited by Murray Pittock Volume XIV: The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe Edited by A. A. Mandal and Brian Southam Volume XV: The Reception of S. T. Coleridge in Europe Edited by Elinor Shaffer and Edoardo Zuccato Volume XVI: The Reception of P. B. Shelley in Europe Edited by Susanne Schmid and Michael Rossington Volume XVII: The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe Edited by Eve-Marie Engels and Thomas F. Glick Volume XVIII: The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe Edited by Stefano Evangelista Volume XIX: The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe Edited by Michael Hollington Volume XX: The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe Edited by Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer Volume XXI: The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe Edited by Murray Pittock Forthcoming volumes in the series include: The Reception of Isaac Newton in Europe Edited by Helmut Pulte and Scott Mandelbrote The Reception of William Blake in Europe Edited by Sibylle Erle and Morton D. Paley The Reception of Alfred Tennyson in Europe Edited by Leonee Ormond The Reception of Edmund Burke in Europe Edited by Martin Fitzpatrick and Peter Jones

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The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe Series Editor: Elinor Shaffer School of Advanced Study, University of London

The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Edited by Elinor Shaffer and Catherine Brown

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Elinor Shaffer, Catherine Brown and contributors, 2016 Series concept and Series Editor’s Preface © Elinor Shaffer All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-9022-2 ePDF: 978-1-4411-9634-7 ePub: 978-1-4411-2854-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

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Contents Series Editor’s Preface: George Eliot Elinor Shaffer

viii

Acknowledgementsxiv List of Contributors

xvi

Abbreviationsxxiii Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2014 Introduction: A Steady Shining – George Eliot’s Life and Afterlife in Europe Elinor Shaffer with Catherine Brown Part 1: Northern Europe

xxiv 1 13

Germany 1

The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime Gerlinde Röder-Bolton

15

2

George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013 Annika Bautz

41

Netherlands 3

George Eliot in the Netherlands Diederik van Werven

66

Scandinavia 4

‘Spirit of the Age(s)’: The Reception of George Eliot in Sweden Git Claesson Pipping and Catherine Sandbach Dahlström

5

George Eliot’s Reception in Denmark Ebbe Klitgård

6

George Eliot in Norway: The Enthusiasm that Petered Out Marie Nedregotten Sørbø

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103 120

134

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vi  Contents Part 2: Southern Europe

155

France 7

The Reception of George Eliot in France Alain Jumeau

157

Italy 8

The Reception of George Eliot in Italy: 1868 to the Present Marialuisa Bignami

9

Romola on Home Ground: Then and Now Franco Marucci

178

10

Romola in England and Italy (1868–1924) Francesca Bugliani

184

167

Spain 11

George Eliot in Spain María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia

209

Catalonia 12

George Eliot in the Catalan Lands: The Long and the Short of It Jacqueline Hurtley and Marta Ortega Sáez

Part 3: Eastern Europe

237 259

Russia 13

The Reception of George Eliot in Russia: The Start that Determined the Paradigm Boris M. Proskurnin

261

14

George Eliot in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia (1917–2014) Natalia V. Gorbunova

275

Bulgaria 15

George Eliot in Bulgaria Vesela Katsarova

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285

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Contents   vii Czech Lands 16 ‘An Unspeakable Journey’: Czech and Slovak Reception of George Eliot Zdeněk Beran

303

Poland 17

The Reception of George Eliot in Poland Ilona Dobosiewicz

318

Hungary 18

The Hungarian Reception of George Eliot Mihály Szegedy-Maszák

336

Romania 19

George Eliot in Romania Adina Ciugureanu

348

Greece 20

The Reception of George Eliot in Greece Georgia Farinou-Malamatari

362

Bibliography375 Index437

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Series Editor’s Preface: George Eliot Elinor Shaffer

The reception of British authors in Britain has in good part been studied; indeed, it forms our literary history. By contrast, the reception of British authors in Europe has not been examined in any systematic, long-term or large-scale way. The terminology is revealing: an author’s ‘afterlife’ is regularly (and remarkably) used to refer only to reputation in Britain or Englishspeaking countries. ‘Critical reception’, although apparently a more learned and ambitious phrase, is equally limited to domestic reputation. We wish to extend these narrow boundaries. With our volume on Jonathan Swift (2005) we altered our series title to The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe, as a reminder that many writers previously travelling under the British flag may now be considered or claimed as belonging to the Republic of Ireland (1948), or Eire. The strong Scottish tradition of letters has also been represented. Walter Scott has stood both as British and as Scottish, both in the British Isles and abroad, establishing that there is a British and a Scottish history, landscape and language, and attracting large numbers of readers and travellers to visit. By contrast, Jane Austen is associated everywhere with ‘Englishness’. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) is without doubt an English writer, born in Nuneaton, and known for her use of provincial settings and provincial dialects in some of her best-known novels and stories. But George Eliot is also a European figure, whose earliest works were translations from important and controversial foreign thinkers (Strauss, Feuerbach, Spinoza), which founded a career in the London circles of influential journals such as the Westminster Review, and made colleagues of such men as John Chapman (the publisher), Herbert Spencer (the Darwinist philosopher) and G. H. Lewes (writer on a wide variety of topics). Together with Lewes, her eventual partner, her acquaintance among foreign émigrés in London was wide, including both political figures such as the Italian nationalists (Mazzini), and literary figures such as Turgenev. In George Eliot we have a cosmopolitan figure, who travelled abroad in Europe, had a wide European acquaintance both of leading figures in those countries and of Britons who lived abroad, and whose later novels undertake international themes of great scope and ambition. Ideologically, she was a cosmopolitan. It is the aim of this series to initiate and forward the study of the reception of British authors in continental Europe, or, as we would now say, the other

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Series Editor’s Preface: George Eliot   ix parts of the Europe to which we also belong, rather than as isolated national histories with a narrow national perspective. The perspectives of other nations greatly add to our understanding of individual contributors to that history. The history of the reception of authors of the British Isles extends our knowledge of their capacity to stimulate and to call forth new responses, not only in their own disciplines but in wider fields and to diverse publics in a variety of historical circumstances. Often these responses provide quite unexpected and enriching insights into our own history, politics and culture. Individual works and personalities take on new dimensions and facets. They may also be subject to enlightening critiques. The capacity to elicit these responses enlarges their scope and value. Our knowledge of our own writers is incomplete and inadequate without reception studies. By ‘authors’ we intend writers in any field whose works have been recognized as making a contribution to the intellectual and cultural history of our society. Thus the series includes literary figures such as Laurence Sterne, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, philosophers such as Francis Bacon and David Hume, historians such as Edmund Burke and scientists such as Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton, whose works have had a broad impact on thinking in every field. In some cases individual works of the same author have dealt with different subjects, each with its own reception history; so Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) was instantaneously translated and moulded thinking on the power struggles in the Europe of his own day; his youthful ‘Essay on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime’ exerted a powerful influence on aesthetic thought and the practice of writing and remains a seminal work for certain genres of fiction. Similarly, each of Laurence Sterne’s two major works of fiction, Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, has its own history of reception, giving rise to a whole line of literary movements, innovative progeny and concomitant literary theory in most European countries. The research project examines the ways in which selected authors have been translated, published, distributed, read, reviewed and discussed on the continent of Europe. In doing so, it throws light not only on specific strands of intellectual and cultural history but also on the processes involved in the dissemination of ideas and texts. The project brings to bear the theoretical and critical approaches that have characterized the growing fields of readerresponse theory and reception studies in the last quarter of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. These critical approaches have illuminated the activity of the reader in bringing the text to life, and stressed the changing horizons of the reading public or community of which the reader is a part. Readers may find themselves in entirely different company from those they had assumed to be their fellow readers. The series as presented to the British Academy in 1998, and published first by Continuum and now by Bloomsbury, is open-ended and multi-volumed, each volume based on a particular author. The authors may be regarded according to their discipline, or looked at across disciplines within their period. Thus the reception of philosophers such as Bacon and Hume may be compared; or Hume may be considered as belonging to an eighteenth-century group that includes writers such as Swift and Sterne, historians, and political figures such as Gibbon and Burke. As the volumes accumulate they enrich

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x   Series Editor’s Preface: George Eliot each other and our awareness of the full context in which an individual author is received. The Swift volume, for example, shows that in many places Swift and Sterne were received at the same time, and viewed sometimes as a pair of witty ironists, and sometimes as opposites representing traditional satire on the one hand (Swift) and modern sentimentalism on the other (Sterne), and equally or diversely valued as a result. The Romantic poets Byron, Shelley and Coleridge were carried forward into mid-century nationalist movements and late nineteenth-century symbolist movements. The fin-de-siècle aspects of Pater, early Yeats, Woolf and Joyce are interwoven in a wider European experience. In the twentieth century, Sterne was paired with Joyce as subversive of the novel form, and Joyce and Woolf became Modernists. These chronological shifts, bringing different authors and different works into view together, are common to the reception process, so often displacing or delaying them into an entirely new historical scene or set of circumstances. The kaleidoscope of reception displays and discovers new pairings and couplings, new milieux, new matches and mismatches, and, of course, new valuations and uses. In period terms one may discern within the series a Romantic group, a Victorian group, a fin-de-siècle group and an early Modernist group. Period designations differ from discipline to discipline, and are shifting even within a discipline. Blake, who was a ‘pre-Romantic’ poet a generation ago, is now considered a fully-fledged Romantic. His role is even more startlingly altered from Revolutionary sympathizer, to fascist mythologizer, to Beat roadie. Virginia Woolf may be regarded as a fin-de-siècle aesthete and stylist whose affinities are with Pater, or as an epoch-making Modernist like Joyce. Terms referring to period and style often vary from country to country. What happens to a ‘Victorian’ author transplanted to ‘Wilhelmine’ Germany? Are the English Metaphysical poets to be regarded as ‘baroque’ in continental terms, or will that term continue to be borrowed in English only for music, art and, to an extent, architecture? Is the ‘Augustan’ Swift a classicist in Italian terms, or an Enlightenment thinker in French terms? Is Scott a Romantic poet and regional singer, or is he an astute realist in art as in politics? Jane Austen is a period puzzle, for she is coeval with ‘the Romantics’, yet the description hardly fits; she came of the eighteenth century, even while a few members of an avant-garde attracted attention to themselves, who only later had bestowed on them the group label ‘Romantic’ that most of them had in their lifetimes rejected. Continental critics of the novel referred to it simply as ‘the Age of Scott and Austen’. It is most straightforward to classify them simply according to century, for the calendar is for the most part shared. But various possible groupings provide a context for reception and enrich our knowledge (and sometimes shock our assumptions) about each author. If George Eliot seems straightforwardly and indisputably a Victorian, yet once Naturalism had set in on the continent through Zola (as described in our Literary and Cultural Reception of Darwin, vols 3 and 4), her role as a defender of a new middle-ground of moral (non-religious) realism appeared – despite her own support for Darwin – as a vital and humane conservatism. Division of each volume by country or by linguistic region is dictated by the historical development of Europe; each volume necessarily adopts a different selection of countries and regions, depending on period and on the specific

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Series Editor’s Preface: George Eliot   xi reception of any given author. Countries or regions are treated either substantially, in several chapters or sections where this is warranted (for example the French reception of Austen, Yeats, Woolf or Joyce), or on a moderate scale, or simply as a brief section. In some cases, where a rich reception is located that has not been reported or of which the critical community is not aware, more detailed coverage may be warranted. In general, comparative studies have neglected Spain in favour of France, Germany and Italy, and this imbalance needs to be righted. The different linguistic regions of the Iberian Peninsula also need consideration. George Eliot is a case in point, where we have given both Catalan and Spanish reception histories, as in our Yeats volume we gave a detailed treatment of one of his plays translated into Catalan, Galician and Basque. Moreover, we have been able to trace the journey of Eliot and Lewes through Spain in more detail than has been done previously. A whole submerged continent of women writers and translators needs to be rediscovered in order to redraw the comparative atlas; some of them we have discovered or recovered, but their relations with George Eliot’s work call for critical exploration. Brevity does not indicate lack of interest but a need for more research. Where separate coverage of any particular country or region is not justified by the extent of the reception, relevant material is incorporated into the bibliography and the Timeline. Thus an early translation may be noted, although there was subsequently a minimal response to the author or work, or a very long gap in the reception in that region. The project also takes cognizance of the studies of the material history of the book that have begun to explore the production, publication and distribution of manuscripts and books. Increasingly, other media too are playing a role in these processes, and to the history of book illustration and painting must be added lantern slides (as in the popular versions of both Scott’s and Dickens’s works), stage, opera and cinema, of which the early impact forms a part of our H. G. Wells volume, and is demonstrated here again in the very early Italian and Hollywood films of George Eliot’s Romola. The study of material history forms a curious annexe, with its concern for the objects that form durable traces of the vogue for a particular author. These may be parts of him- or herself (as with the macabre story told in our Shelley volume of the wish to possess the poet’s heart), or souvenir objects associated with fictional characters, or the more elaborate memorial gardens and graveyards such as linked Rousseau and Sterne in France. The Polish Czartorysky princes acquired a blade of dried grass said to be from Ossian’s battlefield. Scott’s spanking new Romantic ‘castle’ at Abbotsford (like those more ancient piles found in his novels) became a place of pilgrimage. The author’s own image may achieve iconic status, as with brilliant Byron ‘in Albanian dress’, yet tell us no more than Jane Austen’s mob cap. The significance of such cults and cult objects requires further analysis as the examples multiply and diversify. It is, of course, always possible, and indeed to be hoped and expected, that further aspects of reception will later be recovered, and the long-term research project forwarded, through the initial information provided by these volumes. Reception studies often display an author’s intellectual and political impact and reveal effects abroad that are unfamiliar to the author’s compatriots. Thus Byron, for example, had the power of carrying and incarnating liberal

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xii   Series Editor’s Preface: George Eliot political thought to regimes and institutions to whom it was anathema; it is less well-known that Sterne had a similar effect, and that both were charged with erotically-tinged subversion, or that Pater suggested a style of aesthetic sensibility in which sensation took precedence over moral values. By the same token, the study of censorship, or more broadly, of impediments to dissemination, and modes of circumventing control, becomes an important aspect of reception studies. In Bacon studies, the process of dissemination of his ideas through the private correspondence of organized circles was vital. Certain presses and publishers also play a role, and the study of modes of secret distribution under severe penalty is a particularly fascinating subject, whether in Catholic Europe or in Soviet Russia. Much translation was carried out in prisons. Irony and Aesopian devices, and audience alertness to them, are highly developed under controlling regimes. A surprising number of authors live more dangerously abroad than at home. Scott’s central figures, like Waverley, who were able to see both sides, were attacked as gentry standing above conflict, but also embraced as vital ‘focal consciences’. Austen was gradually understood to be an ironist, subtly decentring her astutely observed characters who required no world-historical events to show their true colours. Translators began to vary the tones accordingly. Yet it required the Marxist consciousness of György Lukács, the great twentieth-century Hungarian critic, to formulate the characteristics of the classic critical realist novel of the nineteenth century, which, whatever the political or social views of the writer, set forth the comédie humaine for all to see. Into this great company, with Scott and Balzac and Tolstoy, George Eliot enters and takes her place. Translation itself may provide a mode of evading censure. There is probably no more complex and elaborated example in the annals of Europe of the use of translation to invent new movements, styles and political departures than that of Ossian, the valorous though defeated Scottish bard (perhaps half invented by an eighteenth-century Scottish poet), which became itself a form of ‘pseudo-translation’, that is works by writers masquerading under pseudonyms suggestive of ‘dangerous’ foreigners but providing safety for mere ‘translators’. ‘Ossian’ became the cover name for new initiatives, as ‘Byron’ flew the flag of liberation. If Henry James turned self-censorship into an art of civilization, Austen’s civilized self-mastery assumes the form of nature. George Eliot seeks to explore the possibility of its continuation – into an unkown future beyond Europe. New electronic technology makes it possible to undertake reception studies on this scale. An extensive database stores information about editions, translations, accompanying critical prefaces or afterwords, publishers and places of publication, early reviews and important critical studies, citations and imitations or reworkings, including satire and pastiche by other writers. The recording of full details of translations and translators is a particular concern, since often the names of translators are not supplied, or their identity is concealed behind pseudonyms or false attributions. The nature of the translation is often a determining factor in the reception of a work or an author; yet often the work was translated from a language other than English.

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Series Editor’s Preface: George Eliot   xiii The project website, www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/rbae, provides further information about the project’s history, advisory board, conferences, colloquia and seminars, as well as reviews of its volumes. The project database is an open-access bibliographical resource, available online via the project website and containing all the bibliographies published so far in the series, as well as supplementary information and bibliography relating to the authors.

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Acknowledgements The Research Project on The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe is happy to acknowledge the generous support of the British Academy, where the Reception Project was initiated with a colloquium in 1998; the Leverhulme Trust; the Arts and Humanities Research Board; the Modern Humanities Research Association and other funding bodies. We are also greatly indebted to the School of Advanced Study, University of London, where the research project has been based, to the Institute of English Studies, the Institute of Germanic Studies, the Institute of Romance Studies (merged first as the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, and from August 2013 renamed the Institute of Modern Languages Research) and the Institute of Historical Studies, where much of the work of the Reception project has been carried out. We are grateful to Clare Hall College, Cambridge, which has provided the project with a second institutional home from 2003. The George Eliot Colloquium of the editors and contributors in preparation of the present volume was held at New College, Oxford, in September 2011. We are grateful to the Eugene Ludwig Fund, New College, Oxford, and to the Master and Fellows of New College, Oxford, for their generous grant in support of the Colloquium, and for hosting the George Eliot Colloquium at New College, Oxford, 25–26 September 2011. We would also like to acknowledge the friendly support of Professor Laura Marcus, English Faculty, University of Oxford. We gratefully acknowledge the advice and guidance of the Advisory Board of the Reception project, which has met regularly since the project’s launch. The Research Director, Professor Elinor Shaffer, is also pleased to acknowledge the indispensable services of the staff of the research project during the preparation of this volume, in particular the expert and sustained help of the Project Officer, Dr Lachlan Moyle, and the services of Niall Sreenan, PhD candidate at University College London. We are also grateful to Rebecca Watts, who carried out much demanding copy-editing and correspondence for the volume. The Reception Project would like to express its gratitude for invaluable advice and assistance on individual chapters and topics to our contributors, and to a number of others. For some years the Institute of English Studies has held seminars on the novels of George Eliot under the direction of the eminent Eliot scholar Barbara Hardy, and we had the opportunity to participate in two of them; Dr Francesca Bugliani also gave a paper in 2013 in introduction of the early film versions of Romola. Our contributors, who have led the way in Eliot studies in their own countries, have responded patiently and generously to requests for further information: in particular, Dr Francesca Bugliani has carried out fresh research in Florence and London into the sources and circumstances of composition of Eliot’s Romola; Professor María Jesús LorenzoModia has thrown a great deal of new light on the circumstances, aims and outcomes of George Eliot’s and G. H. Lewes’s journey to Spain; Dr Diederik

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Acknowledgements   xv van Werven has added substantially to our knowledge of the interrelations of Dutch and English writings on Spinoza; and Professor Isobel Armstrong gave a stimulating seminar on Eliot and Spinoza in our long-standing Reading and Reception Series at the Senate House in June 2012. We are also very grateful to Professor Leonee Ormond (King’s College London) for sharing her detailed knowledge of George Eliot’s encounters with art works across Europe, and for her advice on likenesses of George Eliot. We would like to acknowledge the contribution of the British Film Institute, which made available two early film versions of Romola discussed by Dr Bugliani in her chapter, and to thank Professor Ian Christie (Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College London) for allowing Professor Shaffer and Dr Bugliani to consult his then unpublished chapter on the early Italian film industry. Professor Shaffer would also like to thank Sarah Death, translator of a number of Swedish novelists, for much information and support. For the cover image of George Eliot, by Sir Frederick William Burton, we are grateful to the Prints and Drawings Department of the British Museum, and for permission to print it, we thank the Trustees of the British Museum.

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List of Contributors Annika Bautz is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Plymouth University. Her publications include The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott: A Comparative Longitudinal Study (2007) and a Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Sense and Sensibility (2010), as well as essays on Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Jane Austen and aspects of the history of the book in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Zdeněk Beran is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Literary Translation at Charles University, Prague, where he also received his PhD, and at the Metropolitan University, Prague. He has published articles, principally on late nineteenth-century issues, in Prague Studies in English and other academic journals. His recent research includes the Czech reception of major English writers. He has translated fiction by M. R. James, Jack London, Kurt Vonnegut, F. S. Fitzgerald, Robert Harris and others. Marialuisa Bignami is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Milan. Her main research interests have been and are in the field of English prose (the periodical press, the novel and utopias). She is the author of the volumes Le origini del giornalismo in Inghilterra; Daniel Defoe: dal saggio al romanzo; Il progetto e il paradosso: saggi sull’utopia in Inghilterra; and Joseph Conrad e l’arte del narrare: Realismo ed epistemologia. She is the editor of, among others, the volumes Epistemologies of the Novel (2003), Le trame della conoscenza: percorsi epistemologici nella prosa inglese dalla prima modernità al postmoderno and History and Narration: Looking Back from the Twentieth Century (2011). In the case of all three volumes she assembled the research group and contributed an essay herself: in the second volume, on George Eliot. She is the author of several articles on William Shakespeare, John Milton, George Eliot and Iris Murdoch, with one on women novelists of ideas. She is currently contributing to a volume on Joseph Conrad in Italy. Catherine Brown is Convenor and Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the New College of the Humanities in London, where she teaches literature of the last two centuries, having previously taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Her book The Art of Comparison: How Novels and Critics Compare (2011) concerns Daniel Deronda, Anna Karenina and Women in Love, and articles on George Eliot include ‘Daniel Deronda as Tragi-Comedy’ (2009), ‘Why does Daniel Deronda’s Mother Live in Russia?’ (2010) and ‘The Mill on the Floss in the Nineteen-Seventies’ (2011). Her other author specialism besides George Eliot is D. H. Lawrence; she is Vice-President of the British D. H. Lawrence Society. Francesca Bugliani graduated in 1976 from Pisa University (Dott. Lett.) and taught English literature in the English Department of the Università IULM, Milan, from 1986 to 2002. In 2009 she was awarded a PhD by Heythrop College, University of London. She is now Research Associate at

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List of Contributors   xvii Heythrop College and Teaching Fellow at UCL. Several of her publications are concerned with the relationship of English and Italian literature: ‘Modelli epistemici in Romola di George Eliot’ (1993); ‘Petruccio Ubaldini’s Accounts of England’ (1994); ‘“Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse”: Nineteenth-Century English Translations, Interpretations and Reworkings of Dante’s “Paolo and Francesca”’ (1997); ‘Reading English Literature in Italy: Intellectual and Critical History’ (1999); and ‘The Italian Secret Rose’ (2000). She has also published translations into Italian as well as several books and articles on various aspects of English literature from the Renaissance to the present, including The Eye of the Eagle: John Donne and the Legacy of Ignatius Loyola (2011). She has just finished editing the first volume of the Power of the Word project for Ashgate, Poetry and the Religious Imagination (2015), and is at present editing the second volume, Poetry and Prayer (2015). Adina Ciugureanu is Professor of English and American Literature and Culture at Ovidius University Constanta, Romania. She has specialized in the Victorian period, twentieth-century British and American Modernism and popular culture. Her publications concerning Victorian culture and literature include the study Victorian Selves (2008), in which she has a chapter dedicated to George Eliot, chapters in international conference volumes, such as Charles Dickens, Modernism, Modernity (2014) and Dickens’s Signs, Readers’ Designs (2012), as well as articles published in journals including Partial Answers, Gramma, the Journal of Theory and Criticism, the Journal of Victorian Culture and The Dickens Quarterly (2015). She has also written studies on Modernist poetry and fiction including Modernism and the Idea of Modernity (2004, 2008) and High Poetic Modernist Discourse (1997), and on American, British and Romanian popular culture: The Boomerang Effect (Efectul de boomerang, 2002; trans. 2008). She has organized seven international conferences, edited six conference volumes, published over thirty articles in her research domain and given talks at universities in London, Rome, Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem, Salzburg and Lisbon. Catherine Sandbach Dahlström is a retired Lecturer and Reader in English Literature at Stockholm University. Her dissertation was a study of Charlotte Yonge’s domestic fiction and she has written extensively on Virginia Woolf, including a chapter on Woolf ’s reception in Sweden for this series. She is at present Chair of the University of the Third Age in Stockholm. Ilona Dobosiewicz is Professor of English Literature at Opole University, Poland. She is the author of Female Relationships in Jane Austen’s Novels (1997) and Ambivalent Feminism: Marriage and Women’s Social Roles in George Eliot’s Works (2003), as well as articles on nineteenth-century British literature. She co-edits the series ‘Readings in English and American Literature and Culture’ published by Opole University, and is managing editor (literature section) of Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature (www.explorations.uni.opole.pl). Georgia Farinou-Malamatari is Professor Emerita of Modern Greek Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has held visiting appointments at the University of London. Her research interests are in

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xviii   List of Contributors nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greek prose in a comparative framework. Her recent publications include ‘Biography and the Novel in twenteethcentury Greek Literature’ (Phrasis 51.1, 2010) and Το σχοίνισμα της γραφής: Παπαδιαμαντ(ολογ)ικές μελέτες (The allotment of writing: studies in Papadiamandis, 2014). She is currently working on Alexandros Papadiamandis as translator of European literature, and preparing a book on modern and postmodern biographical fiction in twentieth-century Greek literature. Natalia V. Gorbunova is Associate Professor in the Foreign Literature Department of Tyumen State University, Russia. She specializes in the English novel of the nineteenth century, and is author of articles on Eliot including ‘Problema psikhologizma v literature vtoroi poloviny XIX veka i Dzhordzh Eliot’ (The problem of psychologism in the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century and George Eliot) (1998); ‘Metaphory poznaniia v tvorchestve Dzhordzh Eliot’ (Metaphors of knowledge in the works of George Eliot) (2003); ‘“Vpechatleniia Teofrasta takogo-to” Dzhordzh Eliot: k probleme zhanra i traditsii’ (Impressions of Theophrastus Such: the problem of genre and tradition) (2005); and ‘Literatura i “metaphizika” v rasskaze Dzh. Eliot “Priotkrytaia zavesa”’(Literature and metaphysics in The Lifted Veil) (2012). Jacqueline Hurtley is Professor of Literature in English in the Department of English and German at the Universitat de Barcelona. She is a graduate in Spanish with Italian, as well as in English, and a number of her publications are of a comparative nature. Her Josep Janés: El combat per la cultura was published in the 1980s, and in the 1990s she was awarded the Enrique García y Díaz Research Prize by the Asociación Española de Estudios Anglonorteamericanos (AEDEAN) for her José Janés: Editor de literatura inglesa. More recently, she has produced chapters on Woolf, Pater, Yeats and Lawrence in Spain in the series on The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe. She has also published on censorship in F. Billiani (ed.), Modes of Censorship and Translation (2007) and P. Fjagesund (ed.), Hamsun Abroad (2009). She was Head of Department from 2002 to 2005 and has taught literature in English from the Renaissance to the present as well as literary theory. Her biography of Walter Starkie was published by Four Courts Press in 2013 and received the ESSE Book Award in Cultural Studies in 2014. Alain Jumeau, a former student of the École normale supérieure, is Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, director of the international journal Études Anglaises and Honorary President of the French Society of Victorianists (Société Française d’Études Victoriennes et Édouardiennes). He has published widely on several Victorian prose writers and novelists, especially George Eliot. Jumeau has also translated into French George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (2003), Daniel Deronda (2010) and other nineteenth-century novels by Walter Scott, R. L. Stevenson and Anthony Trollope, as well as short stories by Thomas De Quincey and Arthur Conan Doyle. Vesela Katsarova is a Professor of British Studies, DLitt. She has been a lecturer in English literature in the Department of English and American

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List of Contributors   xix Studies, Sofia University, since 1976. As a Fulbright scholar she delivered lectures in Northwestern University (2001) and the University at Albany (2005), USA. She was president of the Bulgarian Society for British Studies from 2002 to 2006. Her major academic works include From Neo-Victorianism to Postmodernism: Angus Wilson (2003), My Country is the Whole World: Women in Anglo-American and Bulgarian Literature (2007) and The Female Tradition in English Literature: George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing (2009). She has translated novels such as Dickens’s Dombey and Son, Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Eliot’s Middlemarch and Adam Bede. Ebbe Klitgård is currently ‘Associate Professor with special qualifications’ in British Studies on the English programme at Roskilde University in Denmark. A reviewer for English Studies since 1994, his doctoral thesis, Chaucer’s Narrative Voice in the Knight’s Tale, was published in 1995 by Museum Tusculanum Press, and three connected articles on narrative voicing in Chaucer’s dream visions have been published in The Chaucer Review, English Studies and Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (1998–2003). Several articles on recent English prose fiction, and encyclopedia contributions on English literature, have been published in Denmark. His recent publications include Narrative Developments from Chaucer to Defoe, edited with Gerd Bayer (2011), for which he co-wrote the introduction and a chapter entitled ‘The Encoding of Subjectivity in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale and Pardoner’s Tale’, and Chaucer in Denmark: A Study of the Translation and Reception History 1782–2012 (2013). María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia is Professor of English Literature and Dean of the Philology Faculty at the University of Corunna in Spain. Her main scholarly interests are modern and contemporary literature and culture, women writers, translation and cultural relationships between Spain and the Anglo-Saxon world. She is currently researching women and mobility in contemporary Galician, Scottish, Welsh and Irish literatures. Her publications include books on eighteenth-century fiction and the teaching of language and literature (All in All, ed., 2004), as well as Australia and Galicia: Defeating the Tyranny of Distance (2008) and From Life to Text: Building Linguistic and Cultural Identity (with Anna Szcepaniak-Kozak, 2012). She has also published numerous articles on women writers, including Charlotte Lennox, Amelia Opie, Medbh McGuckian, Frasquita Larrea y Aherán and Mary Wollstonecraft, and on James Joyce’s female predecessors. Franco Marucci began academic work in 1974 at the University of Siena as an assistant and associate professor; from 1987 to 2010 he was Professor of English at the University of Venice ‘Ca’ Foscari’. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, Hopkins Quarterly and ES. Revista de Filología Inglesa. He was also the founder and editor of the series Le Bricole, 13 books of comparative criticism published by Cisalpino (Milan) and Cafoscarina (Venice). His main publications include Il senso interrotto. Autonomia e codificazione nella poesia di Dylan Thomas (1976), Gerard Manley Hopkins. Il silenzio e la parola (1977), I fogli della Sibilla. Retorica e medievalismo in Gerard Manley Hopkins (1981), Il Vittorianesimo (1991, rev. 2009), The

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xx   List of Contributors Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins (1994), L’inchiostro del mago. Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento (2009), Joyce (2013). He has just completed Storia della letteratura inglese in 8 volumes (2003–2016). As a creative writer he made his début with Pentapoli (2011), followed by Il Michelin del sacro (2012). He runs the Blog http://franco marucci.wordpress.com/, with comments and articles on literature and music, and a weekly sports page. Git Claesson Pipping is General Secretary of the Swedish University Teachers’ Association and Associate Professor in Gender Studies at Södertörn University College, Sweden. Her published work includes Könet som läsanvisning (Reading gender) (1993) on the Swedish reception of George Eliot between 1859 and 1895; Men arbetet! Mitt arbete! (But work! My work!) (2007) concerning biographies of professional women; and Dyrkan och spektakel (Worship and spectacle, with Tom Olsson) (2010) concerning how structures of feeling were used to convey political messages in public celebrations of Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf. She has also written on the Swedish reception of Jane Austen for the present series. Boris M. Proskurnin is Head of the World Literature Department and Dean of the Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures at Perm State University, Russia. He is the author of Angliiskii politicheskii roman XIX veka: genezis i evoliutsia (The English political novel of the nineteenth century: genesis and development) (2000) and  Idei vremeni i zrelye romany Dzordzh Eliot (Ideas of time and the later novels of George Eliot) (2005), and co-author of Istoria zarubezhnoi literatury: zapadnoevropeiskaia realisticheskaia proza XIX veka (The history of foreign literature: West European realistic prose of the nineteenth century) (1998) and Roman Dzordzh Eliot Mel’nitsa na Flosse: kontekst, estetika, poetika (George Eliot’s MF: Context, aesthetics, poetics) (2004). Gerlinde Röder-Bolton retired as Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Surrey in 2008. She was formerly an Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Victorian Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of George Eliot and Goethe: An Elective Affinity (1998) and George Eliot in Germany, 1854–55: ‘Cherished Memories’ (2006), as well as various articles on Geothe, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. Marta Ortega Sáez is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Universitat de Barcelona. In 2013 she defended her doctoral thesis on translations into Spanish from English still in print, which were originally produced during the Franco dictatorship. In 2009 her biographical article on one of the most prolific translators during the Franco dictatorship, Juan G. de Luaces, appeared in the academic journal Arbor, and since 2007 she has taken part in a number of conferences dealing with the reception and censorship of writers in English in the post-war period in Spain, including Rosamond Lehmann, Radclyffe Hall, Vita Sackville-West and Louisa May Alcott. Among her publications are ‘The Translation of Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway into Catalan by Cesar August Jordana’ in Translating Dialects and Languages of Minorities:

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List of Contributors   xxi Challenges and Solutions (2011); ‘Narrativa y censura de Vita Sackville-West en la España de Franco (1939–75)’ in La traducció i el món editorial de postguerra (2011); and ‘Un pasado muy presente: Traducciones del inglés al español en la época contemporánea’, in La traducción: balance del pasado y retos del futuro (2007). Elinor Shaffer is a Fellow of the British Academy, (Hon.) Professor, University College London, and Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study. She is the Director of Research and Series Editor of The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe, of which George Eliot is the twenty-first volume. She is also author of ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: the Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature (1980), which begins with Coleridge and concludes with a study of Daniel Deronda; author of the Introduction to the Everyman Middlemarch; and author of ‘“The Sound of Grass Growing”: Eliot in Weimar’, a lecture to the Goethe Society (Publications of the English Goethe Society). She is  a foundermember of the British Comparative Literature Association and founder-editor of Comparative Criticism. Marie Nedregotten Sørbø is Associate professor or English leterature at Volda University College, Norway. She contributed the Norwegian chapter of The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe (2007, rev. edn 2014). Her doctoral degree from the University of Oslo is on the reception of Austen in film, and she is the author of Irony and Idyll: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park on Screen (2014), as well as articles and book chapters. She is Principal Investigator for Norway in the HERA project Travelling Texts 1790–1914: The Transnational Reception of Women’s Writing at the Fringes of Europe (2013–16), and was previously in the management of the COST Action Women Writers in History – Toward a New Understanding of European Literary Culture (2009–13). Mihály Szegedy-Maszák is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Eötvös Loránd University, Professor Emeritus of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University, President of the Hungarian Comparative Literature Association, and a member of Academia Europaea (London) and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Literary Canons: National and International (2001), seventeen books in Hungarian (among them monographs on the authors Zsigmond Kemény, Sándor Márai, Géza Ottlik and Dezső Kosztolányi), editor-in-chief of a three-volume history of Hungarian literature (2007) and the journal Hungarian Studies, co-author of Théorie littéraire (1989), Angezogen und abgestoßen: Juden in der ungarischen Literatur (1999), A Companion to Hungarian Studies (1999), Epoche – Text – Modalität (1999), The Phoney Peace: Power and Culture in Central Europe 1945–49 (2000), National Heritage – National Canon (2001) and Der lange, dunkle Schatten: Studien zum Werk von Imre Kertész (2004). He has published articles on the culture of the Habsburg monarchy, the theory of the novel, Romanticism, Modernism, postmodernism, translation, inter-artistic studies, Richard Wagner, Henry James, Gustav Mahler, Béla Bartók, Ezra Pound,

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xxii   List of Contributors Wilhelm Furtwängler and Buster Keaton, in English, French, German, Polish, Slovak, Chinese and Hungarian. Diederik van Werven teaches at Amsterdam University College, the joint liberal arts and sciences college of the universities in Amsterdam, founded in 2009. His teaching focuses on the nineteenth century, the history of the novel, the Romantic era, world literature and post-colonial studies. He is also in charge of academic advising and student welfare at this pioneering institution. Van Werven has taught English as a foreign language at many levels, including teacher training. He was a professional translator for a number of years, directing his own school of translation, before joining University College Roosevelt (Utrecht University), lecturing in academic skills and literary studies. The early reception of George Eliot’s novels in the Netherlands was the subject of his doctoral thesis (2001), focusing on religious and philosophical ideas shared by the novelist and her Dutch readers.

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Abbreviations AB Adam Bede AmB ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton’ BJ Brother Jacob DD Daniel Deronda FH Felix Holt ITS Impressions of Theophrastus Such JR ‘Janet’s Repentance’ LV The Lifted Veil M Middlemarch MF The Mill on the Floss MG ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ R Romola SCL Scenes of Clerical Life SG The Spanish Gypsy SM Silas Marner

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Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015 Under ‘Translations’, the timeline records for each European country each translation of individual works by Eliot. Under ‘Criticism’, it lists all European book-length monographs on Eliot plus significant reviews, articles, chapters and theses. The timeline draws on the Bibliography of this volume and on a wide range of reference materials. Year

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

1819

Mary Ann Evans born 22 November in Nuneaton, Warwickshire Boards at Miss Lathom’s School in Attleborough Boards at Mrs Wallington’s boarding school, Nuneaton Becomes Evangelical Attends Misses Franklin’s School, Coventry Mother dies and Eliot takes over father’s household Learns Italian and Greek; reads Latin and Greek Reads widely in theology and contemporary literature, especially Scott

1824 1828

1832–5 1836

1837

1838 1839 1840

1841 1842

1843 1844 1845

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Translations

Criticism

First publication, a religious poem Begins to study Italian Meets Charles and Cara Bray, Coventry free-thinkers Refuses to attend church with her father, January–May Meets Sara Hennell Meets Dr Brabant Begins to translate Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu Declines a proposal of marriage Meets Harriet Martineau

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Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015   xxv Year

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

1846

Translation of Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu published as The Life of Jesus Nurses her father Meets Emerson Reads George Sand Nurses father Begins to translate Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus Father dies in May Travels in France, Italy and Switzerland with the Brays; stays alone in Geneva for the winter Begins Journal Decides to make her living by writing Changes ‘Mary Ann’ to ‘Marian’ Reviews Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect, Westminster Review (Jan.), ed. John Chapman; lodges with him in London for two weeks Lewes becomes editor of the Leader (until 1854) and promotes Italian independence Becomes actual (though not named) editor of Westminster Review Lewes becomes member of the council of Society of the Friends of Italy Friendship with Herbert Spencer; meets George Henry Lewes, and becomes involved in Society of the Friends of Italy, to which Mazzini gives a lecture Works for the Westminster Review Reads current novels: Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth; C. Brontë, Villette; Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Hegel

1847 1848

1849

1850

1851

1852

1853

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Translations

Criticism

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xxvi   Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015 Year

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

1854

Translation of Feuerbach’s Das Wesen Christentums published as The Essence of Christianity Travels to Germany with Lewes to help research his biography of Goethe (Weimar, then winter in Berlin) They meet Franz Liszt, Clara Schumann and Anton Rubinstein Scandal in Britain: Lewes cannot divorce his wife because he had condoned her adultery Henceforth Eliot lives with Lewes, and the travels mentioned below are made by them both Eliot begins to translate Spinoza’s Ethics (published only in 1952) Publication of ‘Woman in France: Madame de Sablé’ Publication of Lewes’s Life and Works of Goethe to wide acclaim Eliot’s ‘Evangelical Teaching: Dr Cumming’, ‘The Future of German Philosophy’, ‘Translations and Translators’, ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’ Visits Ilfracombe for Lewes’s researches, published as Seaside Studies in 1858 Starts writing AmB Publication of review of Riehl’s The Natural History of German Life, ‘German Wit: Heinrich Heine’ and ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ Publication of AmB under pseudonym ‘George Eliot’ Visit to Scilly Isles where she writes MG; to Jersey, where she finishes JR and stays until late July Begins AB in September

1855

1856

1857

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Translations

Criticism

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Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015   xxvii Year

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

1858

Publication of Scenes of Clerical Life and Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies Travel in April to Nuremburg, Munich (until July), Salzburg, Vienna, Prague (including Jewish ghetto) and Dresden Meets Christian Tauchnitz Finishes AB in England Publication of AB and LV Pseudonym uncovered Christian Tauchnitz visits Eliot and Lewes at Holly Lodge, Wandsworth Friendly with the positivists Richard Congreve and his wife Visits to Switzerland and Italy; Lewes visits Dutch materialist in Switzerland Publication of MF Visits to Switzerland and Italy, where in Florence Eliot conceives idea for R, and meets with Italian nationalist politicians Writes ‘Recollections of Italy’ Publication of Lewes’s The Physiology of Common Life

1859

1860

1861

SM published in April Revisits Florence to gather material for R, which begins serialization in the Cornhill Magazine in July Count Carlo Arrivabene visits in London

1862

AB adapted for stage

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Translations

Criticism

First Danish translation: AB First Russian translation: AB

Russia: Mikhailov, ‘Adam Bid Dzordzh Eliot’; Lev Tolstoy reads AB and recommends SCL to a relative

First Dutch translation: AB First German translation: AB First Russian translation: JR

Germany: Frese, ‘Einleitung’ (Introduction) to AB; Gutzkow, ‘Adam Bede’; Marggraf, ‘Ein neuer Roman von George Eliot’ (A new novel by George Eliot); Schmidt, ‘Adam Bede und andere Romane’ (AB and other novels); Zeising, ‘Eine englische Dorfgeschichte’ (An English village story) Russia: Mikhailov, ‘Novyi roman Dzordzh Eliot The Mill on the Floss’ (George Eliot’s new novel MF)

First Danish translation: SCL, MG First Dutch translation: MF, SM First French translation: AB First German translation: MF, SM First Hungarian translation: AB Norway: extract from AB First Swedish translation: AB, SM

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xxviii   Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015 Year

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

Criticism

1863

R completes serialization and is published complete in 3 vols Move to the Priory, Regent’s Park Research for SG Thornie wants to fight for the Poles against Russia, but is dissuaded Visit to Italy

First Danish translation: SM First French translation: MF, SCL, SM

France: Schérer, ‘George Eliot’

1864

1865

1866

1867

1868

1869

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Lewes becomes editor of the Fortnightly Review Publication of ‘The Influence of Rationalism’ and ‘Servants’ Logic’ Publication of FH Visit to Low Countries, Germany and south of France Visit to Spain to research SG Befriends Emmanuel Deutsch, possible model for Mordecai in DD

Publication of SG and ‘Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt’ Meets the Russian Boborykin Writes ‘Notes on Form in Art’ (published in 1963) Visit to Italy, meeting John Walter Cross in Rome Writes the poems published in 1874 as ‘The Legend of Jubal’ and Other Poems Dines with Felix-Bartholdy Mendelssohn

First Dutch translation: R First German translation: R Russia: AB First Russian translation: MF

Russia: Druzhinin, ‘Romola: roman o florentiiskoi zhizni’ (R: a novel of Florentine life)

First Dutch translation: FH

First German translation: FH First Russian translation: FH First Spanish translation: FH First Swedish translation: FH First Italian translation: R, abridged

Sweden: Erika, ‘Vår lektyr: 3, Miss Braddon och George Eliot’ (Our reading: 3, Miss Braddon and George Eliot)

Germany: Dohm, ‘George Eliot’, review of all her novels published by Tauchnitz and Duncker to date Russia: Goncharov appeals to AB in self-defence from charges of immorality; Veinberg, ‘Dzhordzh Eliot’

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Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015   xxix Year

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

1870

Publication of Book I of M Visit to Berlin, Vienna, Prague (including the Jewish ghetto)

1871

Rest of M published First visit of Turgenev and Pauline Viardot to the Priory Second meeting of Turgenev and Eliot Visit to France and Germany to research DD Publication of ‘The Legend of Jubal’ and Other Poems Dines with German orientalist Max Müller in Oxford

1872 1873

1874

Publication of Poems and Vol. 1 of Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind

1875

Publication of Vol. II of Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind

1876

DD begins publication Richard Wagner and wife visit Visit to France, Germany, Switzerland Turgenev and Ardov attend public reading of DD in Russia

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Translations

Criticism

Germany: Schmidt, ‘Bilder aus dem geistigen Leben unserer Zeit’ (Pictures of the intellectual life of our time) Russia: Mordovtsev, ‘Zadachi sovremennogo romana’ (Problems of the contemporary novel) Russia: Tsebrivoka, ‘Angliiskie pisatel’nitsy’ (English authors)

First Danish translation: M First Dutch translation: M First German translation: M First Norwegian translation: M, in two variants First Russian translations: M, twice

First Hungarian translation: FH, M

France: Quesnel, ‘Le Roman contemporain en Angleterre: George Eliot’ (The contemporary English novel: George Eliot) Germany: Honegger, review of M Netherlands: Busken, ‘George Eliot’s nieuwe roman’ (George Eliot’s new novel) Sweden: Bergstedt, review of M Germany: Ludwig, Romane und Romanstudian (Novels and novel criticism) Germany: Schoenbach, Über die humoristische Prosa des XIX. Jahrhunderts (On humorous prose in the 19th Century) Russia: Chernyshevsky describes Eliot as unsophisticated but charming

First Dutch translation: DD First German translation: DD

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xxx   Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015 Year

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

Criticism

1877

Meets Wagner when he visits England for a series of concerts

Denmark: MF First Russian translation: DD

1878

Writes ITS Turgenev, Eliot and Lewes dine at Six Mile Bottom Lewes dies Romania gives citizenship to Jews (as Eliot does not acknowledge in ITS, which criticizes Romania on this point) Publication of ITS Helps Cross to learn Italian Changes her name to Mary Ann Evans Lewes Marries Cross Visit to France, Italy, Switzerland, Habsburg Empire, Germany Dies on 22 December Buried in Highgate Cemetary

First Dutch translation: LV, BJ First French translation: R First Norwegian translation: LV First Swedish translation: DD

Germany: Kaufmann, ‘George Eliot und das Judenthum’ (George Eliot and Judaism); Schérer, ‘George Eliot und ihr neuester Roman’ (George Eliot and her latest novel) Russia: P-skaia, ‘Vstuplenie: Stseny i kharaktery iz novogo romana Eliot Daniel Deronda’ (Introduction: scenes and characters from Eliot’s new novel DD) France: Schérer, ‘Daniel Deronda par George Eliot’ (DD by George Eliot) Sweden: ‘Daniel Deronda’

1879

1880

1881

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First Dutch translation: ITS First German translation: BJ, LV First German translation: ‘The modern Hep! Hep! Hep! First Swedish translation: LV

Czech: Hanušová, ‘George Eliotová’ Norway: Skram, review of Danish LV and BJ

First French translation: DD

France: Brunetière, ‘Le Naturalisme anglais: Étude sur George Eliot’ (English Naturalism: a study of George Eliot) Netherlands: Balsem, ‘George Eliot’; Busken, ‘George Eliot’; Pierson, ‘George Eliot’ Norway: Winter-Hjelm, ‘Obituary’ Sweden: ‘George Eliot och hennes författarskap’ (George Eliot and her authorship)

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Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015   xxxi Year

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

Criticism

1882

First Italian translation: DD

1883

France: Montégut, ‘Esquisses littéraires: George Eliot; I. L’Âme et le talent; II. Les Œuvres et la doctrine morale’ (Literary Sketches: George Eliot; I. the soul and the talent; II. works and moral doctrine) Germany: Spielhagen, Beiträge zur Theorie und Technik des Romans (Contributions to the thoery and technique of the novel) First Spanish translation: Romania: Suţu, ‘Studii AB asupra romanului realist First Swedish ȋn zilele noastre’ (On translation: ‘Address to the realist novel of our Working Men’ time) Russia: Koropchevskii, ‘Kriticheskie statii Dzordzh Eliot’ (Critical essays of George Eliot); Slonimskii, ‘Dzhordzh Eliot: Ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva’ (George Eliot: sketch of her life and work) Sweden: Westermarck, ‘Den realistiska inriktningen i den franska romanen’ (The realist turn of the French novel). Important becasue first comparison Eliot/ French contemporary novelists

1884

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xxxii   Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015 Year

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

1885

1886

1887

1888

1889

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Translations

Criticism

First Danish translation: R First German translation: SCL First Hungarian translation: SM

Germany: Wolzogen, George Eliot: Eine biographisch-kritische Studie (George Eliot: a biographical-critical study) Italy: Palma, ‘George Eliot: La sua vita e l’opera sua’ (George Eliot: her life and works) Netherlands: Busken Huet, ‘Nieuwe Engelsche Letteren: George Eliot’s Life, edited by her husband J. W. Cross’ Norway: English edition of AmB for secondary schools Russia: Ia, ‘Dzhordzh Eliot i evrei’ (George Eliot and Jews); Lev Tolstoy reads and admires FH Sweden: Lindgren, ‘George Eliot’

First Danish translation: AmB France: SM, school edition with English text First Greek translation: MG First Swedish translation: R First Dutch translation: Legend of Jubal Sweden: SM First Swedish translation: SCL, M France: MF First Swedish translation: MF First Russian translation: SM

Greece: Kourtidis, ‘Γεωργία Έλλιοτ’ (Georgia Eliot)

First Swedish translation: from Leaves from a Notebook, ‘Om författarskap’ (On authorship) and ‘Hur man skriver en barättelse’ (On story-telling)

Sweden: Wirsén, ‘Silas Marner’

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Translations

Criticism

1890

France: SCL, SM school edition with English text First French translation: M

1891

France: JR First Polish translation: AB First Russian translation: R

Czech: Mourek, Přehled dějin literatury anglické (An outline of the history of English literature) Italy: Furino, George Eliot and Her Works Sweden: Krook, ‘Qvarnen vid Floss’ (MF); Wirsén, ‘Middlemarch’ Italy: Negri, George Eliot: la sua vita e i suoi romanzi (George Eliot: her life and novels) Russia: Davidova, Dzhordzh Eliot: Eio zhizn’ i literaturnaia deiatel’nost’ (George Eliot: her life and literary works) Sweden: AmB, adapted English version

1892

1893

1894

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

First Czech translation: MF First Norwegian translation: SM First Polish translation: SCL Russia: R France: MF First Norwegian translation: ‘O May I Join’ Romania: excerpt from MF Romania: Zamfirescu, Viaţa First Czech translation: la ţarǎ, considered to have SM been influenced by AB

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Norway: Tambs-Lyche, ‘Salme av George Eliot’ (George Eliot’s Hymn [O May I Join the Choir Invisible]) Czech: ‘Evans, Mary Ann’, entry in encyclopaedia Ottův slovník naučn´y (Otto’s encyclopaedia of general knowledge) Norway: Tambs-Lyche, ‘George Eliot’ Sweden: Westermarck, George Eliot och den engelska naturalistiska romanen: en literär studie (George Eliot and the English naturalist novel: a literary study)

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Translations

Criticism

1895

First Norwegian translation: MF

1896

France: MF First Norwegian translation: JR First Hungarian translation: MF First Hungarian translation: R

Denmark: Brummer, To Kvinde-Portraiter: I. George Eliot. II. Bertha von Suttner (Two portraits of women) Norway: Randers, ‘George Eliot’ Czech: Symbolist poet Březina recommends Eliot highly Greece: Parrén, ‘Γεωργία Έλιοτ’ (Georgia Eliot) Czech: Váňa, Knihy a lidé (Books and people) Norway: Parton, ‘George Eliot’ Russia: S-skoi, Dzhordzh Eliot i eio roman ‘Daniel Deronda’ (George Eliot and her novel DD) Czech: ‘Lewes, George Henry’, entry in encyclopaedia Ottův slovník naučný (Otto’s encyclopaedia of general knowledge) Russia: Davidova, ‘Vvedenie’ (Introduction) in AB

1897 1898

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

1899

Russia: AB

1900

France: SM, school edition with English text Russia: AB

1901 1902 1903

Russia: AB, SM twice Russia: DD, MF First Czech translation: AB

1904

1905 1906

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Denmark: AB Italy: R

Greece: Nikolaḯdou, ‘George Eliot’ Romania: Costache, ‘Genul literar ȋn teatru’ (The literary genre in the theatre) France: Bremond, ‘La Religion de George Eliot’ (George Eliot’s Religion) Romania: Constantinescu, ‘Arta naturalistǎ şi estetica lui Taine’ (Naturalist art and Taine’s aesthetics); Sanielevici ‘Romanul istoric’ (The historical novel)

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

1907

Denmark: LæssøeMüller and Ottosen, Engelske Kulturbilleder: Uddrag af ‘Felix Holt, The Radical’ (English cultural images: extracts from FH) Italy: Biagi, ‘Introduction’, Romola Romania: Scriban, ‘Femeia ȋn literaturǎ’ (Women in literature) Denmark: SM France: Pages choisies de George Eliot (Chosen Pages of George Eliot), SM, abridged school edition with English text

1908

1909

Film adaptation of SM (entitled A Fair Exchange, USA) Netherlands: AB First Norwegian translation: AB

1910

1911

Film adaptation of SM

1912

1913 1914

Criticism

France: SM, school edition with English text First Danish translation: LV Denmark: MF Netherlands: MF

Film adaptations of SM (UK) and MF Film adaptation of DD Italy: AmB (entitled Gwendolyn, USA)

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Romania: Sanielevici, ‘Duiliu Zamfirescu şi “poporanismul”’ (Duiliu Zamfirescu and ‘ruralism’) France: Chaffurin, ‘Les Idées morales et religieuses de George Eliot’ (The Moral and Religious Ideas of George Eliot) Norway: Lassen, ‘Forord’ (Introduction) to AB Norway: Strømme, ‘George Eliot: Adam Bede’ Sweden: Platen, ‘Från George Eliots lefnadsväg’

Italy: Bassi, Medaglioni letterari: La vita e le opere di Jane Austen e George Eliot (The life and works of Jane Austen and George Eliot) Romania: Stratilescu, George Eliot: Viaţa şi scrierile ei (George Eliot: her life and works)

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

Criticism

1915

Film adaptations of MF (USA), FH (USA), AB (USA) and R (Italy) Film adaptation of SM

First Czech translation: R Russia: DD, FH, MF, SM

Netherlands: Querido, ‘Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot’

1916 1917 1918 1919

1920

1921 1922 1923 1924

Czech: Schauer, Spisy (Writings) Film adaptation of AB (UK)

First Catalan translation [supposed 1918]: SM Stage adaptation of MF in First Norwegian Nuneaton to mark centenary translation: AmB of Eliot’s birth First Spanish translation: SM Film adaptation of MG (UK) Czech: SM abridged for schools, in English Denmark: (at some point in 1920s or 1930s) MF, ‘Sweet Evenings Come and Go, Love’ Italy: R, first unabridged translation

Film adaptation of DD (UK) BBC adaptation of AB Film adaptation of R (USA)

Italy: MG and JR Denmark: AB France: AmB, school edition with English text; SCL, abridged school edition with English text

1925

1926 1927

1928 1929

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Norway: Liestøl, ‘George Eliot’; Midttun, ‘George Eliot: “Amos Barton”’ France: Chaffurin, ‘Les Amours de George Eliot’ (George Eliot’s Loves); Thibaudet, ‘Le Centenaire de George Eliot’ (George Eliot’s Centenary) Romania: Sanielevici, ‘Ce a însemnat “Curentul nou” de la 1906’ (What the ‘new trend’ of 1906 was)

Netherlands: KloosReyneke van Stuwe, ‘George Eliot’ Stage adaptation of DD in London

Italy: SM First Polish translation: R

France: Pond, Les idées morales et religieuses de George Eliot (The moral and religious ideas of George Eliot) Sweden: Tegner, George Eliot: en studie i hennes religiösa och filosofiska utveckling (George Eliot: a study of her religious and philosophical development)

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

Criticism

1930

Spain: AB

France: Romieu, La Vie de George Eliot (George Eliot’s life) Greece: Kourtídis, “Γεωργία Έλιοτ: Κριτική βιογραφία” (Georgia Eliot: A Critical Biography)

1931

First Czech translation: MG First Italian translation: AB Italy: MF, abridged English version First Spanish translation: MF

1932 1933

France: Bourl’honne, George Eliot: Essai de biographie intellectuelle et morale (George Eliot: essay of intellectual and moral biography) Italy: Berti, ‘Considerazioni generali sul realismo morale di George Eliot’ (General considerations on the moral realism of George Eliot) Sweden: Böök, ‘George Eliot’ France: SM First Italian translation: MF Italy: SM

1934

1935

1936 1937

Film adaptation of MF (USA)

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Poland: Dyboski, ‘Wielcy powieściopisarze angielscy z perspektywy dzisiejszej’ (Great novelists of the nineteenth century from a contemporary perspective) Russia: Rovda, Dzhordzh Eliot i eio otsenka v Rossii (George Eliot and her reception in Russia)

France: selections from MF, abridged school edition with English text

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1938

1939

1940

1941 1942 1943

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

France: MG, AmB abridged school edition with English text France: SM Italy: SM

Italy: MF Spain: 194?, SM

First Romanian translation: MF First Romanian translation: SM Spain: MF

Criticism

Poland: Krzyżanowski, ‘Zagadka Jermoły Kraszewski i George Eliot’ (The mystery of Jermoła: Kraszewski and George Eliot) Greece: Nikoletopoulos, ‘Φιλολογικαί Χρονολογίαι: 22/9/1856: Το πρώτο διήγημα της Γεωργίας Έλιοτ’ (Philological chronology: 22/9/1856: George Eliot’s first short story) Russia: Kuzmin, Dzhordzh Eliot i angliiskii roman 60-h godov (George Eliot and the English novel of the 1860s)

Spain: censorship of MF Sweden: Slomovitz, ‘George Eliots Juderoman, Daniel Deronda: Judestatstanken tjugo år före Herzl’ (George Eliot’s Jewish novel DD: the idea of the Jewish state twenty years before Herzl) Spain: censorship of AB Sweden: Hagberg, ‘Slutord’ (Final words)

1944

Spain: AB Sweden: SM

1945 1946

Spain: AB, SM Spain: MF, SM First Spanish translation: JR France: AB Spain: SM Poland: Borowy, ‘O Młynie nad Flossem pani George Eliot’ (On MF by George Eliot) France: MF, abridged

1947 1948

1949

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

1950

1951 1952 1953

Translations

Criticism

France: SM Netherlands: MF Norway: SM France: M Spain: MF, SM Italy: MF (abridged) France: M

Spain: censorship of MF

1955

France: SM Italy: SM Norway: AB Czech: SM

1956

Sweden: LV

1957

France: MF twice, once abridged Italy: R

1954

1958 1959

1960

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Russia: SM

Russia: Kuz’min, ‘Krizis angliiskogo sotsiial’nogo romana v 50-h – 60-h godakh 19. veka: Eliot, Trollop, Rid, Kollinz’ (The crisis of the English social novel of the 50s and 60s of the 19th century: Eliot, Trollope, Read, Collins)

Czech: Milner, ‘Felix Holt, the Radical and Realism in George Eliot’ Italy: Tosello, Le fonti italiane della Romola di George Eliot (The Italian sources of George Eliot’s R) Russia: Anikst, ‘Dzordzh Eliot’ Sweden: Lundblad, ‘George Eliot’ Poland: Dyboski, Sto lat literatury angielskiej (A hundred years of English literature) Russia: Gritchuk, Osobennosti khudozhestvennogo metoda Dzhordzh Eliot (Particularities of the artistic method of George Eliot); Levinton, ‘Dzhordzh Eliot’

Italy: MF Norway: comic book of SM First Polish translation: MF

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

Criticism

1961

Sweden: M

Czech: Milner, ‘Lydgate and the Heroic Aspiration in Middlemarch’ Spain: censorship of MF Sweden: Lagerroth, ‘Efterskrift’ (Afterword) to M

1962

Italy: MF Spain: MF Russia: MF

1963

1964

Television series of SM

1965 1966

Television series of MF

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Italy: MF Romania: MF

France: SM Hungary: MF Italy: MF (abridged)

Czech: Milner, ‘The Genesis of George Eliot’s Address to Working Men and Its Relation to Felix Holt, the Radical’; ‘George Eliot and the Limits of Victorian Realism’ Russia: Rovda, ‘Dzhordzh Eliot i ieio roman Melnitsa na Flosse’ (George Eliot and her novel MF) Czech: Milner, ‘George Eliot’s Realist Art’, ‘Herr Klesmer: George Eliot’s Portrait of the Artist’ Romania: Alexandrescu, ‘Prefaţǎ’ (Introduction) to Moara de pe Floss (MF) Russia: Gritchuk, ‘Obschestvennopoliticheskaia tema v romane Dzhordzh Eliot Feliks Holt, radical’ (The social-political theme in George Eliot’s novel FH) Czech: Milner, ‘The Structure of Values in Adam Bede’ Italy: Franconeri: ‘Silas Marner una poesia in prosa’ (SM: a poem in prose); Pisapia, ‘George Eliot e Henry James’; Rizzi: ‘Note biografiche e bibliografiche’ (Biographical and bibliographic note); Tarizzo: ‘Eliot e il romanzo moderno’ (Eliot and the modern novel)

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

1967

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Translations

East Germany: MF Italy: SM twice

Criticism

Russia: Kondratiev, ‘Glavnye osobennosti esteticheskoi pozitsii Dzhordzh Eliot kak vyrazhenie obshchikh tendentsii v razvitii realisticheskogo romana v Anglii vtoroi poloviny XIX veka’ (The main characteristics of the aesthetic position of George Eliot as an example of the general tendencies in the development of the realistic novel in English in the second half of the nineteenth century); ‘Pozdnee tvorchestvo Dzhordzh Eliot: Roman Middlmarch’ (The late work of George Eliot: the novel M) Czech: Milner, ‘The Quest for Community in The Mill on the Floss’ France: Couch, George Eliot in France: A French Appraisal of George Eliot’s Writings, 1858–1960 Italy: Franconeri, ‘Note biografiche e bibliografiche’ (Biographical and bibliographic note); Pisapia, ‘George Eliot e Henry James’; Tarizzo: ‘Eliot e il romanzo moderno’ (Eliot and the modern novel), Franconeri: ‘Silas Marner una poesia in prosa’

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1968

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Television series of M

1972 1973

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East Germany: SM Italy: AB; SM Romania: SM First Slovak translation/ adaptation: SM Spain: MF

1969

1970 1971

Translations

Criticism

Russia: Kondratiev, Iz istorii razvitiia realisticheskogo romana v Anglii vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Dzhordzh Eliot, Meredit, Batler, Hardi) (From the history of the development of the realistic novel in England in the second half of the nineteenth century [George Eliot, Meredith, Butler, Hardy]) Czech: Milner, The Structure of Values in George Eliot Hungary: Katona, A valóságábrázolás problémái George Eliot regényeiben (Issues of the representation of reality in the novels of George Eliot) Italy: Gaetano, La narrativa di George Eliot; Pietro, La narrativa di George Eliot (The fiction of George Eliot); Spina, Poesia e Umanità nel Silas Marner di George Eliot (Poetry and humanity in George Eliot’s SM)

Television series of DD East Germany: AB

Hungary: Szerb, Gondolatok a könyvtárban (Library thoughts) Poland: Dobrzycka, ‘George Eliot’

First Romanian translation: FH

Czech: Milner, ‘George Eliot’s Prague Story’ Russia: ‘Literaturnokriticheskiie statii Dzhordzh Eliot’ (Literarycritical articles by George Eliot)

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

1974

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Translations

Criticism

Czech: Milner, ‘Dickens’ Style: A Textual Parallel in Dombey and Son and Daniel Deronda’ Russia: Andreeva, Mesto Dzordzh Eliot v razvitii angliiskogo romana vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (The place of George Eliot in the development of the English novel of the second half of the nineteenth century); Bushkanets, ‘Dzhordzh Eliot v otsenke zhurnalov N. A. Nekrasova, Sovremennik i Otechestvennye zapiski’ (George Eliot’s presentation in N. A. Nekrasov journals The Contemporary and Fatherland Sketches); Demidova, ‘Dzhordzh Eliot v russkikh perevodakh’ (George Eliot in Russian translations); Ivasheva, ‘U istokov angliiskogo naturalizma: Dzhordzh Eliot’ (Towards the sources of English Naturalism: George Eliot); Seletrina, ‘K voprosu o literaturno-esteticheskikh vzgliadakh D. Eliot’ (On the question of the literary-aesthetic views of George Eliot)

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Translations

Criticism

1975

Italy: MF

1976

Hungary: M First Slovak translation: MF

1977

First Romanian translation: AB, M

Poland: Mroczkowski, ‘George Eliot: emancypacja a tradycja’ (George Eliot: emancipation versus tradition) Russia: entry on Eliot in Kratkaia literaturnaia entsiklopedia (Short literary encyclopedia); Putykevich, ‘Problema geroia v rannikh proizvedeniiah Dzhordzh Eliot’ (The problem of the hero in the early works of George Eliot); Seletrina, Pozdnee tvorchestvo Dzhordzh Eliot: Roman ‘Midlmarch’ (The late work of George Eliot: the novel M), ‘Obschestvennopoliticheskie vzgliady D. Eliot’ (The socialpolitical views of George Eliot) Russia: Putykevich, Problema stanovleniia khudozhestvennogo metoda Dzhordzh Eliot (Rannii period tvorchestva, 1851–1861) (The problem of the formation of the artistic method of George Eliot [the early works, 1851–1861]) Romania: Marian, ‘Prefaţǎ’ to M Russia: Kuz’min ‘Tvorchestvo Dzhordzh Eliot’ (George Eliot oeuvre)

1978

Hungarian: AB First Italian translation: LV

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

Criticism

1979

East Germany: M

1980

First Greek translation: SM Italy: MF Spain: SM

1981

Netherlands: MF Russia: M First Slovak translation: M Italy: M

Italy: Calimani, ‘George Eliot e l’evoluzione dello stereotipo ebraico’ (George Eliot and the evolution of the Jewish stereotype); Mariani, ‘Il sionismo di Moses Hess e George Eliot’ (The Zionism of Moses Hess and George Eliot) Italy: Marroni, Una verità difficile Studio sui romanzi di George Eliot (A difficult truth: study of the novels of George Eliot) Russia: Seletrina, ‘Svoeobrazie realizma D. Eliot (roman Midlmarch)’ (The particularity of George Eliot’s realism [the novel M]) Sweden: Bergmann, ‘Politics through Love: Felix Holt and the Industrial Novel’; Halldén, ‘Djup dimension åt vardagen: om Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë och George Eliot’ Sweden: Halldén, ‘Vem försvarar girigheten’; Strömholm, ‘En moralist med nyanser’ Poland: Zbierski, Historia literatury angielskiej (The history of English literature) Russia: Seletrina, ‘K voprosu o tipologicheskoi blizosti estetiki D. Eliot i L. Tolstogo’ (On the question of the typological similarities of the aesthetics of George Eliot and Lev Tolstoy) Sweden: Lindblom, ‘Infernalisk iakttagare’

1982

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

1983

Animation of SM

Catalonia: SM Italy: M West Germany: MF First Spanish translation: Netherlands: Verheul, M ‘Ethisch Realisme: de ontvangst van de romans van George Eliot in Nederland in de periode 1860–1881’ (Ethical realism: the reception of George Eliot’s novels in the Netherlands 1860–1881) Russia: Seletrina, ‘Daniel Deronda Dzhordzh Eliot and Zhenskii portret G. Dzheimsa’ (George Eliot’s DD and Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady) Sweden: Halldén, ‘Förkrympta, krassa livet’; Melberg, ‘Myten om den skrivande kvinnan’ Sweden: Hedberg, Italy: LV ‘Marian (Mary Ann) West Germany: M Evans, alias George Eliot – en oviktoriansk författare’ Spain: García-Bermejo Giner, ‘Otras notas al diálogo de la primera novela de George Eliot’ (Further notes on the dialogue in George Eliot’s first novel) First Bulgarian Bulgaria: Nikolchina, translation: MF ‘Tragika i tesnogrudie’ First Spanish translation: (Tragedy and LV narrow-mindedness) West Germany: AB Czech: Stříbrný, Dějiny anglické literatury (History of English literature) Denmark: Sørensen, ‘Mellem erfaring og metafor: Æstetik, køn og kulturkritik i George Eliots romaner’ (Between experience and metaphor: aesthetics, gender and cultural criticism in George Eliot’s novels)

1984

1985

1986

1987

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BBC adaptation of SM

Criticism

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

Criticism

Italy: M including: Locatelli and Loretelli, ‘M’, Bottalico, ‘Tradurre Middlemarch’ (Translating M) Russia: Lugais, Problemy realizma i naturalizma v tvorchestve Dzordzh Eliot (Rannii period, 1851–1861) (The problems of realism and Naturalism in the work of George Eliot [the early period, 1851–1861]) 1988

First Greek translation: MF First Catalan translation: LV Czech: SM Spain: LV

1989

1990

Stage adaptation of AM

1991

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Denmark: Sørensen, ‘Den lille snehvide og den onde stedmoder Om rivalisering og kvindelige forfattere’ (The little snow-white and the wicked stepmother: about rivalry and female authors) Italy: Lampedusa, ‘George Eliot’; Lops, ‘Femminile, flusso e forma in George Eliot’ (Female, flow and form in George Eliot) Russia: Demidova, Sharlotta Bronte, Elizabet Gaskell, Dzhordzh Eliot v Rossii (1850-e–1870-e gody) (Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot in Russia [1850s–1870s]); Ryzhkova, ‘Stanovlenie psikhologizma Dzhordzh Eliot’ (The development of George Eliot’s psychologism)

Poland: MF Spain: M

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Translations

Criticism

1992

Italy: LV Spain: SM

1993

Spain: M

Italy: Payne, Strange within the Real: The Function of Fantasy in Austen, Brontë and Eliot Sweden: Norbelie, ‘“Oppressive Narrowness”: A Study of the Female Community in George Eliot’s Early Writings’ Italy: Bugliani, ‘I modelli epistemici in Romola di George Eliot’ (The epistemic models in George Eliot’s R) Sweden: Claesson Pipping, Könet som läsanvisning: George Eliot och Victoria Benedictsson i det svenska 1880-talet; En receptionsstudie Italy: Villa, Riscrivendo il conflitto Indagine sull’incidenza del genere nella narrativa di George Eliot (Rewriting the conflict: study of the incidence of genre in George Eliot’s fiction) Russia: Soloveva, ‘Russkii chelovek i anglichanka na render-vous (I. S. Turgenev i Dzhordzh Eliot)’ (Russian man meets English woman [I. S. Turgenev and George Eliot]’) Sweden: Granlund, The Paradox of Self-Love: Christian Elements in George Eliot’s Treatment of Egoism

1994

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

BBC adaptation of M Stage adaptation of MF

Germany: SM

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

1995

1996

1997

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Translations

Criticism

First Catalan translation: Italy: Boccaccini, 1882: M ‘Cesare Olivetti e la Norway: M traduzione italiana di Daniel Deronda di George Eliot’ (Cesare Olivetti and the Italian translation of George Eliot’s DD); Marroni, ‘Comte e l’ “eccesso” testuale di Felix Holt’ (Comte and textual ‘excess’ in FH); Mineo, ‘L’epifania nuziale di Dorothea Brooke’ (The nuptual epiphany of Dorothea Brooke) Norway: Tysdahl, ‘Middlemarch: romanen bak TV-serien’ (M: the novel behind the TV-series) Italy: DD, LV Italy: Sette, The Lifted Veil: George Eliot e il peso della realtà’ (George Eliot and the weight of reality) Norway: Langholm, ‘Forord’ (Introduction) to M; Ramberg, ‘Oversetters etterord’ (Translator’s afterword) First Greek translation: France: Seichepine, Le LV temps dans les romans de George Eliot (Time in George Eliot’s novels) Russia: Naptsok, Roman D. Eliot ‘Midlmarch’ v kontekste angliiskoi literatury vtoroi poloviny XIX veka’ (George Eliot’s novel M in the context of English literature of the second half of the nineteenth century) Sweden: Svanberg and Witt-Brattström, ‘George Eliot’

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

Criticism

1998

Stage adaptation of SM

Germany: R Greece: LV

Russia: Gorbunova, ‘Problema psikhologizma v literature vtoroi poloviny XIX veka i Dzhordzh Eliot’ (The problem of psychologism in the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century and George Eliot) Italy: Lanaro, Il positivismo tra scienza e religione Studi sulla fortuna di Comte in Gran Bretagna (Positivism in science and religion: study of Comte’s fortunes in Great Britain) Spain: Fraga, ‘Sobre la recreación fílmica de The Mill on the Floss’ (On the filmic recreation of MF) Germany: Wagner, ‘George Eliot in Deutschland und Österreich: Transkulturelle Affären des 19 Jahrhunderts’ (George Eliot in Germany and Austria: transcultural affairs of the nineteenth century) Italy: Grego, ‘The Dual Form of Daniel Deronda’; Mucci, ‘Realismo e epistemologia negativa in George Eliot’ (Realism and negative epistemology in George Eliot); Sette,‘“Their Truths are only Half-Truths”: George Eliot e John Stuart Mill’ Russia: Proskurnin, ‘Politicheskii roman Dzhordzh Eliot Feliks Holt, radical: Novatorstvo poetiki i traditsii zhanra’ (George Eliot’s political novel FH: poetic innovation and generic tradition) Spain: Furst, ‘The Talk of the Town in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Leopoldo Alas’ La regenta’ Sweden: Mazzarella, ‘En annorlunda viktorian’ (A different Victorian)

1999

First Italian translation: BJ Italy: M

2000

Denmark: SM Spain: AB

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Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015   li Year

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

2001

2002

First Czech translation: LV Netherlands: M Norway: MF Sweden: MF

2003

Denmark: M France: MF First Greek translation: M Spain: MF

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Criticism

France: Drouet-Richet, Les marges du regard dans la fiction éliotienne (The margins of regard in Eliot’s fiction) Hungary: Bezeczky, ‘Structural Metaphors in the English and Hungarian Versions of George Eliot’s Middlemarch’ Italy: Punzi, Il mito di Corinne: viaggio in Italia e genio femminile in Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller e George Eliot (The myth of Corinne: travel in Italy and the feminine genius of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller and George Eliot) Netherlands: Werven, Dutch Readings of George Eliot 1856–1885 Russia: Maslova, Regional’nyi roman v tvorchestve Dzordzh Eliot (The regional novel in the works of George Eliot) Italy: Marucci, ‘The Lifted Veil, il racconto mesmerico di George Eliot’ (LV: George Eliot’s mesmeric story) Sweden: Bromander, ‘Sin tids Fadime’, review of MF; Halldén, ‘Det brinner en eld’; Lundgren, ‘Ödesdiger kärlek till en bror’; Petersen, ‘George Eliot’; Sundström, ‘Förord’ to Bror och Syster: Kvarnen vid Floss (Introduction to MF) Poland: Dobosiewicz, Ambivalent Feminism: Marriage and Women’s Social Roles in George Eliot’s Works Russia: Gorbunova, Metafory poznaniia v tvorchestve Dzhordzh Eliot (Metaphors of cognition in the works of George Eliot)

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lii   Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015 Year

2004

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

Criticism

Italy: MF Poland: MF First Polish translation: M First Spanish translation: BJ

Bulgaria: Katsarova, ‘The Woman Artist as Viewed by the Woman Novelist: George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing’ Italy: Marroni, ‘George Eliot fra religione dell’umanità e “vane speranze”’ (George Eliot between the religion of humanity and ‘vain hopes’); Sette, George Eliot: il corpo della passione (George Eliot: the body of passion) Russia: Gorbunova, ‘“Vpechatleniia Teofrasta takogo-to” Dzhordzh Eliot v philosofskom kontekste epohi’ (ITS: George Eliot in the philosophical context of her period); Proskurnin and Hewitt, Roman Dzhordzh Eliot ‘Melnitsa na Flosse’: Kontekst Estetika Poetika (George Eliot’s novel MF: context, aesthetics, poetics) Slovak: Lacko, Feminist Paradox: Antithetical Feminism in the Writing of George Eliot, unpublished dissertation Sweden: Halldén, ‘George Eliot’

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Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015   liii Year

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

Criticism

2005

France: M

2006

First Czech translation: M First Greek translation: AmB

Greece: Kitsi-Mitakou, ‘Aquatic Spaces and Women’s Places: A Comparative Reading of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Alexandros Papadiamandis’s Η Φόνισσα’ (The murderess) Norway: Kulås, ‘George Eliot’ Poland: Jarniewicz, ‘Heroizm codzienności’ (Everyday heroism) Russia: Proskurnin, ‘Pochemu Dzhordzh Eliot nedootsenena v sovremennoi Rossii, ili O polze zarubezhnogo vzgliada na rossiiskuiu anglistiku’ (Why George Eliot is insufficiently valued in contemporary Russia, or on the usefulness of a foreign perspective on Russian English studies); Shamina, Zhenskaia problematika v victorianskom romane 1840–1870 gg.: Dzhein Osten, Sharlotta i Emili Bronte, Dzhordzh Eliot (Women’s problems in the Victorian novel 1840–1870: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot) Italy: Antosa, ‘Transport and Society in Transition in the Fiction of George Eliot’; Sette, ‘Muoversi malinconicamente: George Eliot, Middlemarch, e la lipemania viatoria’

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liv   Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015 Year

2007

2008

2009

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

Criticism

Greece: M, LV, SM Italy: LV

Italy: Bignami, ‘George Eliot: la visione e la rappresentazione del reale’ (George Eliot: vision and the representation of the real) Norway: Narvesen, ‘Highgate kirkegård, London: en fortelling om vennskap og kjærlighet i George Eliots 184. år’ (‘Highgate Cemetary, London: a story of friendship and love in George Eliot’s 184th year’) Spain: Sierra, ‘Miguel de Cervantes y George Eliot: The Spanish Gypsy y “La gitanilla”’ (Miguel de Cervantes and George Eliot: SG and ‘La gitanilla’) Italy: M Italy: Sasso, ‘Beauchamp’s First Spanish translation: Career and Literary AmB Dialogism: Meredith Misreads George Eliot’; Sette, ‘George Eliot e la corporeità malinconica’ (George Eliot and melancholic corporeality) Poland: Grzegorzewska, ‘Czytając jakby w zwierciadle Problem naśladowania w powieściach: Młyn nad Flossą i Emancypantki’ (compares MF and 1894 Polish novel) First Valencian Bulgaria: Katsarova, translation: BJ Zhenskata traditsia v Italy: R angliiskata literature: George Spain: SM Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing (The women’s tradition in English literature: George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing) Valencia: Marco, ‘Introducció’ to BJ

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Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015   lv Year

Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

2010

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Translations

Criticism

Italy: Bignami, ‘Sir Joshua and the Historian: Portraits in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda’; Marucci, L’inchiostro del mago Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento (The magician’s ink: essays on English literature of the nineteenth century); Sciarra, ‘George Eliot, The Lifted Veil e il multiverso creativo’ (George Eliot: LV and the creative multiverse); Villa, ‘The Case of Camilla Rucellai in George Eliot’s Romola’ Netherlands: Schepper, ‘George Eliot on the Dutch Market (1860–1896)’ Norway: Espeland, ‘George Eliot: Skandaleombrust forfatterinne’ (‘George Eliot: scandalized authoress’) Sweden: Håkansson, Narratorial Commentary in the Novels of George Eliot Czech: LV Bulgaria: Hadgikosev, First Czech translation: ‘George Eliot’ BJ Italy: Mariani, ‘Silas France: DD Marner: George Eliot’s Hungary: SM Garden Building as Italy: LV twice Fabular Representation of Spain: M a New Social Order’ First Spanish translation: Russia: Gorbunova, DD ‘K voprosu o vospriiatii Dzordzh Eliot v sovremennoi Rossii’ (On the question of the reception of George Eliot in contemporary Russia)

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lvi   Timeline of the European Reception of George Eliot, 1819–2015 Year

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

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Eliot’s life and reception (other than translations and criticism)

Translations

Criticism

Russia: MF, AB Italy: Bignami, ‘Iris First Spanish translation: Murdoch and George ITS Eliot: Two Women Writers of Ideas’ First Bulgarian Bulgaria: Katsarova, translation: M ‘Middlemarch: panorama na First Spanish translation: burna epocha’ ‘Silly Novels by Lady Italy: Bignami, ‘What Novelists’ do George Eliot’s Women Wear? Dress and Characterization in her Stories’; Bignami, ‘Giuseppe Mazzini: What did he mean for George Eliot?’; Sette, ‘George Eliot’s Romola as an expression of a cultural Risorgimento Metaphor and narration of a system of civilization’ Poland: ‘Gutowska,’ ‘George Eliot – pisarka w męskim przebraniu’ (George Eliot – writer in male disguise) Russia: Gniusova, ‘Dzhordzh Eliot i L. N. Tolstoy (Pastoral’naia traditsiia v “Adame Bide” i “Voskresenii”)’ (George Eliot and L. N. Tolstoy [Pastoral tradition in AB and Resurrection]) Sweden: Matthis, ‘Förord’ (Introduction) Italy: SM Denmark: Hjørnager, First Spanish translation: ‘George Eliot’ SCL Russia: Gniusova, ‘Ispoved’ Dzhenet D Eliot i Otets Sergii L.N. Tolstogo: sostradanie vmesto poucheniia’ (George Eliot’s JR and L.N. Tolstoy’s Father Sergius: compassion rather than sermonising) First Bulgarian translation: AB

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Introduction: A Steady Shining – George Eliot’s Life and Afterlife in Europe Elinor Shaffer with Catherine Brown

A European Life The reception of George Eliot in Europe was a remarkably warm, respectful and appreciative one. Although her sales did not equal those of Byron or Scott, Byron’s appeal was in part based on notoriety, and his political activities brought him opprobrium in some quarters, while Scott seemed to project another historical nationality onto the growing nineteenth-century map of small European nations. While her reputation travelled further than she did, nevertheless she is one of the best travelled of nineteenthcentury English writers, familiar with Germany, the Low Countries, France, Switzerland, Austria-Hungary, Italy and Spain; and her travels play a powerful role in her writing. Moreover, she built her reputation on her early translations of significant and controversial European texts, including philosophy, politics and biblical criticism; and on her unusual position as an editor and essayist of the respected Westminster Review. The success of her first novel, Adam Bede, only confirmed this. As she herself remarked, in a review in 1854, ‘Madame de Staël’s name still rises first to the lips when we are asked to mention a woman of great intellectual power’;1 but it was her own name which was to equal that of the author of De l’Allemagne and Corinne, ou L’Italie. Despite the scandal of her personal life as the unmarried companion of G. H. Lewes (married to a woman he could not divorce), he brought many contacts and resources into her life; he too earned high regard for his Life of Goethe (the first in any language, and still to be found in many European libraries), and together they had many foreign friends and contacts in a wider community, both at home and abroad, where they travelled and lived on many occasions, beginning with their first venture abroad together, to Germany in 1854, where they worked on the Life. 1

George Eliot, ‘Woman in France: Madame de Sablé’, Westminster Review LXII (October, 1854), in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 55 (52–81).

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2   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Gerlinde Röder-Bolton, who has devoted much of her life to tracing their German experiences and connections in substantial detail, contributes here a chapter on the reception of the novels using the latest resources of recent research into private and spa libraries, the history of Tauchnitz’s publications in German and English, and the life of the Berlin salons where Eliot was invited to read aloud from her works and which later were the model for their own more modest ‘Sunday afternoons’ at home Annika Bautz, a long-standing contributor to this Series, shows the later history of their reception in the BRD and the DDR, West and East Germany, and up to the present. It was of course in Germany that both Eliot and Lewes formed the longest and deepest contacts. Lewes had come earlier, as a follower of Carlyle, interested in German philosophy, and made the acquaintance of friends of Goethe; Eliot on her first visit had already published her translation of the important work of David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, The Life of Jesus (1846). This was a landmark, and in some ways the culmination, of the historical or ‘higher critical’ reading of the Bible, which set out to trace the gradual process of the assembling of the various books of the Bible into a whole which was claimed, in the various versions of different sects, to be ‘the Word of God’.2 The close link between the historical criticism of the Bible in Strauss and the other works that Eliot translated, by Ludwig Feuerbach and Ludwig Büchner, as well as by Spinoza, is not always recognized in Eliot criticism. These were all major and highly controversial texts in the critique of religious claims, with further implications for philosophy and for politics. They also had implications for literature, not least for the forms, means, and ends of novels. The fact that her novelistic practice looms large today in critical discussions of ‘realism’ in the nineteenth century owes not a little to her grasp of the general issues behind the conduct of narrative. In the Netherlands, Eliot received a particularly discerning response, which throws light on all these issues. Her favourable reception (as traced by Diederik van Werven in this book) was led by thoughtful male critics who themselves began as Protestant clerics, but turned increasingly secular over time and left the ministry: such men as Allard Pierson (who wrote an influential Introduction to Adam Bede), Conrad Busken Huet, and Johannes van Vloten. They well understood her mental pilgrimage through Strauss, Feuerbach and Spinoza, to the lingering hope of a secular, societal form of caritas. She was seen as an enlightened secular (but non-religious) moralist. Moreover, Eliot’s own example exerted a powerful effect on women: women not only as writers and translators, but as editors and public commentators, through her reputation as a writer but also through her public activities as a translator of major philosophical texts and as an editor and essayist of the Westminster Review. In all these capacities she was an unusual public figure and an exceptional role model for women. Mrs von Weltrheene, herself a novelist, became the well-known woman translator of Felix Holt, Middlemarch 2

See E. S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

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Introduction   3

and Daniel Deronda. Felix Holt roused considerable interest in Europe with its account of an election at the time of the Reform Bill. Another novelist with outspoken views on the emancipation of women, who translated Impressions of Theophrastus Such, was Jacoba Berendina Zwaardemaker-Vischer. As we have found in our previous studies, the Dutch reading public, while it looked to Germany for philosophy, turned to England for novels, and many read English. The significant participation of women in the translation and critical reception of Eliot continues to this day: our contributor, Professor Vesela Katsarova, in Sofia only last year became the first translator of Middlemarch into Bulgarian. In the Netherlands this strong interest in Eliot’s work was sustained and continues to be so by her translation of Spinoza, Holland’s most significant philosopher, of whom there has been a new wave of analysis and recognition. Baruch Spinoza had been born in the Netherlands to Portuguese Sephardi Jewish parents, well after the community was evicted from Portugal. His work had become a byword during the Enlightenment as his ‘pantheism’ (his belief in one substance only, rather than a dualist distinction of mind and body) was identified with atheism by conservative thinkers. Lessing, the great German Enlightenment figure – philosopher, playwright and critic – had taken up Spinoza’s cause, and had been instrumental in the publication by Hermann Reimarus of Jesus and his Disciples. This treatise, arguing that Jesus did not die on the cross but was taken down by his friends, thus enabling his reappearance, underlay the more famous work of Strauss, translated by Marian Evans at the very beginning of her career. The thought and the reception of Spinoza were thus directly antecedent to and closely related to the movement in the historical criticism of the Bible that denied the status of ‘God’s Word’ to the Bible text. Feuerbach, whose Das Wesen des Christentums (1841) Marian Evans also translated (as The Essence of Christianity, 1856), was a student of Hegel, but departed from him via Spinozist ‘pantheism’. In this view, God is a human construction, in that he is a projection of human qualities onto a mythical divinity. Feuerbach’s book on The History of Modern Philosophy (1833–37) was subtitled ‘from Bacon to Benedict Spinoza’, underlining the importance of Spinoza in the canon of the moderns. Indeed, it would be hard to overstate the importance of Spinoza in the mental landscape of either George Eliot or G. H. Lewes. Eliot set out to translate Spinoza, but gave up her first attempt at translation of the Tractatus on the grounds that it was not translation but explication that was needed; it was his Ethics she translated. Lewes wrote first an essay on him, and later a very lucid and sympathetic account of Spinoza’s life and thought – surely one of the best of Lewes’s essays – in his large-scale A Biographical History of Philosophy. Here he presents Spinoza as a major turning point in the history of philosophy, as well as in Lewes’s own mental journey from German idealism to scientific materialism to his concluding point: the science of Darwin and the social philosophy of Comte, with whom his book ends.3 This long and 3

G. H. Lewes, A Biographical History of Philosophy (London and New York: George Routledge & Sons 1857 (1845–46)), pp. 409–38 on Spinoza, pp. 643–55 on Comte.

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4   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe arduous mental journey is in its multifarious forms a characteristic one for the nineteenth century. If Spinoza quietly celebrated the grandeur of nature stripped of the personeity and personality of a God, and reshaped ethics for a secular world, Comte saw that we must turn to the study of human nature to understand our own creations. Here the novelist could step in. George Eliot extended and practiced the new secular Enlightenment ethical system stripped of its religious associations throughout her novels, giving them their depth, power and resonance. Many of Eliot’s readers, including some of her more advanced women friends, such as Barbara Bodichon or the latter’s female counterparts abroad (such as the Swedish novelist and activist Fredrika Bremer, or in the 1890s, Russian critic Maria Tsebrikova), regret or are surprised that she did not play a more active role in the battle for women’s rights – the right to vote, for example, which was gradually extended from men of property across the range of male voters in the course of the nineteenth century; and the opportunity for education. She did of course support the founding of the first women’s college, Girton, at Cambridge, and saw education as the necessary basis for the extension of the franchise, whether to men or women. By the same token it is sometimes felt that she curtailed her own women characters too sharply, so that even Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, who is said to have some of the qualities of a St Theresa, in the end reaches only a limited freedom in a domestic situation, and Romola, a classical scholar, heir to her father’s learning, ends up caring for her dead husband’s illegitimate daughter; while Gwendolen Harleth, although freed from her domineering husband by split-second inaction, finds no role (although she is considering how to change at the end of the book), by contrast with Daniel’s discovery of a vocation. But Eliot’s handling of this crucial question can be seen quite differently against the background of the evolution of the European novel in a secular society Eliot’s female characters’ moderate and limited fates are seen as ‘providential’ by the acute critic Fredric Jameson: ‘contrary to all expectations, Dorothea’s story ends well, and the renunciation (Entsagung) for which the German tradition, from Goethe to Fontane, had prepared us let alone the terrible and emblematic solitude of spinster and widow from Balzac to Maupassant – is here dispelled by an utterly unexpected happy ending’.4 Moreover, the end-states of the leading male characters (apart from Ladislaw) are more harshly delineated: Casaubon’s utter failure as a scholar, Lydgate’s failure by the measure of his own initial ambition, and Bulstrode’s disgrace. In one sense, then, this is the classic Bildungsroman, or novel of education, where the central character, after his period of striving and experiment, finally attains a kind of equilibrium and his place in society. That automatic his is as often as not her in Eliot’s novels. If Goethe had created the model for this form in Wilhelm Meister (1795), already limiting the outright ‘happy ending’, by mid-century the fine Swiss-German novelist Gottfried Keller in his massive novel Der grüne Heinrich (Green Henry) (1854–55) had written two versions, one in which the would-be artist wins 4

Fredric Jameson, Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), p. 228.

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Introduction   5

through, and another in which he fails. This includes analysis of the conditions available for art in the nature-oriented art of the nineteenth century, compared with a wonderfully conjured Renaissance Nuremburg in which Albrecht Dürer and his fellow artists and craftsmen flourished. A recent critic has shown that Keller’s second version was brought about when he read Ludwig Büchner, and heard Feuerbach give a lecture encapsulating the material that became The Essence of Christianity. He then came to understand Kant’s critique of teleological thinking (the assumption that there is always an end in view): it could be that there is no end, point of destination, or plan in nature. This planlessness would come to be associated with Darwin’s evolutionary theory.5 Within the spectrum from Bildungsroman to new realism in the novel, Eliot made room for a range of choice for her characters, including women – however limited and hedged about with roads that could not be taken. That the reader could glimpse them, and see how they were closed, was itself a gain. Moreover, the ways in which they were closed were not only external or social, but always reflecting the particular nature of the character. Whatever the force of circumstances, Eliot’s characters are seen to have taken up individual positions for which they can be regarded – and can regard themselves – as responsible. When Romola turns back from her road to independence in Venice, it is a testimony to the formidable powers of persuasion of Savonarola, the historical subject of the novel, who was closely associated by the contemporary political struggle for a unified Italy with movements of independence. If Eliot earned a reputation for moral insight across the range of her activities, a moral insight not derived from or enforced by religion, she also gave impulses to the movements for women’s rights, which made more sweeping claims for reform than she. In Denmark, Sweden and Norway, as our three contributors make clear, there were distinct differences in this respect. In Denmark, as Ebbe Klitgård shows, the lively literary establishment was quick to approve her work, both in translations and in the original. In Norway, as Marie Nedregotten Sørbø tells us, Eliot played a special role in the movement for ‘New Norwegian’, a form of the language that would differentiate itself more fully from Danish, and bring back lost usages; the dialects of the countryside were considered particularly apt for this, and like Scott, Eliot’s use of regional dialect (for example in The Mill on the Floss) gave an opportunity to translators to bring forward rural and unpolished phrases. Eliot herself was following Scott in this, and the use of and practice of translation of dialect became a special task and opportunity of reception; at its best, it could turn national practice round, making room in French, for example, for dialect and ‘foreignization’ according to the counsel of Schleiermacher’s famous essay ‘On Translation’ 5

Philip Ajouri, ‘Darwinism in German-Speaking Literature (1859–c.1890)’, in Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer, eds, The Literary and Cultural Reception of Darwin, vol. 3 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), pp. 18–19; and, on Keller, Philip Ajouri, Erzählen nach Darwin: Die Krise der Teleologie im literarischen Realismus: Friedrich Theodor Fischer und Gottfried Keller (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007).

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6   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe (1813), where previously it would have been excluded.6 Eliot’s use of dialect drew her also towards the contemporary Italian dialect writers of Milan and Rome, as well as towards the representation of the language of Renaissance Florence. In Sweden, as our contributors Catherine Sandbach Dahlström and Git Claesson Pipping relates, a range of English women novelists were known, including Maria Edgeworth and Susan Ferrier (though not yet Jane Austen), and the popular Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, as well as French novelists including Mme de Staël (married to a Swedish diplomat) and George Sand. The Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer’s experiments in diverse forms of authorial omniscience in Familien H (entitled The Colonel’s Family in a recent translation by Sarah Death) bear comparison with Eliot’s. This novel is read aloud to the daughters Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy in Louisa May Alcott’s popular novel Little Women. Eliot and Bremer (who met once) admired one another; yet they parted company, both over Bremer’s active engagement in women’s movements and, especially, over Eliot’s negative review of Bremer’s later novel, Hertha.7 It was of this novel that she pronounced, ‘Women have not to prove that they can be emotional, and rhapsodic, and spiritualistic; every one believes that already. They have to prove that they are capable of accurate thought, severe study, and continuous self command.’8 Nevertheless, George Eliot was understood to make the transition from idealrealism (a useful Swedish critical term) to realism, and to appeal to a new generation of women bent on gaining more rights. Another Swedish writer of the generation seeking new freedoms for women, Victoria Benedictsson, like Eliot had an open relationship with a well-known critic (the Dane Georg Brandes). In her vivid novel Pengar (Money) (1885), she makes a clear call for freedom for women; her appealingly independent and forthright 17-year-old heroine, with ambitions to be an artist, is summarily married off to a rich and well-placed old neighbour. The latter is contrasted with a young man placed similarly to herself, with whom she has struck up a friendship. The abrupt and unsought ending to her individual life is powerfully depicted. George Eliot also deals in mésalliances; but it is noteworthy that her characters usually play a role in the wrong choices made, whether it is Dorothea’s choice of Casaubon (against her family’s wishes), or Lydgate’s choice of his vain and petty wife. While social and financial pressures are fully present (for example, in the case of Gwendolen’s marriage to Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda), nevertheless, individual character, male or female, plays a role. There are few characters in Eliot’s novels who are not given the opportunity to assume (or to

6

See Paul Barnaby, ‘The reception of Scott in France’, in Murray Pittock, ed., The Reception of Walter Scott in Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2007); see also Dieter Mehl, Christa Jansohn, eds, The Reception of D. H. Lawrence in Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), for the similar case of D. H. Lawrence’s use of Nottingham miners’ dialect, and how it was coped with by a variety of translators in different languages. 7 [Three Novels], Westminster Review LXVI (October 1856): 325–34. 8 The quoted passage is on p. 334.

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Introduction   7

disown) responsibility for their own actions, however misguided, disastrous or even unavoidable. It has been suggested that Eliot’s analyses of motivation are close to Sartre’s critiques of mauvaise foi (bad faith). This view of Eliot’s representation of the complex trains of self-justification in characters like Tito (in Romola) and Bulstrode (in Middlemarch) offers an insight into the intricacies of her style. She moves from simplistic categories of good versus evil into a precise psychological realism that follows the intricacies of individual bad faith or selfjustification. To draw her into the Sartrean existential circle is unnecessary: as Jameson has suggested, it is the Spinozan ethics that is the source of her evenhanded analysis of good and evil in her characters. Both suggestions show the distinguished company which Eliot keeps in current criticism. Victoria Benedictsson’s novel, however, does not stop with her character’s forced marriage; it goes on to show her resisting an individually and subtly delineated lover (whom she had known before her marriage), before making the decision to leave her husband – a decision often compared with the dénouement of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. As in Ibsen’s play, we do not learn the outcome, although she intends to embark on a career in physiotherapy (one of the few open to women), and writes to her lover to tell him that she is leaving home. The novel was a success. But Benedictsson’s own free life and liaison ended in suicide. The pressures of the exposed life which she advocated were simply too great. In Greece, by contrast to the Scandinavian countries, as our contributor Georgia Farinou-Malamatari shows, English novels were scarcely known until the twentieth century, and George Eliot was compared rather with George Sand, and seen to be more morally resonant than the French. The European turn towards Naturalism, as the work of Zola opened a new phase in the history of the novel from the 1860s, placed Eliot in the position of a conservative and revered figure, who, having been daring herself, was now lauded as the defender of orthodox values. The extreme claims of Naturalism paradoxically confirmed her authority and the respect accorded her, even while her own writing became, in its own way, more ambitious and daring. Our French contributor, Alain Jumeau, the well-known authority on the English novel and a translator of Eliot, shows that it was not least in France that she continued to exert her authority. It may even have been the appearance of a more extreme literary movement which claimed scientific status (although Zola’s science was in fact erroneous)9 that acted to keep her own early works at the centre. The well-known French critic Ferdinand Brunetière, who led the campaign against Zola’s often brutal Naturalism, which gained many imitators all over Europe, although his work was banned in England, praised her (in 1881) as the greatest English novelist of the nineteenth century, stressing her capacity for sympathy as a source of depth, solidity, and breadth of moral vision. Silas Marner remained on the list of required reading for French baccalaureate candidates until World War I. 9

See David Baguley, ‘Darwin, Zola and Dr Prosper Lucas’s Treatise on Natural Heredity’, in Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer, eds, The Literary and Cultural Reception of Darwin, vol. 3 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), pp. 483–509.

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8   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Her place in France, and the respect of the women’s movement, was assured again by Simone de Beauvoir’s powerful response to Eliot, telling in her autobiography of the impact The Mill on the Floss had on her as a teenage girl, identifying with Maggie, and vowing one day to have this impact herself. Beauvoir, who became the leading figure of the women’s movement in the twentieth century, thus embraced and confirmed Eliot’s place in the tradition – which Eliot herself had identified in Mme de Staël – of women writers of intellectual stature. Eliot’s own long-lasting and productive liaison with G. S. Lewes showed, long before Beauvoir and Sartre, that conventional mores could be successfully traversed if not reversed. It is in their many travels abroad that they were accorded both freedom and honour for their achievements, and acceptance for themselves. More than for perhaps any other writer, their foreign friends at home (such as the Italian nationalists in London like Mazzini, or the Russian writer in exile Turgenev), their English friends abroad (such as Thomas Trollope in Florence, where Dickens’s mistress Nelly sometimes visited her sister, who was Trollope’s children’s governess and later his second wife), and their counterparts in foreign countries (such as Franz Liszt and the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein) formed a community whose sympathies formed the landscape in which Eliot most comfortably lived. Gerlinde RöderBolton has elsewhere described in detail the friendly encounters of Liszt and the princess with Eliot and Lewes during their stay in Weimar.10 The hotel in which the couple stayed in Genoa figures as the place of the last meeting of Gwendolen and Daniel. It has been shown that even when in Britain Eliot and Lewes often took themselves off incognito to one or other country hotel, where they established themselves for several weeks and worked on their current writings.11 In this sense, they were always travellers creating a world in which they could by the worth of their own efforts be received. It is hardly surprising, then, that travels and foreign places play such a vital role in Eliot’s writings. The present book confirms that perception, and adds greatly to what is known about their relations with specific places that figure in her works, both critical and creative. Thus Zdeněk Beran tells us in gripping and immediate detail of their experiences in their two visits to Prague, experiences that influenced Prague’s mystical atmosphere in The Lifted Veil and Daniel Deronda and contributed to their awareness of the life of the Jewish ghetto vital for the latter novel; while Marialuisa Bignami gives us the literary reception of the whole range of Eliot’s work in Italy, Franco Marucci trains his attention on Romola as of particular interest for its Italian historical setting. Francesca Bugliani too throws fresh light on their experiences in Italy, especially in the vicinity of Florence, that led to the depiction of Renaissance Florence on a large and detailed scale in Romola, and the interconnections between Savonarola’s historic stand and the contemporary battle for the unity of an independent Italy, with which Eliot and Lewes had so much sympathy. 10

Gerlinde Röder-Bolton, George Eliot and Goethe: An Elective Affinity, Studies in Comparative Literature 13 (Amsterdam, 1998), pp. 11 Kathleen McCormack, George Eliot’s English Travels: Composite Characters and Coded Communications (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), p.

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Introduction   9

The Florence they knew in the early 1860s shortly afterwards became the capital of the newly-formed country of Italy. This novel also chimed with the interest in large-scale historical novels, such as Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii, and figured as a short film in the very early Italian cinema (1911) and again in Hollywood in 1924. Films were already circulating through a number of European countries; the Hollywood Romola was seen, for example, in Poland. Although brief, Romola (the role is played by the well-known Lillian Gish) captures both the public splendour of Renaissance Florence and the moving private drama of Tito’s child between two mothers.12 The chapter contributed by Maria Jesús Lorenzo-Modia has greatly altered and extended the previous sketchy and inaccurate accounts of Eliot and Lewes’s ambitious journey in Spain, opening also the prospect of further research. While in Spain, Eliot and Lewes made many visits to the theatre and the opera (zarzuela), which had remained undocumented, but which were a powerful motivation for their journey. Lewes had written a book, The Spanish Drama (1846), which took up Goethe’s strong interest in Spanish theatre, including the classic works of Lope de Vega, theatrical versions of Cervantes’ tales, and the work of Calderón, whose El Màgico Prodigioso Lewes had compared in detail with Goethe’s Faust in his Life of Goethe. While Lewes is intent in the Life on showing the superiority of Goethe’s play, he also displays his detailed knowledge of Calderón.13 More recent treatments as well of gypsies and Jews fed into George Eliot’s work The Spanish Gypsy, which despite often being described as a poem (her own final term for it, after some hesitation), is modelled on dramatic works. This neglected work – ironically never translated into Spanish – deserves fresh attention. Eliot’s and Lewes’s concern with the political plight of the Jews and the gypsies animates the attempt to deploy the Spanish models, including the then current dramatic versions of Cervantes. Their concern was not just another aspect of the vogue for all things gypsy, which subsequently became associated with Bizet’s Carmen (1875). The attempt to find a dramatic rather than a novelistic voice is characteristic rather of the experiments of the late 1860s, such as Browning’s The Ring and the Book, a novel in poetry that led towards the dramatic construction of his poem ‘My Last Duchess’, and on to T. S. Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’. The Leweses’ visits to Spanish museums and galleries are also detailed here, although the works of the Prado do not figure in Eliot’s fiction as do her visits to art museums in Amsterdam, Dresden, Munich, Vienna and a range of Italian collections, and because of Lewes’s ill heath they failed to go north in the cold to spectacular Toledo to see El Greco’s paintings in situ.14 But the Prado was for them the most magnificent museum of art they had seen.

12

Our thanks to the British Film Institute for making it possible for Dr Bugliani and myself to view both films. 13 G. H. Lewes, The Life of Goethe (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1864), Chapter 7 Faust; on Calderón, pp. 478–84. 14 Leonee Ormond, in her article on the paintings which they viewed in European museums, also corrects some nineteenth-century misattributions which have given a false view of what they saw and valued, and to false identifications of the painters and paintings to which Eliot was referring in her novels.

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10   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Spain also had women writers of note, whom Eliot and Lewes read aloud as they travelled, and others who read and translated Eliot. The Leweses’ travels can as usual be traced in some detail through their travel guides, in this case Richard Ford, A Handbook for Travellers in Spain, and Readers at Home (1845) and Henry George Harrington, ‘Travelling in Spain in the Present Day’ (1866) and even a signature that Lewes left where they stayed. More needs to be done to trace their meetings with others in Spain; the notion that because they travelled incognito they remained alone and unrecognized is to misunderstand the nature of their travels. Whether the name ‘Deronda’ was ultimately derived from the city of Ronda, home in earlier times to both Muslims and Jews, remains to be resolved (in the novel itself, of course, the name suggests Jewishness to no one). Spanish critics are divided on the matter. Focussing on publication in Barcelona and Valencia, Jacqueline Hurtley and Marta Ortega Sáez analyse how Eliot’s reception developed in these different cultural contexts. Eliot and Lewes did not travel further to the east; yet Eliot’s imagination took her there, and we find that Daniel Deronda’s mother is living in Russia, having sacrificed a great deal in personal terms for the sake of her authentic career as a singer.15 At last in Eliot’s novels there is a woman who has made a brilliant public career: but she has paid a high price for it and been placed in a distant and remote land. In that novel Russia variously signifies remoteness, barbarism, decadence and cultural vigour. It is the place of Alcharisi’s aristocratic marriage, exile and decline, and the fact that it was anti-Semitic by European standards, makes Alcharisi’s exile and Christian conversion particularly poignant. Yet it is also a place of musical excellence, which Klesmer wishes to visit. Pauline Viardot, the singer on whom Alcharisi is based, and who was loved by the only Russian author whom Eliot ever read (Turgenev), had herself worked for extended periods in St Petersburg. Eliot and Lewes were also acquainted with the pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein. From her references to the country it is clear that Eliot did not share the antiRussian jingoism which was prevalent in England at her time. Russia, for its part, was warmly receptive to her works, as described here by Boris Proskurnin. Most of her works were almost immediately translated into Russian, and Daniel Deronda was translated by Russian Jews into Hebrew. Proskurnin describes how Eliot provided intellectual and moral leadership to a nascent intelligentsia which was looking for foreign models. Amongst the Russians who read, edited or wrote about her works were writers including Ivan Turgenev, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin, Ivan Goncharov and Lev Tolstoy. The last of these, in his eccentric 1898 tract What is Art?, in which he inveighs against virtually all art from the Renaissance onwards as unChristian, nevertheless exempted from his diatribe George Eliot (together with Schiller, Hugo, Dostoevski, and Dickens) and classified Adam Bede as religious art, ‘coming from love of God and one’s neighbour’.16 That 15

Catherine Brown, ‘Why Does Daniel Deronda’s Mother Live in Russia?’, George Eliot – George Henry Lewes Studies (September 2010). 16 Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Penguin Books, 1995), p. 132.

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Introduction   11

is, art should foster sympathy (itself an Enlightenment reworking of caritas) and bridge the distance between social classes. In 1891 he claimed that between the ages of 35 and 50 (when he wrote both War and Peace and Anna Karenina), Eliot had been a particular influence on his writing. Her early works also provided inspiration to the Russian narodniki (rural populist) movement, as they did to equivalent movements elsewhere in Eastern Europe, for example Romania. The interest in Eliot’s treatment of the common people continued into the Soviet period, when it acquired a Marxist slant and was joined by praise for Eliot’s stance on religion – as related here by Natalia Gorbunova. Gorbunova also demonstrates, however, how Soviet criticism diversified beyond such concerns to analyse Eliot’s aesthetics during the thaw under Khrushchev, and again in the post-Soviet period. Hungary, Rumania, Poland and Bulgaria were all subject to political changes, sometimes perforce, and their individual stories are told here by Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, Adina Ciugureanu, Ilona Dobosiewicz and Vesela Katsarova. For her own part, Eliot’s association of Polish patriotism with romantic energy was perhaps reinforced by the brief resolution of Lewes’s son Thornton to go to fight for the Polish cause, while her association of Poland with music may have been strengthened by her acquaintance with the Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein – Liszt’s partner, herself musical, but also a Polish noblewoman. These associations may be reflected in the facts that Will Ladislaw’s grandfather is an artistically-gifted Polish patriot, while in Daniel Deronda the musically-talented Mirah Lapidoth is half-Polish. However, it was precisely the harried Polish nationalism which attracted Thornton’s sympathy that delayed the reception of Eliot’s works, since foreign literature was overlooked in the concentration on building a national canon. The first translation of her work was not made until 1891, as Ilona Dobosiewicz notes. The influence of political conditions on her reception continued into the present century, as exemplified by the fact that in 2004 Middlemarch’s translator, Anna Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska, argued that the novel’s relevance lay in certain parallels between post-Reform Act England and post-communist Poland. In the Czech territories, too, Eliot’s reception started late compared to in Russia, and it occurred still later in the Slovak territories. However, as Zdeněk Beran relates, Eliot nonetheless influenced writers and intellectuals, including the contemporary Czech female novelist Karolina Světlá. Eliot’s work arrived more promptly in Hungary, via the Tauchnitz editions which were described in our German chapter. There, Mihály SzegedyMaszák relates, she was received particularly well by Protestants (as she was also in the Netherlands). She was first translated as early as 1861, and was for the rest of the nineteenth century one of the most celebrated British authors. Similarly in Romania there was considerable hunger for foreign literature including Eliot’s – mainly read in French or German versions. More than the Poles, the Hungarians and Romanians looked outwards for guidance in forming their new national culture. Moreover, as Adina Ciugureanu points out, Eliot’s association of Romania with the worst form of anti-Semitism was slightly out of date, since in the year before Impressions of Theophrastus Such

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12   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe was published the most stringent restrictions upon Romanian Jews had been lifted. Yet a pattern emerges. As Ilona Dobosiewicz points out, Polish critic Henryk Zbierski, writing A History of European Literature in 2002, summed up the general high estimation that European readers had formed of George Eliot, pointing to ‘her first-rate intellect, whose talent allows her to create vivid dialogues and detailed dramatic scenes, whilst also maintaining an epic distance and ever-present sociological insight’. For the modern European critic it is intellect, epic distance and sociological insight that are valued in Eliot. Yet these qualities are subtly imbued with the humane values forged in the Enlightenment and over the whole European scene it is finally still Silas Marner that has garnered the most readers and the most critical acclaim from the far ends of the political and the literary spectrum.

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Part 1 Northern Europe

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1



The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime Gerlinde Röder-Bolton

During her lifetime, George Eliot’s novels, stories and poems were published in Germany both as English reprints and in German translations. After the great literary success at home of her first work of fiction, SCL, in 1858, a deal was negotiated for publication in Germany between George Henry Lewes, Blackwood’s in Edinburgh (Eliot’s British publishers) and Williams & Norgate, the London agents of Tauchnitz. Following these negotiations, SCL was then published in Germany in 1859 as volumes 462 and 463 in the Collection of British Authors, Tauchnitz’s series of cheap English editions.1 The Tauchnitz reprints were also well known in Britain. The company targeted not only German and other continental readers eager to improve their English, but also the large numbers of British tourists visiting Germany and other continental countries every year. Since the series was started in 1841, Tauchnitz had dominated the market in English language fiction on the continent. The firm’s recipe for success was to offer more attractively presented books of contemporary literature and earlier ‘classics’ at half the price of its competitors. At a time when authors were not yet protected by international copyright and many pirated reprints were published abroad without permission or remuneration to the authors,2 Tauchnitz also offered written contracts, offering a sum of money in return for an author’s explicit

1

Although American authors had been included in the series since 1842, Tauchnitz changed the name of the series to Collection of British and American Authors only in 1914. For details of Lewes’s extensive negotiations with German publishers, see Gorden S. Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1954–56, 1978); Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, eds, The Journals of George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); William Baker, ed., The Letters of George Henry Lewes, 3 vols (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1995, 1999). 2 The first agreements of international copyright were established between Britain and Prussia, as well as Saxony, in 1846.

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16   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe authorization.3 This policy enabled Tauchnitz to build up over the years a strong list of Victorian writers, such as Charlotte Brontë, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, W. M. Thackeray and Anthony Trollope. Although Lewes carried out all the contractual negotiations for Eliot, she was closely involved in every stage of publication, whether in Britain or abroad.4 Tauchnitz paid her £30 for the reprint of SCL. But after the success of AB in Britain, Lewes drove a harder bargain on her behalf: G.E. will not think of taking less than 50 £, fifty pounds; and I believe it is all a ‘try on’ of W[illiams] and N[orgate]. They tried that game with Carlyle for his Friedrich – offering 50 £ for what they gladly paid 100 £ afterwards. They tried it on with me for the Goethe – offering 20 £ – and when Brockhaus gave 50 £ they were enraged, and said Tauchnitz would have given 100 £ rather than lose the book.5

Knowing that they ‘must have AB’, Tauchnitz amended their original offer and paid Eliot £50 for the reprint.6 When MF came out in 1860, Tauchnitz raised their offer to £80. Lewes, however, insisted on £100, and Tauchnitz finally agreed to this sum. This amounted to £50 per volume.7 Eliot had now become one of the firm’s primary names. As was his custom with many of his British authors, the firm’s proprietor, Christian Bernhard Tauchnitz (1816–95), ‘a tall fresh-complexioned, small-featured, smiling man, in a wig’, now paid a ‘visit of homage’ to Eliot in December 1859 at Holly Lodge, the London home she shared with Lewes.8 Tauchnitz was a loyal subject of the Kingdom of Saxony and both a shrewd businessman and a fervent Anglophile. In the preface to the firm’s jubilee volume, no. 500, Five Centuries of the English Language and Literature by Karl Vogel, Tauchnitz wrote in 1860, ‘As a German Saxon it gave me particular pleasure to promote the literary interest of my Anglo-Saxon cousins, by rendering English literature as universally known as possible beyond the limits of the British Empire!’ The Tauchnitz series of reprints was now well established on the continent, and the publication of the celebratory 500th volume was discussed in literary journals.9 That same year, Tauchnitz was ennobled with the hereditary title

3

Werner Jäckh, Festschrift zum 125jährigen Bestehen der Firma Bernhard Tauchnitz Verlag. 1837–1962 (Stuttgart: n. pub., 1962), p. 7; William B. Dodd and Ann Bowden, Tauchnitz International Editions in English, 1841–1955: A Bibliographical History (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1988), pp. 3–4. 4 Allan C. Dooley, Author and Printer in Victorian England (Charlottesville, VA, and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992), pp. 119–23. 5 Haight, Letters, vol. 3, p. 37. 6 Haight, Letters, vol. 3, pp. 76–77, 112. 7 Haight, Letters, vol. 3, p. 268; GHL Journal, 1 March 1860; Tauchnitz vols 509–10. 8 Harris, Journals, p. 83, 9 December 1859. 9 See, for instance, the ‘Notiz’ in Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung 17 (26 April 1860), p. 319. The article also announces a new series of reprints, the ambitious Library

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The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime   17 of Freiherr (baron) and, in 1877, he became a life member in the Saxon Upper Chamber. In recognition of his work for British literature, Queen Victoria, in 1866, appointed him British Consul-General for the kingdom and duchies of Saxony in Leipzig.10 In 1872, the bookselling firm of Asher and Co. in Berlin started its own Collection of English and American Authors, Copyright Editions.11 During the previous year, Lewes had entered into negotiations with Albert Cohn, proprietor of Asher’s, for the reprint of M. Not only was Lewes dissatisfied with Tauchnitz’s level of payments, he also wanted to dissociate Eliot’s name from the mixed bag of authors in the Tauchnitz series. He, therefore, made it clear to Cohn that he wished the reprint of M to be ‘quite distinctive both in aspect and price from the editions of Tauchnitz’. If Cohn was not happy with the sales figures, he could reduce the price for future books, ‘only not with George Eliot’.12 After lengthy negotiations, Cohn finally agreed to a plan of royalties with Lewes, and the new series was launched with M in 1872. The reprint made Eliot £327, a very large sum at that time.13 George Eliot’s defection from Tauchnitz was followed, during the first two years of Asher’s new series, by many of Tauchnitz’s most prolific authors, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, Florence Marryat, Margaret Oliphant and Anthony Trollope.14 Many of these defections, prompted mainly by the inducement of higher royalties, were of short duration only, when it became apparent that Tauchnitz, after all, maintained better quality than Asher both in the selection of authors to be published and in typographical presentation. Eliot herself returned to Tauchnitz in 1876 with the reprint of DD. She was paid £250 for the four volumes, numbers 1617 to 1620. Tauchnitz went on to publish LV, BJ in 1878 (vol. 1732), ITS in 1879 (vol. 1828) and Essays and Leaves from a Notebook in 1884 (vol. 2229).15 However, Eliot’s hope that Tauchnitz might in future be ‘more careful in his selection of books for reprint’ was not fulfilled.16 The firm’s governing

of British Poets, by Brockhaus. This series was to contain the complete works of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Campbell, Milton, Southey, Shelley, Byron, Burns and Scott. Included also was a selection of plays, arranged by ‘the wellknown Goethe-biographer G. H. Lewes’. Lewes chose plays by Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Reade, Douglas Jerrold and others; see Rosemary Ashton, G. H. Lewes. A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 208–09. 10 Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1875–1912), vol. 54, pp. 672–73. 11 Franz Duncker, who published German translations of Eliot’s novels, also started a series of novels in English in 1872 (Haight, Letters, vol. 5, pp. 256–57). 12 Haight, Letters, vol. 5, p. 214. 13 Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 437–38. Asher also published ‘The Legend of Jubal’ (vol. 99). 14 Simon Nowell-Smith, ‘Firma Tauchnitz 1837–1900’, The Book Collector 15, no. 4 (Winter 1966): 434–35. 15 Tauchnitz had also published SM in 1861 (vol. 550), R in 1863 (vols 682–83) and FH in 1867 (vols 897–98). 16 Haight, Letters, vol. 5, pp. 256–57.

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18   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe principle was to be ‘the mediator of the intellectual products of a great nation for foreign countries’. In Tauchnitz’s view, such an endeavour had to produce ‘a trustworthy and objective picture of English literature of the moment’. This meant that, independent of personal tastes, there was a large body of contemporary authors which had to be included. This rationale behind Tauchnitz’s choice of authors for inclusion in his list was not made explicit by the firm until 1912, but it was obvious much earlier. The popular novelists of the day were the mainstay of the firm and insured it a steady financial return against the risk of publishing authors who appealed only to the select few.17 Serious competition for Tauchnitz came only in 1889–90, when William Heinemann set up businesses simultaneously in London and Leipzig. Heinemann offered large royalties, which forced Tauchnitz to raise payments to his authors – even to the point of loss-making – so as to retain a hold in the market. But by 1905, Heinemann had pulled out of Leipzig, and Tauchnitz was once again ‘left in undisputed possession of the field’.18 While George Eliot welcomed reprints of her novels, which made her original texts available on the continent at a very affordable price, she had grave doubts about her work being translated. In one of her reviews, published before she had started writing fiction herself, she gives a concise account of her idea of the task of translating, its requirements and pitfalls.19 Being a linguistically competent, highly knowledgeable and conscientious translator herself, she advocates that a work of philosophy or science, prose literature or poetry required a translator of equal intellectual or poetic power to its author, if it were to be rendered successfully into another language. Although she mentions the moral qualities – ‘the patience, the rigid fidelity, and the sense of responsibility in interpreting another man’s mind’ – somewhat casually at the very end of her review, these qualities were crucial for her and ‘especially demanded in the translator’.20 Yet with even the very basics of knowledge and industry wanting in many of the translators, she took a dim view of translations of her work, which was to last until the end of her life. Her letters show a growing despondency at the quality of the translations which, inevitably, fell short of her own exacting standards, but also her frustration at having no power to prevent any new translations.21 The Berlin firm of Franz Duncker was the first to publish AB, MF and SM in German. Julius Frese, who had translated Lewes’s Life and Works of Goethe, was employed for the translations.22 Frese’s translation of the biography had 17 Dodd,

Tauchnitz, pp. 119–20. Nowell-Smith, ‘Tauchnitz’, p. 436. Unfortunately, Tauchnitz’s archives of many hundreds of letters were destroyed during air raids on Leipzig in 1943 (NowellSmith, ‘Tauchnitz’, p. 428). 19 Thomas Pinney, ed., Essays of George Eliot (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), ‘Translations and Translators’ (1855), pp. 207–11. 20 Pinney, Essays, p. 211. 21 See, for example, Gordon S. Haight, Letters, vol. 2, p. 499; vol. 3, p. 231; vol. 7, p. 119. 22 Julius Frese, 1821–83. AB, trans. Julius Frese, 1860; Die Mühle am Floss, trans. Julius Frese, 1861; Silas Marner, der Weber von Raveloe, trans. Julius Frese, 1861; Bilder aus dem kirchlichen Leben Englands, trans. G. Kuhr, 1885. 18

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The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime   19 made the work accessible and well-known throughout Germany.23 It had also made Julius Frese a household name.24 Lewes seems to have been satisfied with the translation and was pleased to hear that Frese had also been engaged to translate his Sea-Side Studies.25 Yet when Duncker sent Eliot the first translated volume of AB, she briefly noted its arrival in her diary but left no record of her views about the quality of the translation.26 Yet despite her inevitable misgivings, Eliot would have been aware of the fact that a translation by the then famous Julius Frese would ensure her novel’s immediate interest for the German reading public. Frese had been a familiar figure in the literary circles of Berlin during the first part of the 1850s. The writer Ludwig Pietsch describes him as a fairhaired, well-nourished, comfortable epicurean of charming mind and wit.27 Yet by May 1856, Frese had been expelled from Prussia for political activities against the state, and had moved for a time to the city-state of Bremen.28 This action by the Prussian state, however, did not cost him his contact with Franz Duncker, but rather earned him the sympathy of the liberal, democraticminded middle classes – to which many of Eliot’s potential readers belonged. Frese’s translations of AB, MF and SM were published by Duncker in 1860 and 1861. In 1866, however, Frederick Lehmann, a friend of Eliot’s in London since 1864, purchased the translation rights for FH for his brother Emil. Emil Lehmann’s translation was published by Janke in Berlin in 1867 as volumes 53–58 of the series Moderne Romane des Auslandes in guten Übersetzungen (Modern foreign novels in good translations).29 By the 1870s, rumours emerged about Julius Frese that he was in the pay of the arch-conservative King of Hanover. This ‘betrayal’ of the liberal, democratic cause cost Frese not only his previous good reputation among those groups in Pussia and other German states, but probably also his contact with Franz Duncker.30 Lehmann

23

George Henry Lewes, Goethe’s Leben und Schriften, transl. Julius Frese, 2 vols (Berlin: Franz Duncker, 1857). 24 Ludwig Pietsch, Wie ich Schriftsteller geworden bin. Erinnerungen aus den Fünfziger Jahren, 2 vols (Berlin: F. Fontane & Co., 1893–94), vol. 1, p. 390. 25 Baker, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 272–73. Lewes had been happy with Frese’s translation but not with the omission of all references in the volume. This unauthorized omission of Lewes’s acknowledgements had caused ill feelings among people in Germany who had provided Lewes with information. 26 Harris, Journals, p. 84. For George Eliot and translations, see also John Rignall, ed., Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 416–19. 27 In 1853, Frese was ‘ein blonder, wohlgenährter, behaglicher Epikuräer von graziösem Geist und Witz’; see Pietsch, Wie ich Schriftsteller geworden bin, vol. 1, p. 106. 28 Carl Helbling, ed., Gottfried Keller. Gesammelte Briefe, 4 vols (Berne: Benteli Verlag, 1950–54), vol. 2, pp. 155–56. For one of the police raids on his home, see Ludmilla Assing, ed., Tagebücher von Varnhagen von Ense, 15 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1861–70, 1905), vol. 12, p. 419. 29 Haight, Letters, vol. 4, p. 252. 30 During the 1870s, Frese was living in Switzerland. See Helbling, Keller. Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 129, 177.

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20   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe went on to translate M, in four volumes, for Franz Duncker in 1872–73; LV and BJ for Hartleben in Vienna in 1879; and ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ (a part of ITS) for Meiszner in Hamburg in 1880.31 Financial difficulties had forced Franz Duncker in 1876 to sell his publishing company to C. Geibel in Leipzig, and interest in publishing Eliot’s work in translation moved to the new house.32 Lending Libraries and Literary Salons While the Tauchnitz reprints are not a reliable measure of the interest among German readers in George Eliot’s writings because of their English readership, the rapid progression of German translations of her novels – SM, M, R and DD even appearing in the same year as the first English editions – gives a clearer indication of the importance of her work in Germany. Eliot paid close attention to publication figures and other details, even visiting the bookshops on her travels on the continent. A year before her death, she had the satisfaction of knowing that ‘the reading of my books has spread greatly in Germany of late years’.33 Yet this statement needs to be treated with caution. Placed in context with other British authors in the holdings listed in the surviving catalogues of the many lending libraries in Germany, for instance, Eliot’s success with the German reading public during her lifetime remained moderate. Private lending libraries had started to appear in the various Germanspeaking states during the second half of the eighteenth century, following technical advances in book production and distribution. The inclusion in the early catalogues of around 15 per cent of works in translation points already to an important characteristic of the German book market, which still persists today.34 Public libraries (Volksbibliotheken) and reading circles started to appear during the nineteenth century, and, by the 1880s, there existed some 2,000 lending libraries in the German-speaking countries.35 The libraries were very popular and catered for readers of all social classes. Books were borrowed as frequently by those who could just as easily have bought them as by those who could never have afforded them. The German writer and historian, Felix Dahn (1834–1912), fondly remembers borrowing English editions of novels by Scott, Bulwer Lytton, Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Thackeray and others while still a schoolboy and later as a law student in Munich, and devouring a novel over a weekend to save on lending fees.36

31 Haight,

Letters, vol. 7, pp. 119, 148, 149, 150. Keller. Briefe, vol. 2, p. 178–79. 33 Haight, Letters, vol. 7, p. 149. 34 Alberto Martino, Die deutsche Leihbibliothek. Geschichte einer literarischen Institution (1756–1914) (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990), pp. 3, 65. 35 Ibid., p. 318. 36 Ludwig Julius Sophus Felix Dahn, Erinnerungen, 4 vols (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1890–95), vol. 3, p. 116. 32 Helbling,

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The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime   21 Through the lending libraries, books became available also in rural areas away from the cultural centres of Berlin, Hamburg, Hanover, Dresden, Munich or Vienna.37 The popularity of translated novels by Walter Scott had encouraged the publication of foreign literature in translation to such an extent that by the middle of the nineteenth century it surpassed the publication of German novels. Yet by the 1860s, when Eliot’s novels appeared in translation in Germany, the situation had reversed again.38 At the same time, the publication of reprints of foreign literature was increasing, with books in English at times exceeding the previous dominance of French literature.39 The implication for book sales at least was that Eliot’s work was read in English rather than in German. This, in turn, implies that her novels did not break through to a popular readership but were read predominantly by the educated classes. Only a small number of lending-library catalogues has survived, and no information on numbers of readers or frequencies of borrowings is available. But the published catalogues already give a good indication of the enduring popularity of certain British authors, such as Braddon, Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, Ouida, Scott and Collins, whose works were stocked by practically all the libraries – with some libraries also offering works by Oliphant, Trollope, Thackeray, Shakespeare and Charlotte Yonge, in translation, as reprints, or both. The only citing of Eliot during her lifetime appears in a catalogue of 1879 from Nuremberg with five volumes of reprints. This compares, in the same catalogue, with seven volumes of reprints by Braddon, thirteen by Florence Marryat, six by Ouida, eleven by Oliphant and six by Yonge, while Braddon, Ouida and Yonge were also available in translation in the considerably larger numbers of 97, 31 and 63 volumes respectively.40 The number of volumes by Eliot in the lending libraries improved during the 1880s (after her death) because of a revival in the popularity of foreign literature and a renewed interest in Germany in the English language. In 1886, Eliot’s name is included in a list of 56 recommended authors in English to be given priority by the lending libraries when making new purchases.41 Yet in the overall analysis of catalogues for 1889–1914, she still ranks only in 94th position in the German sections (with 52 volumes in translation), and in 35th position in the foreign-languages sections (with 95 volumes of reprints). This compares unfavourably with, for example, reprints of Dickens, who takes 7th position with 375 volumes; Trollope, in 8th position with 368 volumes; and Collins, in 10th position with 327 volumes.42 By contrast, the

37

Martino, pp. 645–49. Ibid., pp. 672–74. 39 Julius Schmidt, ‘Aesthetische Streifzüge’, Die Grenzboten 12 (1860): 470; Martino, pp. 721–24. 40 Martino, pp. 356–57: Leihbibliothek Jacob Zeisen in Nürnberg; total number of volumes in stock: 9,198. Also available in translation were Bulwer-Lytton (53 vols), Collins (46 vols), Dickens (50 vols) and Scott (46 vols). 41 W. Kitzing and C. Wahl, Handbuch des Leihbibliothekswesens (Taucha-Leipzig: Thallwitz, 1886), quoted in Martino, Leihbibliothek, p. 730. 42 Martino, Leihbibliothek, pp. 414–15, 743. 38

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22   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe English-language catalogue for 1886 of the lending-library at Schlangenbad, a fashionable German spa, gives a more homogeneous picture of the number of volumes by the various British authors, and includes some writers not always found elsewhere: Charles Dickens Anthony Trollope Edward Bulwer-Lytton Charlotte Yonge Margaret Oliphant Ouida Wilkie Collins Thackeray George Eliot Benjamin Disraeli Thomas Hardy

52 47 39 38 36 34 26 20 17 12 14

volumes volumes volumes volumes volumes volumes volumes volumes volumes volumes volumes43

Although Eliot’s novels are not near the top of the list even in this small library, her work is well represented. The discrepancy between the overall picture for lending libraries in the German-speaking states and the holdings in particular libraries at specific locations is significant. The library at Schlangenbad would also have been used by British visitors to the spa. Their requests for reading material would have influenced the choice of authors and number of volumes purchased by the library. With these geographical and demographical differences, it is regrettable that no comprehensive list of libraries and their catalogues is available for Berlin during Eliot’s lifetime, as the city’s population played a leading role as a reading public. It is no coincidence that the first lending library in Germany was founded in the Prussian capital towards the end of the seventeenth century. With 74 lending libraries (private and public libraries as well as reading halls) in 1868, the city had the greatest number of these institutions in Germany, catering for a large and experienced reading public.44 There are further reasons why Berlin holds a special position in relation to the reception of Eliot’s novels. Here, her literary fame through the English reprints would have had a further, local recommendation in the person of her publisher, Franz Duncker, a household name for the politically liberal, educated middle-class reader. Duncker, son of the co-founder of Duncker & Humblot, a publishing house specializing in social politics, had taken part in the revolution of 1848 and was a prominent figure among the political reformers who worked for the emancipation of the middle classes and for workers’ rights. He was a founding member of the Fortschrittspartei and publisher of the left-liberal paper Berliner Volkszeitung. When Eliot revisited Berlin in 1870, Duncker had become a member of the Reichstag des Norddeutschen Bundes in 43

Ibid., p. 710: Eulberg’s Library in Schlangenbad, 1886; total number of volumes in stock: 1,377. 44 Martino, Leihbibliothek, pp. 64, 319.

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The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime   23 Berlin. He and his wife Lina invited Eliot and Lewes on 24 March 1870 to attend the 27th sitting of the Reichstag at the parliament’s provisional location in Leipziger Strasse. Taking their seats in the box reserved for diplomats, they were ‘so fortunate as to hear Bismarck speak’, even if he only gave a rather dull formal reply to a request from the MP Miguel about a proposed bill on the issue of banknotes.45 Although Berlin had nearly half a million inhabitants in the 1850s and was growing fast, Eliot’s reading public would have been confined to the educated members of the middle classes and the nobility. The reception of her novels was also linked to the interest within these social groups in the country of her birth and in the English language. While French had traditionally been de rigueur for the upper classes, a knowledge of foreign languages – especially English – was becoming increasingly necessary for the middle classes as well. Adelheid Mommsen, in her biography of her father, the historian Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), for instance, reveals the importance which a man of Mommsen’s social position attached to his daughter’s study of foreign languages.46 He took particular pleasure in buying Adelheid books in English and French. He also greatly approved of her local boarding school’s policy of allowing its pupils books written only in these two languages as leisure reading during the week. But not only women were learning foreign languages. The writer and critic Friedrich Spielhagen describes in his memoirs how, as a student in the 1850s, he had been eager to read books in their original French, Italian or English. But as he could only afford to learn one foreign language, he chose English. A good knowledge of English, he had realized, would not only give him the desired access to the literary works of another culture, but would also provide him with a regular income. There was a need for language teachers for young, middle-class ladies who wanted to read the Tauchnitz editions, and for the sons of merchants and industrialists who would inherit their fathers’ businesses and trade with Britain.47 New publications, whether in German or in a foreign language, were regularly advertised in papers and magazines. The journal Die Gegenwart, for instance, published three separate announcements in 1872 of Eliot’s reprint of M by Asher & Co. and one for the translation by Emil Lehmann.48 But 45

Horst Kohl, ed., Die politischen Reden des Fuersten (Otto v.) Bismarck: Historischkritische Gesammtausgabe (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta Nachf., 1893), vol. 4, pp. 340ff. See also Haight, Letters, vol. 5, p. 87. 46 Adelheid Mommsen, Mein Vater. Erinnerungen an Theodor Mommsen (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1992 (1936)), pp. 87, 96ff. Theodor Mommsen was professor at the University of Berlin and an active member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences since 1858. Adelheid attended a local boarding school from 1875 to 1879. Later, her father allowed her to complete her language studies in England and France. She became a teacher. 47 Friedrich Spielhagen, Finder und Erfinder. Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, 2 vols (Leipzig: L. Staackmann, 1890), vol. 1, pp. 333, 377. 48 Die Gegenwart. Wochenschrift für Literatur, Kunst und öffentliches Leben 1, no. 5 (24 February 1872): 79; 1, no. 6 (2 March 1872): 96; 1, no. 7 (9 March 1872): 112; 2, no. 39 (19 October 1872).

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24   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe a crucial role in publicizing new work was also played by the literary salons. Berlin was famous for its salons and of these the salon of Franz Duncker’s wife, Lina, is of particular interest. The salons’ guest lists49 – as well as comments in the diaries and memoires of individual guests – show a rhizomatic pattern of interconnections. Guests would often frequent more than one salon, and the mistress of one salon could be the guest at another on a different evening during the week. Through this intricate web of personal, professional and aesthetic sympathies, the salons functioned successfully as efficient transmitters of cultural news. Following the tradition of the early literary salons in Berlin of the 1790s of Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin, the home of Lina Duncker in Potsdamer Straße was open every Thursday evening for conversation and discussions. During a salon gathering, it was also customary to have readings from recent publications in the arts and sciences or from the works of the great writers, such as Goethe or Shakespeare. If an author or translator was present, he or she would most likely read from their own work, followed by a discussion. The Duncker salon, which had 41 known regular guests, was at its height during the 1850s and 1860s,50 the period when the German translations of AB, MF and SM were published by Franz Duncker. Lina took full advantage of her privileged access to publications by her husband and was known to include at her salon readings from recently published or even forthcoming works.51 Although the consulted letters, diaries and reminiscences of guests at the Duncker salon do not specifically mention readings or discussions of Eliot’s novels, their German translations would certainly have been read on these occasions.52 After all, Julius Frese was Lina’s personal friend and a regular guest at her salon. Furthermore, the publishers, writers and critics who made up the majority of the other guests would have known of Eliot from the Tauchnitz reprints. When Eliot stayed in Berlin with Lewes in 1870, Lina Duncker was no longer keeping a salon. But we know that Eliot and Lewes attended the important salon of the writers Fanny Lewald and her husband Adolf Stahr on Monday, 28 March.53 They had met the couple several times in Berlin

49

Ingeborg Drewitz, Berliner Salons: Gesellschaft und Literatur zwischen Aufklärung und Industriezeitalter, Berlinische Remiszenzen, 7 (Berlin: Haude & Spener, 1979), pp. 580ff. 50 Ibid., Salons, pp. 642–45. 51 Ludwig Pietsch, Wie ich Schriftsteller geworden bin, vol. 1, pp. 48, 211–12. 52 Helbling, Keller. Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 137–80; Friedrich Spielhagen and Albert Hänel, Zur Erinnerung an Lina Duncker, geb. Tendering (n.p.: Trauerrede, 1885; Gustav Mayer, ed., Ferdinand Lassalle. Briefwechsel, 6 vols (Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1923), vol. 2; Julius Rodenberg, Erinnerungen aus der Jugendzeit, 2 vols (Berlin: Paetel, 1899) vol. 2; Carl Ludwig Schleich, Besonnte Vergangenheit. Lebenserinnerungen 1859–1919 (Berlin: Vier Falken, 1920); Gerhard Wolf, ed., Fanny Lewald, Zwölf Bilder nach dem Leben: Erinnerungen (Berlin: Janke, 1888); Fanny Lewald, Freiheit des Herzens: Lebensgeschichte, Briefe, Erinnerungen (Berlin: Der Morgen, 1887). 53 They were also invited to parties at the residence of the US Ambassador, George Bancroft (27 March 1870) and at the home of the scientist and physician Karl Westphal (31 March 1870); see Haight, Letters, vol. 5, pp. 83–85, 87.

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The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime   25 in 1854–55, and Lewes was still in regular correspondence with Stahr. Both Fanny Lewald and Adolf Stahr had been frequent guests at the Duncker salon, while Lina and Franz Duncker were among the regular guests at the Lewald– Stahr salon. Considering Eliot’s fame as a novelist and Berlin’s close-knit literary community, it comes as no surprise to learn that she was the centre of attention at every function she attended. Looking back to those days in Berlin, Eliot wrote to John Blackwood two years later, in connection with her publications in Germany: [...] the Germans are excellent readers of our books: I was astonished to find so many in Berlin who really knew one’s books and did not merely pay compliments after the fashion of the admirers who made Rousseau savage – running after him to pay him visits, and not knowing a word of his writing.54

In a letter to his mother, Lewes confirms that the guests were very interested in meeting the famous George Eliot when they were in Berlin: It was very funny last night at a grand party to see Polly [George Eliot] surrounded by adoring women, and a crowd of others all waiting their turn to say a word. She compared it to a flock of birds waiting each to have a peck at her.55

Without examining Eliot’s and Lewes’s personal connections with the literary salons of Berlin and the very specific circumstances surrounding their second visit to that city, Eliot’s statement to Blackwood might come as a surprise, as Karl Wagner suggests in his study of the reception of Eliot in Germany and Austria.56 However, Eliot is being very precise. She refers to ‘our books’, and ‘our books’ would include Lewes’s best-selling Goethe biography as well as his scientific writings. Reviewers and Critics Such was George Eliot’s standing among the readership in Germany due to the Tauchnitz reprints that the translation of AB was almost immediately reviewed in the literary journals.57 It is not clear who suggested that Frese should add his own introduction, but the nature of the introduction suggests

54 Haight,

Letters, vol. 5, p. 257. Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 83–85, 86–87. Lewes also writes of their meetings in Berlin with the historian Theodor Mommsen, the chemist Robert Wilhelm Bunsen and the physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond as well as Frederick VIII, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein. 56 Karl Wagner, ‘George Eliot in Deutschland und Österreich. Transkulturelle Affären des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Norbert Bachleitner (ed.), Beiträge zur Rezeption der britischen und irischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 137–56, p. 138. 57 George Eliot, AB, trans. Julius Frese, 2 vols (Berlin: Franz Duncker, 1860), vol. 1, pp. iv–v. 55

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26   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe some anxiety about the reception of the novel. In the piece, Frese reassuringly draws attention to AB’s phenomenal success in Britain, before addressing an issue that might pose problems to German readers. This was the provincial setting of AB. Frese attempts to distance the novel from the popular German genre of the Dorfgeschichte (literally ‘village tale’) by arguing that AB’s high poetic qualities and the degree of psychological development within this novel far exceeded the standard of the usual Dorfgeschichte. The term would simply not do justice to AB. According to Lawrence Marsden Price, the Dorfgeschichte (the term emerged around 1840) had developed in Germany in response to the popularity of the novels of Walter Scott. Scott’s influence, he argues, ‘past thru Gotthelf, Auerbach, and Immermann, thru Storm, Keller, Ludwig, and Raabe to Polenz and Zahn’.58 Indeed, Berthold Auerbach is said to have aspired to become the Walter Scott of his native village.59 Besides these literary influences, there were also political and economic impulses which together produced circumstances in which this new kind of literature of village life could emerge during the 1830s and 1840s. Rural literature had, of course, had a long tradition in Germany, but the Dorfgeschichte was to enjoy its main flowering from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century. As diverse as its sources was the writing itself. The term Dorfgeschichte was applied to all forms of literature, from short sketches to full-length novels, as long as they could be identified as rural epics.60 Their novelty was the narrative viewpoint from within the village, with plots which revolved around the joys and tragedies of peasant and farming life. They should not be thought of as overtly moral or devotional tales written in simple language for the edification of country folk. It is doubtful even whether farmers or peasants ever read the tales written about them. Yet the Dorfgeschichte was not a town dweller’s romantic view of life in the countryside either. At first, contemporary critics praised the Dorfgeschichte as a new aesthetic of provincialism, being a realistic portrayal of country life.61 The Dorfgeschichte quickly gained in popularity. While its subject matter and easy accessibility appealed to a wide readership, the generally high quality of the writing – at least when the genre first emerged – also ensured its interest for the more discerning readers.62 Some of the earliest works were by the Swiss writer Jeremias Gotthelf (Der Bauernspiegel, 1837) and the German writers Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (‘Die Judenbuche’, 1837–41) and Berthold Auerbach (Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten, 1843–53; Die Frau Professorin, 1846). In 1874, Julius Rodenberg, in the first volume of his new

58

Lawrence Marsden Price, The Reception of English Literature in Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1932), p. 371. 59 Robert Eduard Prutz, Die deutsche Literatur der Gegenwart: 1848 bis 1858, 2 vols (Leipzig: Voigt & Günther, 1860) vol. 2, p. 232. 60 Jürgen Hein, Dorfgeschichte (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976), p. 68. 61 Ibid., Dorfgeschichte, pp. 65–69. 62 Friedrich Altvater, Wesen und Form der deutschen Dorfgeschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, Germanische Studien 88 (Berlin: Emil Ebering, 1930), pp. 13–19.

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The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime   27 journal Der Salon, remarks on the public’s enduring appreciation of the ‘sage and writer’ Berthold Auerbach. Auerbach ‘brought us characters from his Swabian forests to whom we feel close, as though they belonged to us in some way’, writes Rodenberg.63 Encouraged by the success of these seemingly simple stories, large numbers of imitators produced formulaic country tales, repeating the genre’s limited choice of settings, plots and motives, and creating unrealistic, make-believe rural worlds. This, inevitably, reduced both the literary quality of the writing and the reputation of provincial tales.64 This popular escapist writing also contrasted sharply with the reality of conflicts and fundamental social and economic transformations taking place within the country and beyond – which might have called for some literary exploration – and, thus, further contributed to the genre’s demise. Critics who had originally welcomed the Dorfgeschichte as a national event of literary as well as political significance now barely disguised their contempt. Despite Frese’s efforts, the setting of AB made it impossible for the novel not to be identified as a Dorfgeschichte. The reception of AB in Germany was thus burdened from the outset by an association which differed fundamentally from the radically realist agenda which Eliot was exploring. Its reception in Germany could not have been further from the kind of praise Mrs Carlyle expressed in a letter when she wrote that reading AB was ‘as good as going into the country for one’s health’.65 German reviewers generally recognized that AB was different from the average Dorfgeschichte and that the quality of the writing stood out among contemporary fiction from Britain. As in British reviews, the portrayal of Mrs Poyser was frequently singled out for special praise, but Eliot’s irony and wit were overlooked.66 Indeed, many of the reviewers lacked the critical competence to talk about the thematic or philosophical issues in Eliot’s writing. The worst example of this unfortunate situation was a seven-page article in September 1860 by Adolf Zeising in the opening pages of the weekly

63

Julius Rodenberg, ‘Die Literatur und das Publikum’, Der Salon 1 (1874): 26–40. ‘Ihnen Allen werth ist der Name Berthold Auerbach, der, ein Weiser und ein Dichter zugleich, mit einem Herzen voll Liebe für das Volk […] uns aus seinen schwäbischen Wäldern Gestalten gegeben hat, die uns nahe stehen, als ob sie in irgend einer Weise zu uns gehörten […]’ (p. 35). 64 Hein, Dorfgeschichte, p. 91; Prutz, Die deutsche Literatur, vol. 2, pp. 243–44. 65 Haight, Letters, vol. 3, pp. 17–18. 66 There was also no critical engagement with humour in Eliot’s work. Anton Schoenbach, in his critique of humour in nineteenth-century prose, pays some tribute to Eliot’s skill in producing humour. He relates her ‘delicious humour’ to her indelible conviction that some moral goodness was present in even the most depraved characters. Humour let traces of this goodness shine through here and there and threw a warm glow over the honest and dutiful characters, he argues. It was a characteristic of Eliot’s narrative technique to achieve humourous effects through characterization, a character’s relations with others and in the unrivalled skill of creating dialogue; see Anton Schoenbach, Über die humoristische Prosa des XIX. Jahrhunderts (Graz: Leuschner & Lubensky, 1875), pp. 16–23.

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28   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe journal Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung.67 Heading his article ‘Eine englische Dorfgeschichte’, Zeising defies Frese’s argument and forcefully defends respected German and Swiss writers of the genre against any implied criticism of being second rate. His positioning of AB as a Dorfgeschichte also leads him into a serious misreading of the novel. To fit it to his preconceptions (and despite the novel’s title), Zeising places the relationship of Hetty and Arthur at the centre of the text. He claims that Eliot transformed a typical Dorfgeschichte plot by shifting the blame in the relationship, which is generally placed on the nobleman for seducing a naïve country girl, on to Hetty. This made Arthur the readers’ object of sympathy and allowed for the most subtle motives to emerge. Zeising at least recognizes Eliot’s outstanding use of realism (he does not actually use this term but speaks of ‘Naturwahrheit’) in presenting character, dialogue and action. He also indirectly agrees with Frese that the novel’s subtle psychological observations raised AB well above the general run of the Dorfgeschichte. Yet all in all, and despite the incongruity of a now marginalized title hero who is too passive and destined only to endure and suffer, Zeising deems AB to be an excellent Dorfgeschichte. This grossly misleading review comes unexpected in a generally wellinformed journal. Its editor, Hermann Marggraf, had two years earlier protested against the present overproduction of the Dorfgeschichte with its frequent distortions of the peasant character: They write Dorfgeschichten, they flirt with Dorfgeschichten and the readers yawn over Dorfgeschichten. At least, the readers have already started to yawn, since the excitement of novelty has passed.68

Marggraf ’s own, more rigorous review of AB – together with the German translation of MF which had appeared that same year – was published in Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung three months later, in December 1860.69 There is an unacknowledged Goethean echo in his view that AB demonstrated the terrible consequences of feelings triumphing over principles, while MF celebrated the triumph of principles over feelings.70 He praises the quality of Eliot’s narrative style, as well as her technique of revealing character and telling the story through dialogue. The figures were more or less likable, he 67

Adolf Zeising, ‘Eine englische Dorfgeschichte’, Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung 39 (1860): 706–11. 68 Hermann Marggraf, ‘Dorfgeschichte und Weltgeschichte in novelistischer Einkleidung’, Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung 8 (1858): 133–44. ‘Man schreibt Dorfgeschichten, man tändelt mit Dorfgeschichten, und die Leser gähnen bei Dorfgeschichten. Wenigstens fangen sie bereits an zu gähnen, seit der Reiz des Neuen vorüber ist.’ 69 Hermann Marggraf, ‘Ein neuer Roman von George Eliot’, Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung 52 (1860): 952–55. 70 For this conflict and its consequences, see Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809). For a detailed discussion of MF and Goethe’s Elective Affinities, see Gerlinde Röder-Bolton, George Eliot and Goethe: An Elective Affinity (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 15–98.

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The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime   29 concedes, and the novel reconciles the readers to their weaknesses and foibles. But Marggraf barely hides his dislike of the novels’ provincialism. It took Eliot’s ingenious use of realism in MF, he proclaims, to make its unpleasant, prosaic, self-centred and repulsive characters – and the environment they inhabit – interesting to the readers. Choosing two children as main characters at least prevented the readers from being utterly repelled by the spectacle of adult life in an English provincial town. To Marggraf, the novel pictured the worst of what one might find in the German provinces. Marggraf was not alone among the critics in his aversion to the literature of provincial life. Karl Gutzkow, the novelist and editor of the weekly journal Unterhaltungen am häuslichen Herd, was even more outspoken, and made no attempt at hiding his irritation with yet another example of provincial fiction, an irritation that was exacerbated by Eliot’s narrative scale: Here, too, the reader will in the end feel quite downcast by all these workmen, farm tenants, schoolmasters, country parsons, squires, mothers, cousins. We live in the village and we die in the village! Why don’t you just go and get buried in the village, too.71

While Marggraf at least appreciated Eliot’s specific form of realism, Gutzkow objects to her reproducing people and settings in ‘an anxious, pedantic, almost photographic way’. Using vocabulary from the new science of photographic reproduction, he narrowly interprets realism as ‘copy’, as many Victorian critics did, and criticizes Eliot’s portrayal of people and situations simply as they were: the misery and minutiae of everyday life in exact focus and in every detail. He exaggerates the imitation while overlooking the imaginative engagement. Eliot’s realistic portrayal had been filtered through what she describes as ‘such a medium as my own nature gives me’.72 At a time when writers and critics in Germany were looking to France and Britain for examples of the new realist novel, Gutzkow refuses even to engage with the complexities and possibilities of realist writing and advises German authors to refrain from emulating Eliot’s style, as it severely limited the scope of the novel.73 In his essay ‘Realism in Art: Recent German Fiction’, G. H. Lewes had addressed the relation between realism and art, and the antithesis between realism and idealism. Contemporary German literature, he argued, had to have an ‘ideal element’. The hero had to be ‘a man of genius; because prose can be 71 Karl

Gutzkow, ‘Adam Bede’, Unterhaltungen am häuslichen Herd 4, no. 54 (1860): 863. ‘Es wird dem Leser auch hier vor all den Handwerkern, Pächtern, Schulmeistern, Landgeistlichen, Gutsbesitzern, Müttern, Basen zuletzt doch ganz flau zu Muthe. Im Dorfe leben wir und im Dorfe sterben wir! Laßt euch doch endlich auch – im Dorf begraben.’ 72 Haight, Letters, vol. 2, p. 362. 73 Gutzkow, ‘Adam Bede’, p. 863. ‘Um so ängstlich, pedantisch, gleichsam photographisch Menschen und Dinge abnehmen zu können […] nichts anderes als die Misère des Alltagslebens zum Thema haben […] den Höhen des Lebens fern bleiben, auf weltgeschichtliche Perspectiven verzichten und so um kleinere Wirkungen willen größere dichterische Ziele aufgeben.’

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30   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe found at every street-corner, and art must elevate the public by “beautifying” life’. Yet all art was a representation of reality, limited only by the nature of its medium of expression, such as language: ‘Realism is thus the basis of all Art, and its antithesis is not Idealism, but Falsism,’ he argued.74 Eliot had already set out these same views on realism in her essay on ‘The Natural History of German Life’ and had followed them through in AB.75 Julian Schmidt, a well-known critic writing at the time in Die Grenzboten, had tried to remove the antithesis addressed by Lewes by developing the theory of a synthesis between idealism and realism. He still defended the Dorfgeschichte because he found – particularly in Berthold Auerbach’s writing – a vehicle for his theory. In 1860 Schmidt wrote: The purpose of art, in particular the art of literature, is to establish ideals, i.e. to create characters and tales which we must desire to be real because they elevate us, excite us, give us pleasure, amuse us and so on. The means of art is realism, i.e. truth gathered from nature, which is convincing, so that we believe in the poetic ideals.76

According to Schmidt, Auerbach had found among the peasant farmers of the Schwarzwald an innate simplicity and moral constancy and had used this experience to create believable characters who thought and felt like real country people – and could be used to represent those ideals. In his review of AB, Schmidt compares Eliot’s novel not with Auerbach’s work but with Otto Ludwig’s novel Zwischen Himmel und Erde, first published in 1856 and dedicated to Auerbach.77 Schmidt preferes Eliot to Ludwig because her novel was more conciliatory and less dismal in tone. Her humourous characters, her economy of treatment (Oekonomie in der Handlung), her realist technique and moral idealism made AB one of the foremost novels of its time. In a later essay, Schmidt defends Eliot’s focus on the provincial in terms which seem to reference her essay ‘The Natural History of German Life’.78 Schmidt argues that the depiction of a claustophobic provincial society – as in MF for instance – was part of an exploration into the laws of natural

74 75 76

77

78

G. H. Lewes, ‘Realism in Art: Recent German fiction’, Westminster Review 14 (1858): 488–518. George Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’ (1856), in Thomas Pinney (ed.), Essays of George Eliot (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 269. Julian Schmidt, ‘Neue Romane’, Die Grenzboten 52 (1860): 481–92, 481: ‘Der Zweck der Kunst, namentlich der Dichtkunst, ist, Ideale aufzustellen, d.h. Gestalten und Geschichten, deren Realität man wünschen muß, weil sie uns erheben, begeistern, ergötzen, belustigen u.s.w.; das Mittel der Kunst ist der Realismus, d.h., eine der Natur abgelauschte Wahrheit, die uns überzeugt, so daß wir an die künstlichen Ideale glauben.’ Julian Schmidt, ‘Adam Bede und andere Romane’, Die Grenzboten 21 (1860): 287–92; Otto Ludwig, Zwischen Himmel und Erde (Frankfurt/Main: Meidinger Sohn & Co., 1856). In his essay, ‘Realism in Art: recent German fiction’, Lewes describes Zwischen Himmel und Erde as a ‘mawkish, ineffective, wearisome story’. Julian Schmidt, Bilder aus dem geistigen Leben unserer Zeit, 4 vols (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1870–75), vol. 1, pp. 344–409.

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The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime   31 science; to understand the true life of modern civilization, one also needed to know characters like the Dobsons. Otto Ludwig, in an essay published posthumously in 1874, explores the very specific skills that made Eliot’s writing in MF different from the usual German product.79 This essay is part of a series of writings on German and European literatures through which Ludwig explores topics such as the complexities of the author–reader relationship, the specificities of drama and the novel, or the characteristics and techniques of the various forms of narration.80 MF, he argues, was not composed of sensational events and a variety of narrative tricks within a tight framework of time and place, but rather Eliot used the simplest of means to produce something as exquisite as a Dutch genre painting. Reflection was embedded into a narrative with exceptional sensitivity. Even minor characters were subtly drawn and perfected more sucessfully than many characters in Dickens. Eliot’s realism did not pamper the readers with make-believe worlds. It created a ‘real’ world. Art made this world more transparent and, thus, allowed the readers to gain experience for their own lives and to sharpen their understanding of the world.81 The writer and essayist Ernst von Wolzogen, in a biographical study of Eliot, also uses the image of the Dutch genre painting in praise of Eliot’s profound knowledge of people, her power of observation, her delicate exploration into the states of the soul and her humour.82 Despite these references to the famous passage in Chapter 17 of AB, neither writer engages critically with Eliot’s very specific realist agenda in art: It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions […] Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands.83

Prioritizing ‘a monotonous homely existence’ over ‘world-stirring actions’ was part of Eliot’s realist agenda because it was the ‘real’ experience of the majority of the readers. The appeal of cultural difference that had furthered the reception in Germany of novels by Scott, Dickens and Thackeray does not seem to apply to

79

Otto Ludwig, Romane und Romanstudien, ed. William J. Lillyman (Munich: Hanser, 1977). 80 Ibid., ‘Nachwort’ by William J. Lillyman, p. 729. 81 Ibid., ‘Die Mühle am Floss von George Eliot’, pp. 627–29. 82 Ernst von Wolzogen, George Eliot. Eine biographisch-kritische Studie (Leipzig: Albert Unflad, 1885), pp. 82–95. 83 George Eliot, AB, Cabinet Edition, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1878), vol. 1, pp. 268, 270.

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32   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Eliot. While Scott’s historical-provincial novels inspired Theodor Fontane to write about his native Brandenburg,84 the clerical-provincial theme in Eliot’s early work proves problematic. Her subtle positioning of herself as a secular writer was not fully recognized due to her sympathetic treatment of parsons and preachers and the strong moral content of her fiction. Karl Gutskow, for example, has his doubts about the appeal of Methodism for the German readers of AB, claiming a prejudice in Germany against ‘down-in-the-mouth Pietism’.85 Julian Schmidt, despite his appreciation of Eliot’s art, also suspects that readers would find a character like Dinah Morris puzzling. Pietism, he claims, had run its course in Germany. For the same reason, JR would leave the readers with an unpleasant religious aftertaste.86 Yet the main stumbling-block for the reception of Eliot’s early work remains her intention to present ‘the truth of rustic life’.87 The provincial settings of her novels, overshadowed by the reception of the Dorfgeschichte, inevitably pre-empted an objective appreciation by most critics of her artistic aims and occluded her very specific moral position. Her realist aesthetics, together with her ‘delicious sympathy’ for the realities of rural life, were either misunderstood, misinterpreted or simply not shared by the critics writing in the popular literary journals. The effect of their aversion to ‘the truth of rustic life’ is echoed in an image used by Eliot in a different context: ‘Anyone who detests the Dutch school in general will hardly appreciate fairly the merits of a particular Dutch painting.’88 While not every reader would have been dissuaded by an unfavourable review in a popular family journal from reading AB or MF, the effect of bad or misleading reviews on readers new to Eliot should not be underestimated. Just how bad many of these reviews were becomes apparent when we compare them with, for instance, Hermann Marggraf ’s appreciative and generous article on the German translation of Lewes’s Life of Goethe.89 Lewes’s critical biography, first published in 1855, had started a re-evaluation in Germany of Goethe’s work, which had suffered neglect, even contempt, during the decades following the writer’s death in 1832. The publication of the German translation of Lewes’s biography spread this renewed interest across the German states. Marggraf accepts that such a biography could not yet be an exhaustive presentation of Goethe – the subject was too varied and complex – and he is lenient towards what he calls Lewes’s lack of ‘German thoroughness’. At the same time, he is full of praise for the unusual clarity 84

Theodor Fontane first wrote about Brandenburg in his book of travel stories, Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (1862–82), but later also in his novels. 85 Gutzkow, ‘Adam Bede’, p. 863. ‘Daß Dina Methodistin ist, wird ihr keine erhöhte Sympathie beim deutschen Leser erweckt haben, der im Methodismus […] nur einen kopfhängerischen Pietismus zu sehen pflegt, ohne dessen praktischen Nutzen durch seine wohlthätige sittliche wie materielle Förderung der ihm vorzugsweise angehörenden niedern und arbeitenden Volksklassen zu bestreiten.’ 86 Schmidt, Bilder, vol. 1, pp. 347–48, 364. 87 George Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, p. 269. 88 Height, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 291–92. 89 Ibid.

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The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime   33 and simplicity of Lewes’s style. In Goethe studies, this work was a breath of fresh air and bright sunshine, Marggraf enthused. He especially recommends the original English version for the ease with which it could be read, and for its general intelligibility and transparency.90 Yet despite this national preoccupation with Goethe, neither Marggraf nor any other reviewer remarks on affinities between Eliot and Goethe, such as the emphasis on renunciation and self-sacrifice, or the issue of the sudden attraction in MF, which were recognized by some British reviewers.91 Julius Frese, in his introduction to AB, even mentions Goethe in his attempt to alleviate the reader’s possible concerns about AB. Eliot’s narrative composition, he asserts, corresponded fully with Goethe’s theories of the epic. He then suggests that this affinity was either due to Eliot’s innate throught processes or the outcome of her close study of Goethe’s work. In any case, when reading AB with Goethe’s theories in mind, the reader could not fail to recognize their agreement with Eliot’s narrative composition.92 Frese is most likely referring to a short essay jointly published in 1797 by Goethe and Schiller.93 In this essay, the two national icons prescribe for the epic a widening of space and an extension of time into past and future while, at the same time, emphasizing the need in drama for a very tight, unified structure. Yet despite these innovative ideas voiced in 1797, the debate on the theory of the novel in Germany during the 1860s and 1870s was still firmly focused on the rules of classical literature. Frese’s reference to Goethe falls on deaf ears, as Julian Schmidt and other critics object to Eliot’s wide-ranging narrative and even criticize some of her techniques, such as delaying, interrupting or deviating, which are specifically endorsed in the essay by Goethe and Schiller. In his biographical study of 1885, Ernst von Wolzogen stated that Eliot’s readership was to be found predominantly among the educated, Englishreading public despite the availability of very readable German translations.94 While this situation, it has been suggested, was due to the number of sales in Germany of Eliot’s novels in their English editions, Wolzogen’s observation

90

Hermann Marggraf, ‘Goethe und die neueste Literatur über ihn’, Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung 17 (1858): 301–12. 91 See, for instance, R. H. Hutton, ‘The Novels of George Eliot’, National Review 11 (July 1860): 191–219; Richard Simpson, ‘George Eliot’s Novels’, Home and Foreign Review 3 (October 1863): 522–49; an unsigned review in the Dublin University Magazine 57 (1861): 192–200. 92 Julius Frese, Introduction to his translation of AB, vol. 1, p. v. ‘Die künstlerische Composition endlich wird gewiß vor der Strenge unserer theoretischen Kritik bestehen. Die Grundsätze, welche Goethe und Schiller über den Character epischer Dichtung und die Bedeutung für dieselbe aufgestellt haben, müssen der Verfasserin von Natur eigen sein oder durch Studium eigen geworden sein; wer ihren Roman mit Beziehung auf dieselben liest, wird die Uebereinstimmung ihrer Praxis mit jener Theorie nicht verkennen.’ 93 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke, ‘Ueber epische und dramatische Dichtung. Von Goethe und Schiller 1797’, Schriften zur Literatur, Hamburger Ausgabe 12 (Munich: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1973), pp. 249–51. 94 Wolzogen, George Eliot, pp. 82–95.

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34   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe gives rise to the assumption that the bad reviews of her novels in the popular journals had dissuaded readers in other social groups from reading her novels. A very different review from those discussed above appeared in 1869 in Unsere Zeit: Deutsche Revue der Gegenwart, and was clearly aimed at the educated reader familiar with European literature.95 This essay by H. Dohm reviews all of Eliot’s novels published to date by Tauchnitz and Duncker. Awarding the highest accolade among British women novelists to the author of AB, Dohm first places Eliot’s novels in relation to contemporary novels in France (Balzac and George Sand) and Britain (Thackeray and Dickens), and then, more specifically, analyses her realism in relation to Thackeray, before discussing in detail her individual novels. Dohm is aware of the criticism voiced against Eliot’s fiction, and tackles it persuasively. AB was a Dorfgeschichte, but (as Frese had already argued) the novel’s scope and richness of ideas far exceeded the genre. Adam’s passivity, or the wide narrative canvas with its wealth of detail that might have puzzled the reader on a first, superficial reading, were revealed at closer inspection to be part of a carefully constructed, harmonious picture of a specific time and place, including its political and religious background. Even the narrator’s reflections woven into AB, SM or MF always followed immediately after some internal or external event, and did not overwhelm the narrative. While Dohm forcefully defends the artistic qualities and beauties of structure, content and writing in these novels, R, Dohm admits, disappointed the reader by its lack of essential connection between the historic events in the novel and the inner life of the characters. Their story could have happened almost anywhere at any time. In addition, the excessive weight of the moral element and the large extent of detail and description wearied and alienated the reader. Like FH and SG, R, in Dohm’s view, had lost the freshness and vitality of the earlier novels and contained passages that threatened to bore the reader. Yet despite his criticism, Dohm concluded that Eliot undoubtedly belonged among the greatest novelists of the time, because her work united high philosophical content with beauty of form. This essay by Dohm was exceptional in its depth of analysis and breadth of understanding of Eliot’s artistic and intellectual qualities. More usual were other voices, which signalled what was to become the main criticism of the novels of Eliot for many German critics and readers alike. With the publication of M by Asher in 1872, and in Emil Lehmann’s German translation in 1872–73, the appreciation of Eliot’s novels in Germany took a decisive downward turn. The novel received the widest critical attention of all of Eliot’s works, but was generally dismissed by the critics due to its complicated narrative composition. The journal Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung was particularly hostile. In 1773, J. J. Honegger reviewed M together with other recent novels in the first pages of the journal.96 He finds little to recommend in M. The novel lacked a leading 95

H. Dohm, ‘George Eliot’, Unsere Zeit: Deutsche Revue der Gegenwart, Monatsschrift zum Conversations-Lexikon, Neue Folge 5.2 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1869), pp. 189–211. 96 J. J. Honegger, ‘Neueste Romanliteratur’, Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung 16 (1873): 241–46.

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The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime   35 character. Its loosely arranged figures and situations gave an unmistakable impression of truthfulness to English provincial life, but Eliot’s outstanding realism could not offset the inartistic compilation of detail. Originals, such as the genteel, down-at-heel Mrs Cadwallader, the ambitious hypochondriac banker Bulstrode or the novel’s most pleasant character, the poor parson Fairbrother, were psychologically true, but colourless. M contained too much description, too much reflection and abstraction, and not enough movement or action. Compared with the works of Beecher-Stowe, Honegger argues, this novel by Eliot left the reader indifferent and cold. The serial publication of the successive volumes also worked against Eliot. Julian Schmidt declared that M overtaxed his memory.97 Reading the volumes as they appeared, he found that on the arrival of the next volume he had forgotten many of the earlier details and had to go back to the previous book. He found that he was not looking forward with impatience to the next instalment. There were too many narrative strands crisscrossing each other without a strong focal point to make this a successfully serialized novel. If the novel had a hero at all, it was to be found in the collective term of ‘Middlemarch, a provincial town in the years 1829–32’. His main objection was what he calls the novel’s incorrect perspective; that is, giving the same detailed treatment to the essential as well as the inessential, such as boring characters like Mr Brooke. He did not recognize Eliot’s irony, and found the overall impression of M depressing. Friedrich Spielhagen, the influential contemporary critic and novelist, took up the most extreme position in relation to M.98 Spielhagen had studied and taught English, and considered himself a spokesman on English literature.99 He was widely read and had written on English novelists, especially Dickens and Thackeray.100 In his essays, his critical eye and his subtle handling of the material owe much to his reading of English critics.101 Yet despite his study of British – as well as French – literature, his own theory of the contemporary novel returns resolutely to Artistotle’s Poetics, the Homeric epic and a ‘higher objectivity’. He had developed a simplistic, rigid theory which could neither accommodate Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre nor many of Spielhagen’s own novels. Yet despite these obvious flaws, his theory exerted considerable influence during the 1860s and 1870s.102 Unfortunately, Spielhagen chose M 97

Julian Schmidt, Bilder, vol. 4, pp. 272–339. Spielhagen, Beiträge zur Theorie und Technik des Romans (Leipzig: L. Staackmann, 1883), pp. 69–72. 99 Spielhagen, Finden und Erfinden, vol. 1, pp. 264, 328–33, 366. 100 Ibid., p. 330; Friedrich Spielhagen, Vermischte Schriften, 2 vols (Berlin: Otto Janke, 1864, 1868), vol. 2, pp. 47–112. 101 Gustav Karpeles, Friedrich Spielhagen. Ein literarischer Essay (Leipzig: L. Staackmann, 1889), p. 78. 102 Günter Rebing, Der Halbbruder des Dichters: Friedrich Spielhagens Theorie des Romans, Literatur und Reflexion, vol. 8 (Frankfurt/Main: Athenäum Verlag, 1972), pp. 169, 192. Spielhagen later suffered the fate of outliving his own fame, and he died neglected in 1911: see Victor Klemperer, Die Zeitromane Friedrich Spielhagens und ihre Wurzeln (Weimar: Alexander Duncker, 1913), pp. 3–13. 98 Friedrich

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36   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe to demonstrate how a writer – even an eminent writer like Eliot – could be led astray by not observing his interpretation of the laws of the epic.103 M was one of the most important English novels of the present time, Spielhagen conceded, yet it made the ‘strangest and most interesting contribution’ to the ‘pathology of the novel’.104 The absence of the unifying hero left the reader with a confusing multitude of figures and relationships as well as an unpredictable, constantly changing viewpoint. The world in which these figures lived was strangely indistinct and muddled, although it consisted only of a small town and a few surrounding estates.105 Spielhagen’s final criticism was of what he calls Eliot’s insistent talkativeness and unnecessary zealousness on almost every page. This was a constant insult to the readers’ intelligence and feelings, he declared. Spielhagen’s respect for Eliot as a truly distinguished writer is unmistakable, yet, in his view, she would never have produced such a ‘barbaric work’ (aesthetically speaking) if she had stayed true to her genius.106 George Eliot’s last novel, DD, was also widely reviewed. An important essay by Wilhelm Schérer, philologist, literary historian and critic, appeared in the Deutsche Rundschau, whose editor was Julius Rodenberg.107 The journal had first appeared in 1874 and was known for the high quality of its articles on arts and science. DD, Schérer argues, did not have the remarkable strength of representation of M. The novel did not so simply and painfully touch on situations that could happen to any of us. The lives that call for our sympathy in DD corresponded not to the rule, but to the exception. Schérer outlines the simple story of Daniel and Mirah. Even when including Daniel’s upbringing as an English gentleman and his meeting with his mother in Genoa, he argues, the story can be summed up in a few words. However, with that crucial moment of disclosure in Genoa that transforms Deronda’s identity, his life and his future, Eliot creates a momentous situation – yet does not exploit it. Instead, she remains the observer who coolly explains Deronda’s state of mind and the tumult of his emotions with sympathetic irony. Even more frustrating for Schérer is a narrative that has a main character who has no profession of any kind for six books out of eight and at the end of the novel leaves the country for an uncertain future. It is not irrelevant to the reader, he argues, whether Mordecai is to be seen as a fevered dreamer or a prophet and national benefactor. And it is not irrelevant whether his influence has sent the hero to a tragic or a successful fate, especially when the goal to be achieved lies outside experience, yet needs to be realized in the near future. Novelists make us believe the stories of unknown people whose experiences happen somewhere privately. Yet if an exceptional Jew like Deronda had gone to Palestine in 1866 to agitate for a Jewish state, then the rest of world would have heard of it by now. Schérer quotes works by Gutzkow (Ritter vom Geist

103 Spielhagen,

Beiträge, pp. 65–100. p. 69. 105 Ibid., p. 87. 106 Ibid., pp. 85, 99. 107 Wilhelm Schérer, ‘George Eliot und ihr neuester Roman’, Deutsche Rundschau 10 (February 1877): 240–55. 104 Ibid.,

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The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime   37 and Zauberer von Rom) and Disraeli (Coningsby and Tancred) to demonstrate a similar mistake made by other authors. Like F. R. Leavis later, Schérer separates the Jewish part from the English part of the novel and presents the dark sides of human nature as represented in the story of Gwendolen, with echoes from Eliot’s earlier writing: Catarina in MG and Casaubon and Dorothea in M. However, the superficial fusion of several stories and the lack of unity in the novel that had already been objected to by critics in M was even more pronounced in DD. Yet unlike other German critics, Schérer suspects that Eliot had had her reasons. She would have known that by giving Deronda tender feelings towards Gwendolen, the two stories would have overlapped more successfully and she would have created a more true-to-life character, not a flawless saint. The basis of the novel was both artistic and philosophical. Schérer discusses at length the Jewish parts of the novel in this light and comes to the conclusion that in DD Eliot did not start from observations whose explorations led her to general thoughts, but from thoughts for which she needed representatives who by way of observation and experience became living characters. This process explained some of the narrative discrepancies and difficulties in the novel. But DD was not only a philosophical book, it was also an interesting one and he highly recommended it to the readers. Because of the Jewish element, the novel also attracted a new Jewish readership. As usual, DD was immediately translated into German,108 but sections of it were also translated into Hebrew and East European languages. The ‘message of the book which reached East European Jewry through excerpts and summaries at second and third hand, stirred all the hearts and gave the novel a character that was almost “mythological”’, writes Shmuel Werses.109 The best-known Jewish response to DD came from Rabbi David Kaufmann, head of the distinguished Yeshiva and Rabbinical Library in Budapest, and was the kind of informed criticism that Eliot particularly valued.110 Like Schérer, he spoke of the ideas which Eliot presented through ‘men and women of flesh and blood in whom these ideas work and act consciously und unconsciously; we are shown not a creed, but its professors – not a faith, but those who have been nurtured in it’. Eliot ‘succeeded in bringing before us, in all its inward, compelling power, and in all its fiery, action-craving impetuosity, no common passion of mankind, well known and easy to understand, but a special sentiment shared by few, strange, and therefore incomprehensible to many’. A ‘major figure in the [...] scientific study of Judaism’ and editor of the journal Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums in Berlin was Leopold Zunz (1794–1886).111 Eliot owned several of his works, which she consulted

108 George

Eliot, DD, trans. Adolf Strodtmann, 4 vols (Berlin: Paetel, 1876). Werses, ‘The Jewish Reception of DD’, in Alice Shalvi, ed., DD: A Centenary Symposium (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Academic Press, 1976), p. 12. 110 David Kaufmann, ‘George Eliot und das Judenthum’, Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 26 (1877): 172ff., 214ff., 255ff. 111 Jane Irwin, ed., George Eliot’s DD notebooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 162. 109 Shmuel

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38   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe and annotated for DD. The heading for Chapter 42 is from Zunz’s Die synagonale Poesie des Mittelalters (1855). The interest of scholarly Jews in Germany was so great that, having seen the novel, Zunz was also told by five different correspondents of Eliot’s use of the quotation. Zunz was obviously pleased by this and reported, in a letter to his friend Victor Ehrenberg, that one of his Berlin friends had written to G. H. Lewes and received Lewes’s reply: ‘Prof. (?) Zunz has done so much to earn the gratitude of men.’ Zunz, in turn, recommends that Ehrenberg reads Kaufmann’s essay ‘George Eliot und das Judenthum’.112 Reception by Writers and Academics The novelist Theodor Fontane (1819–1898), when on a visit to London in 1862, wrote to his wife Emilie in Berlin (who was reading MF) that Eliot’s novels were exceptional among contemporary English novels. His only criticism was that Eliot had not yet found the right measure of detail in the artistic composition of MF. The quality of the whole went without saying, but the quantity of observations and individual descriptions had a depressing effect. Fontane likened the novel to a respectable, properly and neatly dressed lady who wears her jewellery in all the correct places, but has the peculiar habit of putting on not one, but another and another earring until she wears half a dozen.113 Two very different views of Eliot’s novels emerge in the correspondence between the poet and Novellen-writer Theodor Storm (1817–1888) and the younger Germanist and Goethe-editor Erich Schmidt.114 For Storm, Eliot’s novels (as well as Lewes’s Goethe biography) made ideal Christmas presents. He did not read the works himself, but his wife liked them and read extracts aloud to her children. Schmidt, on the other hand, was eager to engage Storm in literary discussions about the novels. Was M not more perfect than MF, with its very feminine breadth, he asked. Eliot had so infinitely and delicately observed, that one enjoys looking with admiration at her psychological miniature paintings. Unfortunately, Storm could not be drawn.115 However, Schmidt’s interest in Eliot’s novels continued, and in 1889 he wrote to a friend that after a day’s editing he rewarded himself with the purchase of the 112 Nahum

N. Glatzer, ed., Leopold and Adelheid Zunz, An Account in Letters 1815–85 (London: Leo Beck Inst., 1958), p. 350–51. 113 Walter Keitel and Helmuth Nürnberger, eds, Theodor Fontane. Briefe, 5 vols (Munich: Carl Hauser, 1976–1994), vol. 2, p. 69: ‘[MF] ist eine wohlanständig, regelrecht und sauber gekleidete Dame, die ihren Schmuck auch an der rechten Stelle trägt, nur hat sie die Eigentümlichkeit, an einem Ohrring noch einen andern anzuhängen und so fort und fort, bis das halbe Dutzend voll ist.’ 114 For details of Schmidt’s contributions as editor to the Weimarer Ausgabe of Goethe’s works and his career as professor and rector of the University of Berlin, see Biographisches Jahrbuch und Deutscher Nekrolog, vol. 17 (1912), pp. 155–75. 115 Peter Goldammer, ed., Theodor Storm, Briefe 1817–88 (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1972), pp. 22, 37, 41.

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The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime   39 four volumes of DD, published by Paetel in Berlin and translated by Adolf Strodtmann.116 For Schmidt, Eliot’s novels ranked among the best of world literature.117 The diaries of the Austrian novelist Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830– 1916) not only reveal her admiration of Eliot, but also include her comment about two writers who knew Eliot personally. The first indication of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach reading Eliot was a note in her diary on 25 June 1881 that she had started to read M. Although her views on the novel have not survived, her interest in Eliot’s writing was such that on 31 May 1883 she confided to her diary that she had started to read SM, ‘one of the most wonderful books in existence’.118 The following day, she was ‘overwhelmed by SM’.119 Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach even copied an extract from SM ‘by the great George Eliot’, together with other notes in the back of her diary: Er fasste Entschlüsse im leidenschaftlichen Zorn, aber er ließ sich nicht davon abbringen wenn sein Zorn sich gelegt hatte, wie vulcanische Gegenstände zu Felsen sich abkühlen und verhärten. Gleich vielen leidenschaftlichen u. unzähmbaren Männern ließ er Uebel unter dem Schutze seiner eigenen Fahrlässigkeit anwachsen, bis sie mit überwältigender Macht auf ihn drückten, u. dann wandte er sich mit grimmiger Strenge um u. wurde erbarmungslos hart.120 The old Squire was an implacable man: he made resolutions in violent anger, and he was not to be moved from them after his anger had subsided – as fiery volcanic matters cool and harden into rock. Like many violent and implacable men, he allowed evils to grow under favour of his own heedlessness, till they pressed upon him with exasperating force, and then he turned round with fierce severity and became unrelentingly hard.121

Reading Eliot reminded Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach of a conversation between the Russian novelist Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–1883) and the German poet and novelist Paul Heyse (1830–1914), and she adds in her diary: ‘Turgenev said to Heyse: George Eliot is greater than I am.’122 Both Turgenev and Heyse were personally known to Eliot. Turgenev, a friend of Lewes’s since the two men had met in Berlin in 1832, became a frequent visitor to Lewes’s home in London, and Turgenev and Eliot became friends. Their acquaintance with Paul Heyse is less well known. On a visit to Munich 116 Agnes

Ziegengeist, ed., Konrad Burdach – Erich Schmidt. Briefwechsel 1884–1912 (Stuttgart and Leipzig: S. Hirzel Verlag, 1998), p. 96. 117 Erich Schmidt, Reden zur Literatur- und Universitätsgeschichte (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1911), p. 14. 118 Konrad Polheim and Rainer Baasner, eds, Tagebücher. Marie von Ebner Eschenbach, 6 vols (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989–97), vol. 3, pp. 317–18: ‘eines der schönsten Bücher die es giebt’. 119 Ibid., ‘Hingerissen von Silas Marner’. 120 Ibid., pp. 359–60: ‘Silas Marner, der Weber von Raveloe, von der großen George Eliot aus d[em] E[nglischen] v. Dr G Fink Stuttgart 1861, S. 109.’ 121 George Eliot, SM, The Weaver of Raveloe, Chapter 8. 122 Polheim, Tagebücher, vol. 3, pp. 359–60: ‘Turgeniew sagte zu Heyse: Die Eliot ist mehr als ich.’

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40   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe with Lewes in 1858, Eliot met Paul Heyse, who had moved there from Berlin in 1854 at the invitation of King Maximilian II of Bavaria to join the King’s Münchner Dichterkreis or Dichtergruppe. This circle included some of the leading writers and poets of the time, and met regularly at the palace in the presence of the king to discuss and read their latest works. Eliot described Heyse in her diary as being ‘like a painter’s poet, ideally beautiful; rather brilliant in his talk and altogether pleasing’.123 These examples give some indication that there was, indeed, a devoted readership among some writers and academics during her lifetime. Although very little written evidence has survived, there are also strong indications that Eliot’s novels were widely discussed in this social group.

123 Harris,

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2



George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013 Annika Bautz

George Eliot in East and West Germany, 1949–1990 From 1949 to 1990, Germany was divided into two separate states. Political and economic structures differed widely, and consequently the publishing trades and literary markets were separate too. The West German book market functioned much like the British or any other free market capitalist one, with reader demand as the main driving force. The East German market, however, was one where the ideological aims of the government played a major role in decisions about what could be published. State censorship and restrictions of both funding and the raw materials for publishing were vital factors. In order to assess comparatively Eliot’s publishing history and reception in East and West Germany, then, an outline of East German publishing conditions will be necessary. Furthermore, so as to be able to compare Eliot’s reception in the two German states, reception, for the purposes of this chapter, will be measured using indicators accessible for both countries: editions and reprints, interpretative essays included in these editions, and different kinds of translation. The chapter will start by discussing publishing conditions in the German Democratic Republic. It will then consider editions and reprints of Eliot’s novels in East and West Germany – which of her texts were published when, where, and how often. In East Germany’s controlled literary market, however, quantitative data such as numbers of editions and reprints were not necessarily indicators of demand or popularity, so the kind of edition and the quality of the translation will be drawn on to evaluate in what format Eliot was available to East and West German readers respectively, and how this may have informed the reading experience. The main focus of this chapter will be on the qualitative evidence of interpretative epilogues that all editions published between 1949 and 1990 in East and in West Germany carry.1 Of course, epilogues do not necessarily tell us how the majority of readers engaged with her novels, but of all scholarly essays about a literary text, they are the most 1

In German publications, interpretative essays tend to be included as epilogues, rather than as introductions.

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42   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe likely to reach general readers. Furthermore, discussing epilogues allows for comparison and some conclusions as to how Eliot’s texts were (intended to be) read in each German state. East German Publishing Conditions In East Germany, literature was valued and given significance beyond that imputed to it in most Western countries.2 The country was often referred to as the Leseland, ‘reading country’, for a number of reasons.3 First, the state emphasized the education of its citizens and assigned a central role in this to literature, therefore actively promoting it. Second, particularly after the wall was built in 1961, severely restricting the freedom of travel between East and West, reading became a ‘substitute for cultures [that GDR citizens] could not experience’.4 As Emmerich notes, the wall was ‘the final signal for a rejection of a unitary German culture’ and definitely separated the two German literary markets.5 Because reading became, in Bock’s words, a ‘window to the world’,6 there was a particularly high demand for literature from ‘the West’ in East Germany, and this included British authors of the nineteenth century. While these factors were favourable for getting British books published in the GDR, there were difficulties to be overcome. The two main restrictions for the supply of literature from the West were state censorship and access to raw materials. In a centralized state with definite ideological aims, the literary market was regulated: in order to bring out a book, a publisher had to obtain a licence from the Ministry of Culture. Very few books were rejected each year, since there were several filters before a work got to the ministry. One was authors’ self-censorship; another, their supervision by a publishing house’s readers throughout the writing process (or, in the case of translators, the translation process); and a third, the publishing house’s director, who had the final say about what was presented to the ministry. As Friedrich Baadke, from 1965 to 1992 reader for British and American literature for the publishing houses Aufbau Verlag and Rütten & Loening, points out, even where a title was thought unsuitable, it was not rejected, but the publishing house would be 2

Among others, Wolfgang Emmerich discusses the high importance of literature in the GDR. See Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR (Berlin: Aufbau, 2009), e.g. p. 13. 3 ‘Leseland’, Lokatis, ‘Vorbemerkung’ in Simone Barck, Martina Langermann and Siegfried Lokatis, Jedes Buch ein Abenteuer: Zensur-System und literarische Öffentlichkeiten in der DDR bis Ende der sechziger Jahre (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), p. 12. See also, for example, Leseland DDR, accompaniment to the 9 March 2009 issue of the weekly Das Parlament. 4 ‘zum Ersatz für nicht erfahrene Kulturen‘. Korte, Schaur, Welz, ‘Vorbemerkungen’, in Barbara Korte, Sandra Schaur and Stefan Welz, eds, Britische Literatur in der DDR (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), pp. 1–12, p. 1. 5 Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte, p. 177: ‘das endgültige Signal für die Absage an eine einheitliche deutsche Kultur‘. 6 ‘ein Fenster [um] in die Welt hiauszusehen’ (Bock 2008, 44).

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George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013   43 asked to withdraw its application, ‘so that censorship did not become obvious as such’.7 Another element that made publishing more challenging, and required careful planning – and allowed for indirect censorship – was the limited supply of paper. Friedemann Berger, from 1971 to 1994 programme director of the Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, explains how the restricted supply of paper meant that publishers had to plan their publications very carefully, and work together to ensure that paper stocks were used to provide as good a literary spread as possible.8 Otto Brandstädter, lector for Aufbau Verlag, confirms how publishers decided together on the provision of ‘key titles’ from ‘classhostile, capitalist, and morally corrupt foreign countries’.9 Among works that were deemed desirable because they could be interpreted as educational in a socialist sense, were British nineteenth-century realist novels. Each year, publishing houses between them therefore made sure that some of these works would be available. Berger emphasizes the influence of Georg Lukacs in rendering ‘nineteenth-century realism […] the high point of pre-socialist prose fiction’.10 Literature’s role in education, more specifically that of realist fiction, was thus central, and was favourable to the publication of Eliot’s novels. Restrictions on paper supply resulted in the careful management of stock and the prioritization of specific authors for specific reasons. In addition, the East German agenda of furthering women’s emancipation helped to promote Eliot, as a woman writer who lived an unconventional life in Victorian Britain. Berger points out how the government’s promotion of emancipation led to ‘a partiality towards female authors of the nineteenth century’. He notes particularly that publishers ‘were aware that women constituted by far the largest part of novel-readers’ and would identify more easily with female authors than with male realists such as Dickens or Thackeray. Therefore, in Berger’s words, female authors such as ‘Jane Austen, the sisters Brontë or George Eliot became favourite authors of female readers in the GDR’. As a result, in the yearly publication plans, publishing houses made sure that there would be enough paper between them for ‘at least one work of one of these authors [Austen, Brontës, Eliot] to be published each year, either in a new edition or at least in a reprint’.11 7

‘Die Zensur durfte nicht als solche in Erscheinung treten.’ Friedrich Baadke, letter, 5 November 2004. The publishing houses of Aufbau and Rütten & Loening were combined in 1964 but continued to use both names. 8 Friedemann Berger, letter, 18 February 2003. 9 ‘klassenfeindlichen, kapitalistischen und moralisch verkommenen Ausland’. Otto Brandstädter, 200 ‘Editionen aus der britischen Literatur in 40 Jahren – eine bescheidene oder bemerkenswerte Leistung von Lektoren des Aufbau-Verlags Berlin?’ (Brandstädter 2008, 39) 10 ‘dass im Gefolge von Georg Lukacs der Realismus des 19. Jahrhunderts den Höhepunkt der vorsozialistischen Prosaliteratur darstellte’, Berger, letter, 18 February 2003. 11 ‘Autorinnen wie Jane Austen, die Schwestern Bronte oder George Eliot [wurden] zu Lieblingsautorinnen von DDR-Leserinnen, so dass wenigstens ein Werk einer der genannten englischen Autorinnen des 19. Jahrhunderts in jedem Jahresangebot

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44   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe In a controlled literary market, numbers of editions and even print runs do not necessarily give indications as to popularity. However, the popularity of British authors in the GDR is remarked upon repeatedly by publishers, readers and historians working on the GDR: Baadke says how he did not need to worry about selling works ‘by authors with an English name’.12 Similarly, Gabriele Bock, reader for English-language literature at Reclam Leipzig, notes the fact that in spite of being entirely unknown, James Hogg’s Memoiren und Bekenntnisse eines gerechtfertigten Sünders sold its whole print run of 25,000 before it was even published, partly because Hogg’s first name indicated Britishness: The first name of the author already signalled that through the purchase of this book you could, at least in your head, go on a journey into a country where people spoke English. [Hogg’s novel] contains the description of historical events, geographical circumstances and social conditions in Edinburgh and its surroundings. The buyers and potential readers of the book thought this so exciting that it did not matter that the novel was written at the beginning of the nineteenth century and that it was set [a] hundred years previous to that. The descriptions of people and their story, the depictions of landscape, all of it helped to look out into the world as if through a window.13

The very fact that it was a book of foreign – Western – origin guaranteed that it would sell. Books by authors from the West were in demand in the GDR to an extent that was never satisfied. British nineteenth-century novels sold out without being advertised. Usually, East German editions of British texts were not reviewed, as reviews would have made potential readers aware of publications they would not have been able to buy because the text had already sold out.14 A significant factor in this desire for East German editions of literature from the West was GDR currency. Unfavourable exchange rates meant that entweder mit einer Neuausgabe oder wenigstens einer Nachauflage vertreten war.’ Berger, letter, 18 February 2003. 12 ‘um den Absatz unserer begrenzten Auflagen brauchten wir uns bei Autoren mit englischen Namen keine Sorgen zu machen’. Baadke, letter, 5 November 2004. 13 ‘So gab schon der Vorname des Autors gewissermaßen ein Signal, dass man mit dem Erwerb des Buches eine Reise in ein Land, in dem Englisch gesprochen wurde, im Kopf machen konnte. Hoggs Memoiren und Bekenntnisse eines gerecht­ fertigten Sünders enthält die Beschreibung historischer Ereignisse, geographischer Gegebenheiten und gesellschaftlicher Zustände in Edinburgh und Umgebung. Das fanden die Käufer des Buches und potentiellen Leser so spanend, dass es dabei keine Rolle spielte, dass der Roman Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts geschrieben worden war und seine Handlung etwas weitere hundert Jahre zurücklag. Die Beschreibung der Leute und ihrer Geschichte, die Landschaftsschilderungen, all das half, wie durch ein Fenster in die Welt hinauszusehen’ (Bock 2008, 44). 14 ‘Die Bücher aus Grossbritannien waren begehrt und ohne weitere Reklame verkauft, wurden zumeist nicht rezensiert, da man weitere Leser darauf aufmerksam gemacht hätte, deren Wunsch, diese Bücher zu kaufen, nicht hätte befriedigt werden können’ (Bock 2008, 45).

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George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013   45 to buy foreign books became immensely expensive for GDR citizens. In fact, as Siegfried Lokatis points out, this price barrier made the exclusion of Western literature possible, particularly after the wall was built.15 Publishers, too, struggled to buy anything in Western currencies. They often could not buy licences to print titles from the West, even where censorship would have permitted them to do so. At times, where publishers did buy a licence to print a title from the West, they printed far higher print runs than they had paid for, something not detected until after the reunification: for example Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s Der Kleine Prinz (Le Petit Prince, 1943) was not printed, as stated and paid for, 98,000 times but 388,000 times; similarly Raymond Chandler’s Die Tote im See (The Lady in the Lake, 1943) was paid for to cover a print run of 30,000, but was actually printed 240,000 times.16 This illegal Plusauflagenpraxis (‘additional print run practice’) provides further evidence of the immense demand for literature from the West. Apart from the ideological leaning towards nineteenth-century realist authors, therefore, an important factor favourable to publishing Eliot in East Germany was that her novels were out of copyright, so that there were no currency or licence issues to contend with. As Dietmar Böhnke points out, when it came to choosing which works to translate, ‘for understandable financial reasons a clear emphasis was on classic authors, particularly those of the nineteenth century’.17 Generally, publishers were proud of the quality of their translations and took great care over them; they were usually newly commissioned, particularly since this work could be paid for in GDR marks, so currency did not present a problem (as it did when anything needed to be acquired in Western currencies). Translators were usually freelance and paid per translation. There were many routes to becoming a translator, and whilst no specified training was required, what most English-language translators had in common was, Böhnke notes, ‘a certain distance from the state’.18 Bock indicates that translators were ‘often former University staff who had become politically unpopular, teachers who had not gone to elections, or English literature scholars who had submitted a request to leave the country’.19 Not surprisingly, therefore, it is not usually translators who are asked to provide the accompanying interpretative essays to editions in the GDR. Once commissioned, translations were checked carefully by a publisher’s reader, in a ‘sentence by sentence comparison’, so that the result was an adequate and 15

Siegfried Lokatis, ‘Lesen in der Diktatur’, in S. Lokatis and I. Sonntag, eds, Heimliche Leser in der DDR: Kontrolle und Verbreitung unerlaubter Literatur (Berlin: C. Links Verlag, 2008), p. 20. 16 Ibid., p. 21. For the above examples he cites the archive of the Volk-und-Welt Verlag as source. 17 ‘ein Schwerpunkt bei der Literaturauswahl aus verständlichen finanziellen Gründen ganz klar auf den Klassikern vor allem des 19. Jahrhunderts lag’ (Böhnke 2008, 124). 18 ‘eine gewisse Staatsferne gehörte offenbar zum Berufsbild’ (Böhnke 2008, 127). 19 ‘Übersetzer waren oftmals ehemalige Hochschulangehörige, die sich politisch unbeliebt gemacht hatten, Lehrer, die nicht zur Wahl gegangen waren oder Anglisten, die einen Ausreiseantrag gestellt hatten’ (Bock 2008, 42).

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46   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe exacting text, as true as possible to the original.20 And indeed, East German translations were regularly reused by publishers after the reunification.21 A combination of factors were thus favourable to the publication of Eliot’s novels in East Germany: literature was promoted by the government, particularly nineteenth-century realist fiction written by women; financial exchange rates meant that it was viable for publishers to commission the translation of out-of-copyright works; and readers’ gender and tastes further contributed to female Western authors being in demand. Editions and Reprints of George Eliot’s Novels in German Translation in East and West Germany, 1949–90 Eliot’s novels were published in both German states, though at different times and in different translations. Figure 2.1: Editions and reprints of Eliot’s novels in East and West Germany

20 ‘Satz-für-Satz

Vergleich’, Baadke, letter, 10 November 2004. Also see, e.g. Brandstädter, p. 35. 21 For example, M by Anaconda, 2010, in Nickel’s translation. There are many examples of GDR translations of nineteenth-century British authors being reprinted after the reunification, such as C. Hoeppener’s 1952 GDR translation of Scott’s Ivanhoe, which after 1990 was published in 1991 by Rütten & Loening; in 1997 by Verlag Das Beste; in 2003 by Aufbau-Verlag; and in 2005 by Weltbild Verlag.

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George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013   47 Figure 2.1 shows editions and reprints of Eliot’s novels in German translation in East and West Germany.22 Her works are published earlier and more frequently in East than in West Germany. The choice of titles, however, is the same: both countries publish four of her novels: SM, MF, AB and M. Neither state publishes any of her other works. Rather than signifying a particularly German reception, however, this choice of novels is roughly in line with Eliot’s reception in other European countries in the second half of the twentieth century. As the chapters in this book show, in the majority of countries after 1950, M, MF and SM represent the core, with some variations, such as East and West Germany, Italy and Norway also translating AB, and some of the short stories being published in some countries.23 Figure 2.2: Editions, reprints, translations and epilogues of Eliot’s novels in East and West Germany East Germany 1949–58

SM, trans. J. Augspurg (1886), epilogue G. Klotz (Leipzig: Reclam, 1958).

1959–68

SM, trans. J. Augspurg (1886), epilogue G. Klotz (Leipzig: Reclam, 1962). MF, trans. O. and E. Fetter, epilogue K. Szudra (Berlin: Aufbau, 1967). SM, trans. E. Schumann, epilogue G. Klotz (Berlin: Aufbau, 1968). SM, trans. E. Schumann, epilogue G. Klotz (Berlin: Buchclub65, 1968).

1969–78

MF, trans. O. and E. Fetter, epilogue K. Szudra (Berlin: Aufbau, 1970). AB, trans. A. Brock, epilogue K. Szudra (Berlin: Aufbau, 1971). AB, trans. A. Brock, epilogue K. Szudra (Berlin: Aufbau, 1973).

1979–90

SM, trans. E. Schumann, epilogue G. Klotz (Berlin: Aufbau, 1979). M, trans. I. Nickel, epilogue K. Szudra (Berlin: Aufbau, 1979). SM, trans. E. Schumann, epilogue G. Klotz (Berlin: Aufbau, 1980).

West Germany

SM, trans. J. Frese (1861), epilogue H. Killy (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1963).

MF, trans. E. König, epilogue E. König, (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983). M, trans. R. Zerbst, epilogue R. Zerbst (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1985). AB, trans. E. König, epilogue E. König (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987).

22

English editions, Swiss and Austrian editions, abridgments and audio and electronic versions have been omitted. 23 The same Eliot titles keep coming up as those most translated in most European countries after 1950 (see the individual chapters in this book for more detail): Norway (SM, MF, AB, M), Denmark (SM, M), Sweden (MF, M), Czech Republic (SM, M, MF, Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob), Russia (SM, MF, M), Italy (AB, MF, M, Clerical Life, Romola, DD), Greece (SM, MF, M, Lifted Veil, Clerical Life), Spain (MF, M, SM, DD, Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob), Poland (MF, M), Netherlands (MF, M).

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48   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe East and West German publishers made the decisions to publish Eliot’s works independent of one another, yet chose to publish the same selection of Eliot’s novels. In separate literary markets, editions of the same novel are based on different translations, even where editions are published relatively close together (for example, the East German Aufbau published M in 1979 in a new translation by Irmgard Nickel, whilst the West German Reclam published M in 1985 in a new translation by Rainer Zerbst). All editions published in East and West Germany contain interpretative epilogues, which provide some indication as to why Eliot’s novels were published in East and West when they were and how the texts were (intended to be) read in each state – particularly as readers would not usually have had access to the editions published in the other German state. While these essays do not reveal how real readers interpreted the texts, they show what the writers of epilogues thought noteworthy about these novels. Epilogues and Translations in East and West Germany East German publishers first introduced George Eliot’s fiction in translation to readers in 1958. From then on, Eliot’s novels were regularly included in East German publishing plans and outputs, in spite of the market limitations outlined above. It is perhaps not surprising that SM should be the first novel by George Eliot to be published in East Germany. In fact, as Figure 2.2 shows, while no other Eliot novel comes out more than twice in East Germany, SM is published six times. The evidence of editions and translations suggests that SM has always been the most popular of Eliot’s novels in Germany, from its first translation in 1861 onwards.24 More importantly here, however, as the epilogue by Günther Klotz which accompanies all East German editions of SM demonstrates, many aspects of the novel seem to lend themselves to a Marxist interpretation, such as its working-class hero, middle-class villain and happy end for Eppie in her decision to remain working class. Klotz is a scholar who regularly features as the author of epilogues to East German editions of British authors. His epilogue appears in the first East German edition of SM in 1958, and is then reprinted five more times before the reunification.

24

William Baker and John Ross, George Eliot: A Bibliographical History (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2002), pp. 156–61, lists ten translations of SM into German: 1861, 1862, 1883, 1902, 1912, 1925, 1949 (excluded in this essay because it is an abridgment), 1963 (actually 1958), 1963 and 1965 (actually 1968). The 1963 Fischer edition and what is listed as the 1963 Reclam Leipzig edition (actually 1958) are in fact reprints of nineteenth-century translations, so appear to have been double-counted. This compares to four translations of AB: 1860, 1861, 1971 and 1987 (Baker and Ross, pp. 78–79); four of MF: 1861, 1861, 1967 and 1983 (Baker and Ross, pp. 118–22); and three of M: 1872, 1979 and 1985 (Baker and Ross, pp. 309–10).

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George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013   49 Uncharacteristically for an East German edition of a nineteenth-century novel, the translation for the first edition of SM was not newly commissioned, which, paradoxically, could be a sign of how important an early publication of this text was to publishers. Older translations that a publishing house may already have owned were usually only employed if the quality was deemed acceptable.25 The translation used for the edition of SM printed by Reclam Leipzig in 1958 and 1962 is by J. Augspurg and was first published by the same publishing house in 1886, making this an example of an older translation being used because the publishing house already owned it. However, subsequently, it must have been deemed inadequate, as for the third East German edition of SM, published by Aufbau in 1968, the publishers use a newly commissioned translation by Eva Schumann, which is accompanied by the same Klotz epilogue as the earlier Reclam edition. The fact that the novel was moved to another publishing house but kept its initial epilogue shows how publishers shared materials and worked together to make sure that between them, a basic provision of the category of nineteenth-century realist fiction was offered each year. It also underlines the fact that writers of epilogues were not usually affiliated to a specific publishing house; they were often academics at GDR universities. Furthermore, the edition also testifies to the care publishing houses took over their editions, as, rather than continuing to reprint a nineteenth-century translation, Aufbau commissioned a new one. Yet the 1958 epilogue was evidently considered suitable right up to 1980, when the last East German version of SM was published. The evidence of editions and translations suggests, then, that SM was a novel the Ministry of Culture endorsed and publishers had on their list of texts that should be made available regularly to East German readers – in a good and accessible translation and with an interpretative epilogue to steer readers in the right direction. The next Eliot novel to be published was MF in 1967, reprinted in 1970. The translation had been newly commissioned by Aufbau Verlag, as had the epilogue by Klaus Udo Szudra. Szudra, like Klotz an academic, was working at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He is an example of the ‘close cooperation’ that existed between publishing houses and academics at GDR universities.26 He features prominently as a writer of epilogues to editions of British authors in translation in the GDR, for various East German publishing houses and for several decades. His essays range from nineteenth-century British novelists such as Austen, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens and Hardy to Shakespeare and Shaw. The function of epilogues, over and above directing readers, was also to legitimize a publication for the Ministry of Culture, and to ensure a suggested title would be given authorization to be printed.27 Indeed, every title 25

Baadke, letter, 10 November 2004, ‘Bei freien, also klassischen Autoren, wurde grundsätzlich neu übersetzt [...] Es sei denn, es gab eine ältere, ebenfalls freie, aber noch brauchbare Übersetzung.’ 26 ‘enge Zusammenarbeit’ (Brandstädter 2008, 35). 27 See e.g. Bock, p. 43.

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50   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe submitted to the Ministry of Culture had to be accompanied by an epilogue.28 Szudra was evidently a well-trusted writer of epilogues, since Aufbau Verlag commissioned him again to provide the epilogue to AB published in 1971 (reprinted in 1973) in a new translation by Ana Maria Brock, and similarly, Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung contracted Szudra to write the accompanying essay to their 1979 edition of M in a new translation by Irmgard Nickel. Unlike translators, then, who as noted above may not always have been regarded as absolutely trustworthy by the government, writers of epilogues were often employed by GDR universities and as such absolutely trusted with regard to their political persuasions. Szudra’s essays would thus have helped to get printing permission for Eliot’s novels. Given the function of epilogues, their Marxist perspective is of course not surprising. They focus mainly on four aspects in essays accompanying Eliot’s texts: the historical context and conditions of nineteenth-century life in Britain; Eliot’s gender and her biography; the realist mode of her writing; and the moral ideals that she is seen as propagating. Large parts of these essays discuss the historical context of nineteenth-century Britain. This is a feature of GDR epilogues to British nineteenth-century novels generally: conditions are described in order that they can then be criticized and shown to be in opposition to a socialist order. In part, as Friedrich Baadke explains, the context was set out in such detail because it was often difficult for individual readers in the GDR to find out more about an author or a text, so part of the purpose of the epilogue was to provide readers with Eliot’s historical context. However, epilogues also function to give ‘an ideologically correct interpretation’ of the novel, to help the reader ‘understand the book “correctly”’.29 Epilogues give their interpretation of aspects of Britain in the nineteenth century, and then place Eliot herself and the novels into that context. The century is presented as dominated by Klassenkampf, the struggle between classes. Szudra is keen to point out that during her childhood, Eliot would have witnessed the miserable living conditions of the poor in the country (Szudra, MF, 640), long working hours and child labour, and the exploitation of the poor for the benefit of the rich. Furthermore, Szudra and Klotz claim that in the early nineteenth century workers were not as yet ‘a unified force’ (Szudra, MF, 640),30 but that later in the century, the bourgeoisie slowly lost power as ‘the new class, the proletariat, resisted the exploitation in factories and mines and demanded better living conditions and political rights’ (Klotz, 232).31 But as yet, ‘boundless egoism and tough competition meant that most members of society were barred from happiness in order for the rich to become yet

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Korte, Schaur and Welz, ‘Vorbemerkungen’, p. 3. ‘eine ideologisch korrekte Interpretationshilfe geben, ihm [dem Leser] helfen, das Buch “richtig” zu verstehen’, Baadke, letter, 5 November 2004. 30 ‘geeinte Kraft’ (Szudra 1967, 640). 31 ‘Die neue Klasse, das Proletariat, widersetzte sich der Ausbeutung in Fabriken und Gruben, forderte bessere Lebensbedingungen und politische Rechte’ (Klotz 1958, 232). 29

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George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013   51 richer’ (Klotz, 233).32 Klotz sees this selfishness as even worse in the colonies of the empire: the economic stability of which Britain was so proud was ‘bought […] with the sweat of colonial people’ (Klotz, 233),33 not only with that of Britain’s own labouring classes. Furthermore, the Church, instead of alleviating the plight of the poor, was just another medium of oppression, since it worked with the bourgeoisie (Szudra, MF, 640). East German epilogues emphasize the evils of capitalism in nineteenth-century Britain as exemplified in Eliot’s novels. This is the context into which Eliot herself is then placed. Epilogues dwell on certain outward facts of Eliot’s biography, without going into any detail regarding some of the complexities of her character and opinions, which is especially noticeable perhaps where her attitudes to emancipation and feminism are concerned. Her father is a carpenter who worked himself up to become the agent for the Newdigate family of Arbury. These roots also mean that ‘she was best at depicting country people, particularly those of her own level, peasants and craftsmen’ (Klotz, 240),34 so that she is presented as a writer of and for the people. Her rejection of conventional religion and her living with Lewes make her an unconventional woman who is heroic in opposing stiff and hypocritical Victorian conventions. Klotz emphasizes how ‘we can barely appreciate what a step this was for a woman in Victorian England, it was a critique of and an insult to the existing order’ (235),35 while Szudra generalizes her unconventional acts and sees them as politically motivated: ‘Marian Evans, who possessed the courage to avow what she believed right, was to keep transgressing the unwritten laws of decorum and was made to suffer for her upright […] acts’ (Szudra, MF, 644).36 Living with Lewes, in particular, is seen as an ‘act of defiance […] which duly led to a social boycott’ (Klotz, 237).37 Both Klotz and Szudra argue that marriage was impossible because of class: they claim that Lewes’s divorce would have been too expensive, as ‘a procedure only affordable by those who possessed a fortune’ (Klotz, 237; also Szudra, MF, 645, Szudra, M, 585).38 Social boycott, they argue, is a result of

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‘schrankenloser Egoismus und harter Konkurrenzkampf schlossen die meisten Glieder der Gesellschaft vom Glück aus, damit die Reichen reicher werden konnten’ (Klotz 1958, 233). ‘erkauft [...] mit dem Schweiß der Kolonialvölker des Empire’ (Klotz 1958, 233). ‘Am trefflichsten zeichnete sie die ländliche Bevölkerung, vor allem die Vertreter ihrer eigenen Schicht, die Pächterbauern und Handwerker’ (Klotz 1958, 240). ‘Wir können kaum ermessen, was dieser Schritt für eine Frau im viktorianischen England bedeutete: Es war eine Kritik und eine Beleidigung des Bestehenden’ (Klotz 1958, 235). ‘Marian Evans, die den Mut besaß, sich zu dem zu bekennen was sie für recht hielt, hat noch oft gegen die ungeschriebenen Gesetze der “Wohlanständigkeit” verstoßen und an den Folgen ihrer aufrechten, das Gerede nicht scheuenden Handlungen schwer zu tragen gehabt’ (Szudra 1967, 645). ‘Diese [...] Herausforderung ihrer viktorianischen Zeitgenossen führte zu einem gesellschaftlichen Boykott’ (Klotz 1958, 237). ‘ein Verfahren, das sich nur leisten konnte, wer ein Vermögen besaß’ (Klotz 1958, 237).

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52   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe not being rich enough to live in a way that a hypocritical bourgeois society would have deemed acceptable. Interestingly, Eliot’s and Lewes’s strong German interests are not discussed. Lewes primarily features as Eliot’s partner, not as a writer or as the author of The Life of Goethe (of which there is no post-war German edition). Their visits to Germany are not mentioned in these essays, nor are the German salons they frequented, nor indeed Eliot’s essay on ‘Three Months in Weimar’, and other references to German places and people. One possible reason might be that this would show her as belonging to bourgeois society, to which the epilogues try to present her as being in opposition. However, the essays mention her translations of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity and David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus. Szudra claims that her translations of Feuerbach and Strauss inspire her to renounce Christianity;39 Klotz even sees her Strauss translation as her ‘first literary achievement’ (Klotz, SM, 235).40 Not surprisingly, given their Marxist leanings, these essays stress Eliot’s atheism and critical attitude towards Christianity. While they do not elaborate on her connection to Germany, they at least claim the powerful and immediate influence of these two German writers on her. The fact that she does not fit into an order that GDR ideology views as fundamentally wrong means that the way in which Eliot lives her life, especially as a woman, is seen as brave, laudable and, crucially, emancipated. Her choosing to use a male pseudonym, too, is viewed as a sign of the depravity and hypocrisy of Victorian society, which necessitates such an act. As with Charlotte Brontë or Jane Austen, the fact that Eliot was a woman and unmarried made literary and social acceptance much harder (Szudra, AB, 637–38). Again, the implication here is that current conditions in the GDR are far superior to nineteenth-century British capitalism, and that Eliot would have approved of this more developed social order. Eliot, then, leads a life that is expressed in her work, unlike some other great realists such as Scott. In the GDR, Scott was presented as being compelled to write realistically even against his personal political convictions. ‘Like so many great realists, such as Balzac or Tolstoy, [Scott] became a great realist despite his own political and social views. In Scott, too, one can establish Engels’s “triumph of realism” over his personal, political and social views’ (Lukács 1989, 54). Eliot, by contrast, is seen as writing her beliefs: her life and her work correspond, as evidenced, for example, by the many autobiographical elements in her novels.41 She consciously attempts to educate her readers, and her moral aim is to further altruism through her novels’ realism, and, as a result, to reveal the evils of egotism resultant from

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‘Angeregt durch das Studium Ludwig Feuerbachs und David Friedrich Strauss’, deren Schriften sie in Englische übersetzte, entschloss sie sich nach qualvollen inneren Kämpfen, dem Christentum zu entsagen’ (Szudra 1979, 583). 40 ‘Strauss’ Leben Jesu, das dem Christentum jede historische Grundlage absprach und die Evangelien als Mythen nachwies [war] ihre erste literarische Leistung’ (Klotz 1958, 235–36). 41 See, for example, epilogues to AB 643, MF 649, M 594.

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George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013   53 capitalism. She does not write for money, but views her art as ‘for the good of humanity’.42 Her works emphasize ‘true humanity’43 and ’humane social ethics’.44 These values, argues Szudra, emerge in M, where they are demonstrated by the contrast between Dorothea as the altruistic ideal, and the ‘merciless social competition’ (Szudra, M, 593–94)45 and stifling social conditions surrounding her. In all of Eliot’s novels, philanthropy is at the centre. In spite of the fundamental contrast between Eliot and Scott as regards their biography, then, their novels’ focus on humans in real historical conditions links their writings to those of other great writers who constitute the nineteenth-century school of realism: Dickens and Thackeray, but also Austen and Brontë.46 This foregrounding of realism again emphasizes how important this formal element is to the Ministry of Culture, and therefore to getting a book published in the GDR: Klotz notes that Karl Marx himself had praised nineteenth-century realist fiction since it exposed the century for what it was (Klotz, 233), and for Szudra, these novels demonstrate the ‘misery and destitution in this nation that prided itself on its wealth and glory’ (Szudra, MF, 649).47 Eliot’s novels are ‘historically accurate’ (Klotz, 242),48 for example in the way in which they unmask the ‘deeply egotistical practises of the bourgeois economic system’ (Szudra, AB, 641),49 and ‘the moral inferiority of the ruling classes’ (Klotz, 242),50 such as that of the three Cass men in SM, none of whom is morally upright, compared with the altruism, for example, of Dinah or Adam in AB. Maggie in MF fails because she does not fit into the society in which she lives, characterized as it is by ‘egotism, avarice and shrivelled humanity’, sterility and focus on money and property as the main, but empty, concern (Szudra, MF, 654).51 It is this society which provides ‘the real background for the tragic failure of the heroine’ (Szudra, MF, 655).52 In contrast to Alfred Lord Tennyson, for example, who is seen as embedded within and representing bourgeois ideology which leads him to represent the

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‘Dienst am Menschen’, Szudra 1967, 649. (The epilogues do not discuss readers’ access to her texts.) 43 ‘wahre Menschlichkeit’ (Szudra 1967, 655). 44 ‘echte sittliche Werte’ (Szudra 1967, 649). 45 ‘erbarmungslose[r] gesellschaftliche[r] Konkurrenzkampf[]’ (Szudra 1979, 593). 46 Not surprisingly, Dickens was published frequently in the GDR: Aufbau Verlag alone published 18 Dickens titles in 66 volumes, including reprints (Brandstädter 2008, 36). 47 ‘die erschreckende Vorherrschaft von Elend und Not in dieser gerühmten Nation des Wohlstandes und der Herrlichkeit’ (Szudra 1967, 649). 48 ‘historisch richtig’ (Klotz 1958, 242) 49 ‘kraßegoistischen Praktiken des bürgerlichen Wirtschaftsbetriebes’ (Szudra 1971, 641). 50 ‘die moralische Unterlegenheit der Besitzenden’ (Klotz 1958, 242). 51 ‘Sinnbilder der Selbstsucht, des Geizes und verkümmerter Menschlichkeit’ (Szudra 1967, 654). 52 ‘bildet den eigentlichen Hintergrund für das tragische Scheitern der Heldin’ (Szudra 1967, 655).

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54   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe world as harmonious, Eliot describes the hypocrisy she sees everywhere.53 Religion, too, serves as a mask: people appear religious, but actually combine religion with exploitation. Overall, then, and in line with East German epilogues to novels generally, there is more emphasis on context and biography and, extrapolated from these, Eliot’s views, than there is on detailed analysis of the texts themselves. (For example, the time of the novels’ setting is discussed in vague terms, so that Eliot’s life and society can represent that of the texts.) There is very little discussion of form. However, East German epilogues always see her works as belonging to the much-admired school of nineteenth-century realism. Szudra describes it as a big achievement that Eliot contributed to ‘the establishment of realism as the authoritative mode of artistic representation of the world’ (Szudra, M, 586).54 He praises Eliot for giving new life to an area of the realist novel that ‘had been neglected [since Jane Austen]: life in the English provinces’. This remark does not then lead to a discussion of the Dorfroman, or of form more generally, but to an examination of her protagonists as ‘ordinary people’ (Szudra, MF, 647–48).55 Partly to give a context not otherwise easily available in the GDR, and partly to recommend the respective novel to the Ministry of Culture, essays give a larger Marxist view of context and writer, rather than close interpretation of the novel in question. While the writers of epilogues are academics, they are not usually scholars who specialize in that particular author. Statements on the texts therefore tend to be general rather than detailed, and minor factual mistakes about textual details occur occasionally – for example, Klotz claims that in order to atone for his sins, Godfrey Cass has to leave Raveloe at the end. Earlier epilogues to Eliot’s novels, when ideological boundaries were still very strict, sometimes even make apologies for middleclass characters featuring at all in the novels, such as one by Szudra which states that in Eliot’s novels generally, the protagonists are usually working class, and where middle-class characters feature this is ‘to illustrate the psychological and social contrast’.56 By 1979, when M was published, ideological boundaries had become much less strict,57 which is one likely reason why this novel, with 53

‘Dem von den herrschenden Klassen – Industriekapitalisten und Grundherren – bestellten Sänger, dem Poeta laureatus Alfred Lord Tennyson, erschien das Leben rosenrot’ (Klotz 1958, 233); ‘[Eliot] teilte nicht den billigen Optimismus eines Alfred Tennyson, der es vorzog, die Missstände und Ungerechtigkeiten der bürgerlichen Ordnung in eine poetische Scheinharmonie zu verwandeln’ (Szudra 1967, 649). 54 ‘die Durchsetzung des Realismus als der verbindlichen Methode künstlerisher Wirklichkeitsgestaltung’ (Szudra 1979, 586). 55 ‘[Eliot gestaltete] einen seit Jane Austen vernachlässigten Darstellungsbereich des realistischen Romans neu: das englische Landleben. George Eliots Helden sind meist einfache Menschen’ (Szudra 1967, 647–48). 56 ‘Wo George Eliot die ‘bessere Gesellschaft’ in die Romanhandlung einbezieht, geschieht dies meist um des psychologischen und sozialen Kontrastes willen’ (Szudra 1967, 648.) 57 Baadke, letter, 5 November 2011. See also Emmerich, pp. 396–401.

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George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013   55 its middle-class focus and protagonists, could be published. Nonetheless, the accompanying essay glosses over much of the novel’s content and emphasizes that positive characters cannot really live in this stifling bourgeois world, so that it does not need to address Dorothea’s choice of domesticity at the end. By not discussing the heroines in any detail, and instead discussing Eliot the woman in the Victorian context which they see as hostile to her, writers of epilogues represent her as opposed to the social and moral status quo. This tendency to describe at a general level is not limited to Eliot’s works, but a widespread characteristic of East German epilogues to nineteenthcentury novels. Jane Austen, for example, was treated similarly, and with Scott was repeatedly hailed as having ‘paved the way for the glorious literary age of Victorian realism, so that she became an immediate predecessor of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and George Eliot’.58 With her, too, it is her gender and the period of her writing that primarily make her novels worth reading, rather than the novels themselves. It is through an emphasis on Austen’s biography – her daring to write and her not marrying – that she is seen a pioneer of emancipation. As with Eliot, this view means that some parts of her biography and some parts of the novels’ contents are glossed over, so that she can be regarded as a promoter of emancipation.59 These views and practices explain why Eliot was published in the GDR as early was she was. Epilogues and Translations in East and West Germany Compared The first West German publication of an Eliot novel, the 1963 Fischer edition of SM, appeared almost as early as the first East German one, but after this event, none was published in West Germany for 20 years, when Reclam Stuttgart brought out Die Mühle am Floss in 1983. Reclam followed this edition with M in 1985 and AB in 1987. These dates suggest that when Fischer first introduced SM into West Germany, it must not have sold well, since for two decades no further attempt was made either to reprint SM or bring out another Eliot novel. By contrast, when Reclam again introduced Eliot in 1983, this appears to have been at least successful enough to warrant bringing out two further Eliot novels over the next few years. However, there are no immediate reprints and no other publishers who bring out Eliot once Reclam reintroduced her, so the success must have been moderate.

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‘gemeinsam mit Walter Scott dem glanzvollen Literaturzeitalter des viktorianischen Realismus den Weg bereitete und so zur unmittelbaren Vorläuferin von Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray und George Eliot wurde’ (Szudra 1989, ‘Epilogue’ to Mansfield Park, 513). 59 See, for example, Elfi Schneidenbach, ‘Epilogue’ to Emma, trans. Horst Höckendorf (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1980), pp. 459–72. For a discussion of Austen in East Germany, see Annika Bautz, ‘The Reception of Jane Austen in Germany, 1949–2003’, in Anthony Mandal and Brian Southam, eds, The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe (Continuum 2007), pp. 93–116.

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56   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe The 1963 edition differs from the 1980s Reclam ones in several respects: instead of commissioning a new translation, Fischer reprinted the first ever translation of SM into German by Julius Frese, published in 1861.60 This falls into a typical West German pattern, where publishers commonly reprint freely-available, out-of-copyright translations of nineteenth-century novels. The Frese translation printed by Fischer in West Germany is not as close to the original as either of the translations of SM printed in East Germany. For example, it omits entire paragraphs, which is particularly noticeable in the final chapter. In Frese’s translation, the chapter ends with Mr Macey’s speech to Silas on Eppie’s wedding day, leaving out the final focus on Eppie, Silas and their home. Both the older translation that is printed in the GDR, the 1886 Augspurg one, and the newly commissioned one by Eva Schumann (1968) give the complete ending. Both these translations therefore conclude with Eppie’s happiness in her choice of a working-class life, her love for her foster father, and their pleasure in a simple but beautiful house and garden. The final sentence reads: ‘Oh father,’ said Eppie, ‘what a pretty home ours is! I think nobody could be happier than we are.’61 J. Augspurg (1886, printed in East Germany in 1958 and 1962): ‘Oh, Vater, welch ein köstliches Heim haben wir jetzt’, rief Eppie, ‘ich glaube, es kann niemand glücklicher sein als wir!’62 E. Schumann (1968, reprinted 1968, 1979, 1980): ‘O Vater’, rief Eppie, ‘wie schön ist es bei uns! Ich glaube, niemand kann glücklicher sein als wir!’63

Augspurg focuses more on the ‘home’ and Schumann more on a general ‘at ours’. She also updates Augspurg’s archaisms (‘köstliches Heim’), but both translations show the care that is taken in East Germany over editions: even where publishers use a nineteenth-century out-of-copyright translation, it is one that is closer to the original than the nineteenth-century one printed in West Germany. In the case of SM, this also means that the original ending, especially important from a Marxist perspective, is preserved. Fischer’s edition of SM includes a short epilogue, whereas many West German editions of classic novels do not carry epilogues at all. SM is part of ‘Die Fischer Bibliothek der hundert Bücher’ (The Fischer library of one

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As Gerlinde Roder-Bolton notes, Frese had also translated Lewes’s Life and Works of Goethe and was commissioned to translate AB, MF and SM into German. In the 1860s, his name would have conferred status onto Eliot’s novels (RöderBolton, ‘The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime’). This, of course, was no longer the case 100 years later when Frese’s name had become unfamiliar to German readers. 61 George Eliot, SM: The Weaver of Raveloe, ed. Q. D. Leavis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 244. 62 George Eliot, SM: Der Leinweber von Raveloe, trans. J. Augspurg, epilogue Günther Klotz (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1958), p. 284. 63 George Eliot, SM: Der Weber von Raveloe, trans. E. Schumann, epilogue Günther Klotz (Berlin: Aufbau, 1968), p. 230.

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George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013   57 hundred books), edited by Professor Walther Killy in the early 1960s. However, while being included in this series gave the novel some status at least, there are no signs of this translating into popularity in West Germany. The six-page epilogue is by Dr Herta Killy, who appears to have been otherwise mostly involved in fine art publications, so does not seem to have had any special interest in Eliot or in other nineteenth-century British authors. Unlike East German essays, there is no discussion of context here. However, Killy does not give a detailed textual analysis either, but keeps her discussion at a rather general level, repeatedly admiring Eliot’s ‘artful prose’ without providing textual examples.64 Her main point is that the novel’s plot is anything but realistic, and in fact has many fairy tale elements, but that Eliot’s prose confers ‘the reality of the quotidian onto the legendary’.65 Overall then, this is a short essay which mainly addresses Eliot’s ‘skill’ in a rather abstract way, but, unlike East German introductions, does not discuss context, biography, gender or morality at any length, nor does it see Eliot as part of a realist tradition. No Eliot novel was published between 1963 and 1983 in West Germany. The three editions Reclam Stuttgart brought out in the 1980s differ greatly from the 1963 Fischer one. They compare to Oxford University Press and Penguin editions in the UK as scholarly yet affordable editions. The epilogues are extensive analytical essays aimed at an educated readership. In each case it is the translator who provides the epilogue, on the basis of intimate acquaintance with the text. The Reclam editions contain notes and further reading, again compiled by the translator (Eva Maria König in the case of both the 1983 MF and the 1987 AB, and Rainer Zerbst in the case of the 1985 M). Both König and Zerbst repeatedly feature as translators, editors and critics of English classic texts. The translations themselves are close to the original and of high quality. The same can be said about the translations done in the GDR, although at times differences emerge. For example, Chapter 5 of M begins with an epigraph from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, to lead into Mr Casaubon’s letter to Dorothea in which he proposes marriage to her. Hard students are commonly troubled with gowts, catarrhs, rheums, cachexia, bradypepsia, bad eyes, stone, and collick, crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases as come by over-much sitting: they are most part lean, dry, ill-coloured […] and all through immoderate pains and extraordinary studies. If you will not believe the truth of this, look upon great Tostatus and Thomas Aquainas’ works; and tell me whether those men took pains. (Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy)66

Zerbst in his 1985 Reclam edition gives the epigraph both in the original and in a translation, thereby distinguishing it from Eliot’s nineteenth-century prose, whereas Nickel’s 1979 translation for Aufbau Verlag leaves the epigraph 64

‘kunstvolle Prosa’ (Killy 1963, 172). ‘[…] verleihen dem Legendären die Realität des Alltäglichen’ (Killy 1963, 171–72). 66 As cited in George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 39. 65

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58   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe out, starting immediately with Casaubon’s letter. One important difference in the publishing process is of course that the Reclam editions are very much the work of one individual, whereas there are several people closely involved in every East German edition. It is therefore impossible to say whose decision it was to omit the epigraphs, but one of the effects in the case of Chapter 5 is that it renders Mr Casaubon more selfish as an individual. One might argue that Zerbst being editor and translator makes him more sensitive to the effects the epigraph has and the way it frames Casaubon as a scholar and as a suitor of Dorothea. Zerbst keeps some English words in his translation, such as ‘Mrs. Cadwallader’, or ‘James’ for Mr Brooke’s servant. Nickel eliminates most of these, so that ‘Mrs.’ becomes ‘Frau Cadwallader’. She also replaces ‘James’ with ‘Jonas’, making it unequivocally clear to East German readers that this is a first name, not a surname. Perhaps she assumes her readers would not necessarily know these English terms, but it is also an interpretative choice: ‘Frau Cadwallader’ compared to ‘Jonas’ ensures the class difference is emphasized for East German readers. Another example, which shows the East German translator working harder at finding a German term, is Dorothea’s use of ‘Kitty’ when she addresses Celia. Zerbst for his West German edition just gives it as ‘Kitty’, whereas Nickel in her version gives ‘Kätzchen’ (kitten) for ‘Kitty’. Nickel thus ensures that East German readers are aware of Celia as a cute, pretty pet and thereby preserves the negative qualities of a bourgeois character, whereas Zerbst risks losing that connotation for his German readers. There are also examples which show Nickel’s to be the more accurate translation. Dorothea’s reaction to Casaubon’s letter includes her imagining her future life: ‘Now she would be able to devote herself to large yet definite duties.’67 Nickel’s translation reads ‘Jetzt würde sie in der Lage sein, sich umfassenden, aber klar umrissenen Pflichten zu widmen.’68 Zerbst’s version reads ‘Jetzt würde sie in der Lage sein, sich großen, freilich noch unklaren Pflichten hinzugeben.’69 Zerbst evidently misreads the original here (‘as yet unclear duties’ rather than the original’s ‘definite duties’) whereas Nickel gives an accurate translation. She, of course, would have had her work closely checked by the publishing house’s reader. On the whole, however, like all East German translations and those done for Reclam in West Germany, both Nickel’s and Zerbst’s translations are accurate and readable renderings of Eliot’s original. East and West German Epilogues: Texts vs Contexts The Reclam epilogues are scholarly discussions of the texts. A major focus that emerges in these editions is gender: the first sentence of the jacket text on the 1983 Reclam edition of MF gives Eliot’s real name, and thereby makes sure 67

M, p. 41. M, trans. Nickel, p. 63. 69 M, trans. Zerbst, p. 58. 68

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George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013   59 readers know that this is a female author.70 The epilogues, too, begin with a focus on her gender. As in East German epilogues, essays give biographical detail in the context of nineteenth-century Britain, but without any overt political agenda. For example, using a male pseudonym is here presented as primarily a personally motivated decision, rather than a political necessity, and a divorce is impossible for Lewes ‘because of the then prevailing laws on divorce’ (König 1983, 740),71 instead of it being too expensive for anyone outside the elite. Significantly, as in East German epilogues, Eliot’s strong interest in Germany is not discussed. As in East Germany, West German epilogues mention her translations of Strauss and Feuerbach, and comment on these writers’ ‘remarkably big influence on her’, usually in the context of the role of religion in her life – but the essays do not consider Eliot’s German connections in any detail.72 These short references suggest that the importance of her interest in German philosophers and theologians is acknowledged in both East and West, but, perhaps oddly, no attempt is made to render her more relevant to German readers because of her German affinities. By far the largest parts of these essays analyse the text itself. König, for example, in her epilogue to AB, analyses the novel’s epigraph, from Wordsworth’s Excursion (given in both the original and in German), which she sees as relevant for both the content as well as the ‘artistic intention’ of the novel (König 1987, 747).73 An essential part of this artistic intention is the absence of any ‘idealisation [or] heroisation’ (König 1987, 748).74 König supports her statements about characters with examples from the text, such as Adam’s development, which results in his decision to assist Hetty: ‘Ich will nie wieder hart sein’ – ‘I’ll never be hard again’ (König 1987, 759).75 Similarly, when Zerbst discusses how M condemns moral blindness and the tendency to see only one’s own point of view, he cites Chapter 29, ‘Warum immer Dorothea? ’ – ‘But why always Dorothea?’ – to back up his point from the text (Zerbst 1985, 1175).76 West German epilogues do not discuss either Eliot or her heroines as feminist, although the essays emphasize women’s concerns. For example, 70

Interestingly, the blurb presents Eliot’s work as new in Germany and König’s edition as having discovered this author’s quality, rather than linking back to her success in the nineteenth century. (‘Die Bekanntheit ihrer Werke in Deutschland hält sich freilich in Grenzen, was gewiß damit zusammenhängt, daß adäquate Übersetzungen bisher fehlen. Eva Maria Königs neue Version von MF versucht diesen beklagenswerten Zustand zu verbessern.’) 71 ‘auf Grund des damals geltenden Scheidungsrechtes’ (König 1983, 740). 72 Feuerbach’s was ‘ein Werk das einen ausserordentlich grossen Einfluss auf sie ausübte’ (König, MF, 740). Zerbst similarly puts her translations into a religious rather than a straighforward German context: ‘[sie] löste sich rasch von ihren religiösen Überzeugungen, übersetzte gar Das Leben Jesu’ (1165). 73 ‘künstlerische Intention des Romans’ (König 1987, 747). 74 ‘keine Idealisierung, keine Heroisierung’ (König 1987, 748). 75 König 1987, p. 759. 76 Zerbst 1985, p. 1175.

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60   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe König’s essay focuses on Maggie, her intelligence and her frustrations at not being allowed to learn what Tom does. But Maggie is not presented as an ideal: she may be ‘deeper, more humane’ than Tom, but Tom is not simply evil or wrong (König 1983, 746).77 Similarly, Arthur in AB is not merely a villain. AB, too, is put into a female context: Mary Anne’s aunt Mrs Evans had told her of how she had visited a woman in prison who had murdered her child, so that this female-dominated element becomes the basis of the story. As in East German epilogues, then, there is a focus on gender, but whereas in East Germany this is approached entirely through the author’s biography (since the heroines in the texts are not discussed in any detail), in West German essays this interest in gender emerges from of an analysis of the texts. Unlike East German essays, West German ones see a difference between Eliot’s unconventional life and her novels: she does not ‘make her novels a mouthpiece of critical revolt against tradition and orthodox belief ’ (König 1987, 745).78 Zerbst discusses Dorothea’s sufferings in a society that views women as ‘accessory’, without ‘reasoning powers’ (1164), but concludes that overall, ‘the position of women in M stays on a conservative level […] George Eliot was never at the forefront of the women’s movement’ (Zerbst 1985, 1167).79 This is a significant contrast to East German essays, in which Eliot’s novels are seen as radically opposed to the Victorian status quo. Regarding biography, both the West German and East German epilogues mention the difficulties Eliot had to overcome as a woman living the life she did in Victorian England. However, West German epilogues also discuss her literary success and popularity, and how this eventually allowed her to overcome social ostracism (Zerbst 1985, 1166). Yet these remarks are confined to her popularity in Britain: neither Lewes’s nor her own reception in Germany is mentioned in either East or West. East German epilogues occasionally mention her success in nineteenth-century Britain, but gloss over it, since it is in opposition to their depiction of Eliot as a woman who fights against the society in which she lives. Another major concern in West German epilogues is the moral aim of Eliot’s novels. König sees love in all its forms as the novels’ primary concern, and argues against seeing MF as simply a Bildungsroman. Instead, it is a novel about morality as the highest aim for its own sake, not connected to either hope of reward nor fear of punishment in an afterlife. Consequently, egotism becomes the most deplorable quality (König 1983, 748). Absolute heroism and absolute villainy do not exist in her novels; rather, the texts’ main interest is in the human capacity to develop into morally responsible beings who can

77

‘tiefere, menschlichere’ (König 1983, 746). ‘Man könnte meinen, George Eliot habe ihre Romane zum Sprachrohr kritischer Auflehnung gegen Tradition und orthodoxen Glauben gemacht, doch man stellt sehr schnell fest, daß dies nicht der Fall ist’ (König 1987, 745). 79 ‘Frauen sind in dieser Gesellschaft Anhängsel; Denkfähigkeit wird ihnen nicht attestiert [...] Die Position der Frau bleibt in Middlemarch konservativ. Revolutionäre Neuerung war George Eliots Sache nicht [...] an der Front der Frauenbewegung stand George Eliot nie’ (Zerbst 1985, 1164–67). 78

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George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013   61 see beyond their own narrow perspective and sympathize with others (Zerbst 1985, 1175). Morality in East German essays is defined more straightforwardly. SM, for example, is described even on the jacket as a story about ‘the victory of good over evil’ (SM, Aufbau, 1979).80 Crucially, in West German essays plot and moral message are linked to technique, structure and form, and statements are always based on close textual analysis. In East German epilogues, this aesthetic element is missing; instead, their focus is on context and content. For them, protagonists fail because society is villainous, so that morality can never be general or apolitical. As in East German essays, then, the novels in West Germany are seen as promoting altruism and condemning egotism, but the significant difference is that in West Germany, this is not then mapped onto larger political contexts. For example, Zerbst emphasizes that M is the portrait of an English town in the provinces, a network of interrelated characters, ‘on this scale, the first study of its kind in English literature’ (Zerbst, 1159).81 He analyses how this network is created and argues that Eliot’s complex sentence structure and style, her use of sub-clauses, parallels and contrasts, are an expression of her theories of society (1173). The focus is therefore on how content and form are linked, rather than on the novel’s political agenda. Of the main aspects that East German epilogues discuss – context, realism, gender and biography, and moral message – gender and moral message are also focal points in West German essays. Eliot’s realism, however, is not a major concern, nor are the historical and political contexts, which largely disappear in favour of giving attention to the text itself. While East German essays conduct the discussion on a general level, West German epilogues focus on the individual text. Conclusion Eliot’s gender influences not just the topics focused on by epilogues in East and West Germany, but also the timing of the publication of her works in both states. Reclam’s publications of Eliot’s novels in West Germany between 1983 and 1987 coincide with their bringing out of other British nineteenthcentury female novelists’ works, for example novels by the Brontës, Sturmhöhe (Wuthering Heights) (1986), Jane Eyre (1990), Agnes Grey (1990), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1986), and all six Austen novels (1977–84), all in new translations and scholarly editions. The Austen editions in particular were highly successful and repeatedly reprinted. As Dietrich Klose, editor for Reclam, states, the Austen publications coincided with ‘the dramatic increase of interest in women’s literature’,82 and, given the jackets’ and the epilogues’ emphasis on 80

‘vom Sieg des Guten über das Böse’, jacket of 1979 Aufbau SM edition. ‘in diesem Umfang die erste Studie dieser Art in der englischen Literatur’ (Zerbst 1985, 1159). 82 ‘Konzidenz mit dem sprunghaft steigenden Interesse an Frauenliteratur’, Klose, letter, 4 June 2003. 81

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62   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Eliot’s gender, she, too, appears to have been published in connection with this surge in demand for women’s literature. There is a further parallel in the West German publishing patterns of Austen’s and Eliot’s works. Just as Fischer had published one novel by Eliot in the 1960s, there had also been two earlier attempts at publishing Austen, in the 1950s and 1960s respectively, which were not very successful. Publishing both these female authors as a reaction to the 1970s and 1980s rise of feminism proved more effective: three of Eliot’s novels were brought out and all of Austen’s. With Austen, this resulted in a flood of new editions by other publishers.83 While this on the one hand emphasizes both Austen and Eliot as female authors, it also puts the success of Reclam’s Eliot editions into perspective: it was enough to merit three of her novels being published, but can hardly be compared to the high numbers of reprints that followed Reclam’s reintroduction of Austen into the West German market. Apart from the timing of the 1980s West German Eliot editions, their format evidently appealed to potential readers: cheap but scholarly, in new translations, with notes and interpretative essays. For the publication of Eliot’s novels in both East and West Germany, then, her gender seems to have been crucial. The emphasis on gender meant that in the East she was brought in early, from 1958 onwards, as a promoter not only of the realist novel, but also of emancipation, whereas in the West, emancipation and a surge of interest in women’s literature needed to take place before her works were marketable. West German trends here mirror British ones. As Jenny Uglow recalls when reflecting on her 1987 study of Eliot, ‘this is George Eliot seen through the lens of the late twentieth-century women’s movement […] there was a drive to recover women’s history and find female authors, artists and heroines’ (Uglow 2008, 2). In East Germany, Eliot is introduced much earlier and given more importance than in the West. She is brought in by the state, partly as a promoter of emancipation and partly as a critic of Western social and economic structures and values. By contrast, in West Germany her novels are published as a reaction to the rise of feminism. This might in part account for the fact that the 1980s publication of three of her works start off with MF, arguably the most overtly critical of her novels as regards gender inequality in access to education. The preceding suggests that ideological differences determined the reception of George Eliot in East and West Germany, more than did nationality, language or a shared cultural history. East German promoted her out of political motivations as well as a reaction to reader demand for Western literature. West German publishers introduced her when market forces allowed for it, there being a demand for fiction by a female British author. Epilogues further testify to the differences between East and West in their approach to Eliot’s texts.

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Including the Reclam ones, there were 23 editions of Austen’s novels in West Germany between 1977 and 1990.

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George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013   63 Epilogue: After 1990 The West German literary market was relatively unaffected by the reunification of the two German states on 3 October 1990, whereas the structures of the East German market fundamentally changed. Publishing houses were privatized and had to refocus. Instead of the state being a driving force in determining what was published, but also in promoting literature, reader demand now became the deciding factor. The numbers and kinds of editions of Eliot’s works published in Germany after 1990 indicate that while Eliot’s works feature, they do not appear frequently or prominently. A medium level of popularity is also suggested by the publication of the only book-length German biography of Eliot in reunified Germany. Elsemarie Maletzke’s 400-page George Eliot was published by Insel in 1993 and reissued in 1997, and not since then, again indicating that Eliot is a presence in the post-1990 German literary market, but not a significant one. The only other biographical work is an essay on Eliot’s life and works, available as a print-ondemand publication.84 There were nine German editions and reprints of an Eliot novel between 1990 and 2013: three of SM (1994, 1994, 1999), two of M (2005, 2010) and AB (2012, 2012), one of MF (2000) and one of R (1998). SM, M, AB and MF had also been available in East and West Germany, so that the only additional title in post-1990 Germany was R. As yet, works such as DD, FH, LV, BJ, or indeed, Eliot’s writings on Germany, have not been published in post-war Germany.85 The majority of these editions use earlier translations, with only two being based on newly commissioned translations. Furthermore, only three editions include an epilogue, and these three are all reprints of earlier essays. Silas Marner: 1994 Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (dtv). Dtv bases this edition on the Swiss publisher Manesse’s 1957 edition, using their translation by Kuno Weber and epilogue by Richard Gerber. 1994 Ars Vivendi Verlag. New translation by Elke Link and Sabine Roth. No epilogue. 1999 Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Based on Ars Vivendi Verlag edition of 1994 edition. Middlemarch: 2005 Weltbild Verlag. Based on the East German edition of 1979, translated and notes by Irmgard Nickel (leaving out Szudra’s epilogue).

84 85

Hans Belde, Leben und Werk von George Eliot: Essay (München: Grin, 2012). DD is published by the Swiss Manesse in 1994, so there is a post-1990 Germanlanguage version of the novel. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag at times buy Manesse titles and publish them in Germany, as they did with SM in 1994, but not with DD.

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64   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe 2010 Anaconda Verlag. Based on the East German edition of 1979, translated and notes by Irmgard Nickel (leaving out Szudra’s epilogue). Adam Bede: 2012 Salzwasser Verlag. Based on Julius Frese’s 1860 translation. No epilogue. 2012 Outlook Verlag. Based on Julius Frese’s 1860 translation. No epilogue. The Mill on the Floss: 2000 Reclam Verlag. Based on Eva Maria König’s translation, with her notes and epilogue (this is a reissue of their 1983 edition). Romola: 1998 Bastei Lübbe. New translation by Werner Siebenhaar. The epilogue is a translation of the OUP introduction to R by Andrew Brown. As the above summary shows, most translations are not newly commissioned, and the majority of editions are not accompanied by interpretative essays. Only three editions carry an epilogue. Siebenhaar’s translation of R includes an essay by Andrew Brown which is a translation of his introduction to the 1994 OUP edition of that novel. Dtv’s SM includes an epilogue; however, this edition is a reprint of the Swiss publisher Manesse’s 1957 edition, so that the epilogue was written several decades ago and with a Swiss readership in mind. Dtv replaced this edition of SM with one based on Ars Vivendi’s of 1994, which used a newer translation and did not include an epilogue. The third epilogue published in reunified Germany was a reprint of an essay which first appeared in 1983, in the Reclam edition of MF. None of the interpretative essays published in reunified Germany was therefore written with a 1990s German readership in mind. The essays do not shed light on reader expectation in reunified Germany, then, although their existence in selected editions suggests that publishers believed some readers would prefer the inclusion of an interpretative essay. However, none of these three editions has as yet been reprinted, indicating that their success was limited. The blurbs on the jackets give some indication as to what editors deem important for marketing purposes. Although they vary in length and focus, blurbs on all editions mention that the author’s real name is Mary Ann Evans, so that every reader would realize the author is a woman. Most blurbs emphasize her importance in her own day; one even says she was ‘the most successful woman of her time (besides Queen Victoria)’ (blurb to SM, Ars Vivendi, 1994).86 As in pre-1990s Germany, Eliot’s German connections are not mentioned. Overall, then, editions of Eliot’s works in reunified Germany come out in less scholarly editions than before. All editions in East and West Germany between 1945 and 1990 carried an interpretative essay, whereas the majority do not include one in reunified Germany. In a capitalist market, this might indicate a general readership that demand the texts in readable translations, 86

‘erfolgreichste Frau ihres Zeitalters (neben Queen Victoria)’ (SM, 1994).

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George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013   65 but without scholarly apparatus or interpretative essays. The choice of titles remains limited to the four already published in East and in West Germany, with only R being added. Eliot therefore continues to be a presence in the literary market of post-1990 Germany, and this presence is bound up with her gender, but she does not feature prominently.

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3



George Eliot in the Netherlands Diederik van Werven

Although the last few decades have seen an increasing number of studies regarding the flowering of Dutch letters in the nineteenth century, the literature itself is not now widely distributed or eagerly consumed. The language is not readily accessible, and the digressive and dilatory style of writing is no longer appreciated. With the exception of a few masterpieces, like Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, the view of a Dutch literary landscape dominated by a class of church ministers is confirmed by the documented reception of the works of George Eliot. Industrial development did not come to the Netherlands until later in the century, and before radical innovation in literature in the 1880s, it is fair to say that there was much room for foreign import (Kalmthout 2009). Stimulated by nationalist ideology in schools, educated Dutch people would read French, German and English in the original. There was, however, a large market for translated literature. All the great names of European literature appeared in Dutch translation, and Eliot’s works were particularly appreciated in the Netherlands. From 1861, when a translation of AB was followed closely by one of SCL, all of Eliot’s novels were published in Dutch within months of their publication in English. A small circle of prominent intellectuals initiated the Dutch career of the novelist, and she became part of the Dutch literary canon down to the present time The initial spate of translations, introductions and critical reviews were all produced by a tight-knit network of Protestant publishers, translators and reviewers, who set a tradition of a Christological reading of the novels that proved hard to change and certainly did not reflect the intellectual development of the author. There was serious interest from liberals, but Eliot apparently held no appeal for the Roman Catholic part of the nation. This can be partly explained by social factors, but the ideological implications of Eliot’s view of life were apparently more compatible with the (dominant) Protestant epistemology. Before looking in more detail at the publication history of the translations, it should be remembered that the spiritual development of Mary Ann Evans (MAE) into the great novelist George Eliot was marked in its early stages by several translation projects. It is remarkable that the very works that preoccupied Mary Ann Evans were regarded as crucial to her own formation by

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   67 the circle of Dutch translators and recipients of the novels of the later George Eliot. Allard Pierson, whose introduction to AB was integral to the Dutch version until 1927, had profound sympathies with the pietism of Alexandre Vinet’s Mémoire en faveur de la Liberté des Cultes, a translation project of MAE in 1842 (GEL I, 141 n. 8). Allard Pierson definitely found the roots of Eliot’s ‘sympathy’ here. Feuerbach’s anthropological approach to theology, combined with Spinoza’s epistemology (a set of values that profoundly influenced George Eliot) were more than familiar to another of her Dutch admirers, Johannes van Vloten. The Dutch critic Conrad Busken Huet probably had the most comprehensive understanding of Eliot’s project. He was also responsible for a popular version of D. F. Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu, translated by MAE in 1846. After 1880, and into the twentieth century, Eliot’s reputation was subject to the same vicissitudes as elsewhere, initial admiration turning to criticism of stuffy Victorian morality into the 1920s. Nevertheless, her works remained part of the canon, being included in anthologies and courses of literature in schools, and increasingly in higher education. Since World War II, several translations have appeared, always part of a series of international classics. With the rapid growth of English taught at universities, her position in the great tradition became unassailable, and the internationalization of academic endeavour makes it impossible to distinguish a specifically Dutch strand in the latter-day reception of Eliot’s novels. Translations The history of George Eliot’s reception in the Netherlands starts with the publication of a translation of AB in 1860. In its course through at least ten editions by three consecutive publishers, well into the 1920s, the novel was always prefaced by the introduction by the eminent Allard Pierson. This durable document will be subject to closer scrutiny, but the field of production must first be charted. A humorous contemporary review of AB by P. A. de Génestet in 1860 may serve. It illustrates the close-knit nature of the group of actors involved in Eliot’s Dutch production, and concerns the translation of AB. De Génestet was one of the foremost poets of the day, joining his voice to the ‘modern’ religious views that were of major concern to the most important readers of Eliot in the Netherlands (Roessing, 119–20). He had been asked to review a translation produced by the talented wife (Anne van der Tholl) of a clever friend (Conrad Busken Huet, later to become the foremost Dutch literary critic). The translation had been blessed with an introduction by another close and respected friend (Allard Pierson), and, what was worse, the book had been presented to him by another dear friend, its publisher A. C. Kruseman of Haarlem (the same who published the periodical in hand). The review was lyrical in its praise of both the introduction and of the novel itself. The author found the quality of the translation strikingly high. AB, in short, was a book not only to be read, but one that should be bought. The quality of the binding, the print and illustrations by Jacob Israels (father of Isaac) well warranted the expense.

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68   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe De Génestet did not wish to discuss the form or content of the novel: everything there was to say had already been said. It then appeared that De Génestet had read Punch on AB, as well as Montégut’s discussion of the English novel in the Revue des deux mondes (15 June 1859). Most of the Dutch writers around Kruseman were in the regular habit of perusing the foreign press put at their disposal by their reading circles. Kruseman’s administrative records show subscriptions to a number of periodicals from abroad: five French, seven German and nine English magazines, with the Westminster Review, Cornhill Magazine, All The Year Round, The Economist, Macmillan’s and Edinburgh Review among them. In a later entry, Blackwood’s Magazine, which published SCL, had also been included. Digests and translations of major articles were published by Kruseman on a monthly basis in De Wetenschappelijke Bladen (The scientific journals). Kruseman’s lists for the late 1850s and 1860s included translated works by Dickens, Thackeray and Sterne among others. The lists show that the Dutch translations of Eliot’s novels were produced at about 20 per cent of the quantity of Dickens’s. A typical edition of Dickens would amount to 2,000 to 5,000 copies, George Eliot’s AB amounted to 500 copies, and remaining stocks were sold at auction a few years later.1 Kruseman, the publisher, was a principled man with a programmatic approach to publishing. He was also the author of a two-volume history of Dutch publishing in the nineteenth century, on which much of the national research into the book market is based. Only recently has some of his information been challenged and his rather biased approach questioned. There is no documentation regarding his decisions to remainder the translations of Eliot in the late 1860s, but it may well have been that he backed down in the face of competition, and that he simply could not or would not undercut the prices of his competitors. There were extensive imports of English books into the Netherlands throughout the nineteenth century (Weel 2000b, 2002). In 1850 British imports amounted to 6 per cent of all book imports, growing to 10 per cent in 1879, and in the meantime the volume of trade for British books alone had grown by some 760 per cent in the same period (Weel 2000b, based on Kruseman 1886). Van der Weel persuasively shows that the growth was supported by the abolition of import duties on books in 1859, as well as by the introduction of English as a subject in secondary schools in 1863. Another factor not to be discounted was the enormous popularity of the novels of Scott and Dickens in the Netherlands, thus building a reputation for English literature often confirmed in the reviews of Eliot’s work that will be detailed below. In the late twentieth century, De Génestet’s advice to buy the book was hard to follow, although bibliographies of Dutch printed works show at least another eight editions of AB with Van Druten & Bleeker (Schepper 2009). The last (tenth) Dutch edition dates from about 1927. Older editions are 1

Fondsboeken Kruseman, vol. 1857–62, folio 382. Fondsboeken (administrative records) of the firm of A. C. Kruseman of Haarlem are kept in the library of the Vereeniging ter Bevordering der Belangen des Boekhandels (Dutch association of booksellers), Amsterdam.

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   69 much harder to come by. The collector’s passion is dampened by the relative opacity of nineteenth-century Dutch, even in the high-quality prose of the Busken Huets. The most salient feature lost was the much-praised dialect diction of the novel’s rural characters, which makes redundant the perceptive remark by a contemporary English reviewer that such characters were useful in that they could express their emotions without the reticence that resulted from education.2 The changes in the Dutch language over the past 150 years have been far more profound than those that have taken place in English. In addition, the introduction by Allard Pierson, whose name is still familiar to most Dutchmen (through the Amsterdam museum of classical antiquity that bears his name) was studded with categories like ‘duty’, ‘piety’, ‘lofty religious way of thinking’, and ended with an exhortation to Methodism as the key to the kingdom of heaven. It is no wonder that the market for this version of Eliot in Dutch was found to be saturated after 1930. June 1861 saw the publication of SM by P. N. van Kampen of Amsterdam, translated by Mrs Jacoba van Westrheene-van Heijningen, a prolific translator of all kinds of literature and a novelist in her own right. The firm of Ter Gunne in Deventer also published an anonymous translation of SM in July 1861. August of the same year saw the appearance of Herders en Schapen (SCL), published by Kruseman and translated by Conrad Busken Huet. In September an anonymous translation of MF was published by Van Kampen. R appeared in 1864 in the scholarly Dutch of J. C. van Deventer, a classical scholar and schoolmaster at Dordrecht. He was the close friend from student days and later brother-in-law of Conrad Busken Huet, and the translation duly appeared with Kruseman. FH (1867), M (1873) and DD (1878) were all translated by Mrs Van Westrheene and published by the firm of Van Druten & Bleeker. De Opgeheven Sluier (LV) and Broeder Jacob (BJ) appeared in Sneek translation in 1879 published by Van Druten in the Dutch of Jacoba Berendina Zwaardemaker-Visscher, a novelist in her own right with outspoken views on the emancipation of women. Theophrastus dinges (ITS) appeared in anonymous translation in 1879 with the publisher Bohn. A possibly unique instance of translations of Eliot’s poetry appeared in 1888, when a Dutch rendering of ‘Jubal’ was included in a collection of translated poetry by François Coppée, Louis de Ronchaud, George Eliot and John Keats (‘Hyperion’). The translator was C. van Kempe Valk, a teacher of Dutch and English at a non-classical grammar school in Winterswijk, thus illustrating the canonizing trend in educational publications. The field of production initially showed interested parties from literary and intellectual circles who chose to leave the ministry of the church for more worldly concerns: Allard Pierson, who wrote the introduction to AB, Conrad

2

R. H. Hutton, ‘The Novels of George Eliot’, National Review 11 (July 1860): 191–219, rpt. in Olmsted, pp. 467–95. The article is attributed to R. H. Hutton by Perkin, p. 166, n. 81. A similar observation was made by Peter Gay in The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience; Victoria to Freud (New York: Norton, 1995), p. 9: ‘All education, whatever else it may be, is also a stringent imposition of unwelcome boundaries.’

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70   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Busken Huet, Johannes van Vloten and the later editor of an 1870 collected edition, P. Bruyn. Mrs Van Westrheene, responsible for the translations of the later novels, was married to a prominent liberal, and it may be significant that the translation and reception of Eliot shifts from one ideological field to another. Kruseman never left the straight and narrow path of orthodox consensus in religious matters; P. N. van Kampen was the liberal publisher of De Gids, the literary journal where all the major Eliot critics converged during this era. The other publishers had no other motives than those of commerce. After 1900, one full and one abridged translation of AB appeared, both in the 1920s. A full translation by the pseudonymous Dutric., illustrated in one volume, was published by Misset, Doetinchem, and an abridged edition of anonymous translation was published by Hollandsch Uitgeversfonds in Amsterdam. The latter firm also published a companion volume, De Molen van Dorlcote (MF). In 1950, Contact publishers in Amsterdam and Antwerp published a new translation of MF, De Molen aan de Rivier, executed by Elisabeth de Roos in a series of Masterworks of World Literature. In 1981, Het Spectrum publishers issued De Molen aan de Floss (MF), translated by W. A. Dorsman-Vos, in a series simply called Klassieken (Classics). Finally, in 2002, a prestigious, boxed, hard-cover edition of M appeared with Atheneum-Polak & Van Gennep, Amsterdam, translated by Annelies Roeleveld and Margret Stevens. Its gold dust jacket and large format make it part of a series of great world classics, all in new translations. This enumeration does not take into account a number of school editions, abridged, annotated and simplified for use in the education sector. Reviews Most Dutch reviews were occasioned by the publication of translations. Practically all of them were written when the translations were published. This is purely a matter of record, however, for it turns out that the most serious, appreciative reviews were all written on the basis of the original English editions, in one important case even on the instalments still running in the Cornhill magazine. Reading Eliot was taken for granted. Much as philosophy and theology were imported from Germany, the best literature was found in Britain, according to general consensus. In the prominent literary journal of the day, De Gids, focus would be on British literature from the early 1860s onwards (Aerts, 271ff.). In all the direct references to her work, especially where translations are reviewed, it appears that familiarity with the book under discussion was a matter of course for the educated reader. That there was a market for these translations is just one more proof of Eliot’s early inclusion in the canon. Studies of leesgezelschappen (reading circles) and circulating libraries show that her works were always available, although the work of other authors was more popular (Duyvendak 2009). This study will continue, then, by tracing the path of Eliot’s work in the Netherlands through a brief inventory of the minor reviews. All in all, there is a corpus of 45 articles until 1885, some of them very minor (see Appendix, cf. Verheul 1984), written in the vein of

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   71 recommendation to a well-defined readership. Personal enthusiasm sometimes played a role. Literary contributions either concerned original work, always squeezed in among discussions of matters scientific, political or theological, or they consisted of long passages of selections and translations from important new publications. Art, including literature in a somewhat wider definition than that current more recently, was viewed as a moralizing and civilizing force in society. It is clear that in the 1860s the status of novels was not very high, and they were not generally regarded as contributing fundamentally to contemporary discussions – but change was under way. There is no denying that in the pages of an ever-increasing number of periodicals, filled by contributors hoping to improve the tastes, manners and morals of their countrymen, critical reviews of novels occupied only a minor proportion of articles (Aerts 1994, 268, 491). Other materials suitable for scrutiny include introductions to Eliot’s works in Dutch, and a long, biographical essay written after Eliot’s death. It was remarkable that the list of authors included a relatively large number of Protestant church ministers, confirming a Dutch diatribe that literature in the Netherlands was dominated by dominees. Change came with the inclusion of Eliot’s fiction in educational materials (Kalmthout 2009). The last decades of the nineteenth century saw a marked reduction in nationalist thinking about literature, counteracted by a movement favouring Dutch national materials in education. Foreign literature became compartmentalized in the context of education, but at the same time there was a large market for translated literature from abroad. In well-educated circles, literature was read in the original, and certainly after World War II reading translation was frowned upon. In what follows, the focus will be on early reception of Eliot, for reasons that will become apparent. Minor reviews from Protestant magazines, and a typical obituary The majority of minor reviews until 1885 all reflected an appreciation for the idealist realism of Eliot’s novels (Verheul 1984). This was often implicit, and limited to a single sentence or remark. The reviews consisted mainly of a synopsis of the stories, usually ending with a few remarks on the quality of the translation. A brief discussion of a number of telling examples from the corpus of Dutch reviews may serve to give an impression of contemporary practice and views. A case in point was provided by C. P. in Het Leeskabinet (The reading cabinet), who started his review of AB by resoundingly agreeing with Pierson’s introduction, to be discussed later (Appendix 2, no. 3). The introduction was another confirmation of the book’s high repute. According to the reviewer, the novel’s greatest asset was that the depiction of characters was so lifelike that the reader felt as though they were flesh and blood acquaintances. In particular, the psychology of Arthur Donnithorne’s struggle with evil was considered highly successful. In 1861 the reviewer of Het Leeskabinet gave a synopsis of SCL (published after AB in Holland), which he did not much appreciate (Appendix 2, no. 4). He found nothing unusual in these stories, despite the fact that church

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72   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe ministers were the main characters. Interestingly, in view of the fact that Busken Huet himself was responsible for the translation, he found the translation mediocre, for it contained mistakes for which even a schoolboy would not have been forgiven. SM drew by far the greatest number of reactions, eight in all. The simultaneous publication of two editions of the translation attracted great attention (Weel 2000a; Schepper 2009). This certainly raised the reviewer’s expectations, and Het Leeskabinet in 1861 was not disappointed (Appendix, no. 6). The reviewer still believed that George Eliot was a male author, the famous one who wrote AB. The rest of the review is a synopsis of the story with a final complimentary remark on the translation. In 1862, Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen wrote that realism and knowledge of human nature were the main features of this edition of SM (Ter Gunne). The reviewer expressed the opinion that the association of booksellers (which had protested against this publication as being outside of normal procedures) was too narrowly concerned with its own interests. The reviewer of the other edition (Van Kampen) had read both the original and the Dutch translation. The review was mainly a synopsis, and the reviewer found the translation rather awkward (Appendix, nos 13 and 14 respectively). Bracketed by a discussion of De Lamartine’s Antoniella, and a contribution concerning the supernatural powers of God (an ongoing polemic involving Prof. Scholten, champion of the Modernen, to be discussed below, and Allard Pierson, in defence of miracles), there was a short review of FH (Appendix, no. 22). The 1867 publication, in Mrs Van Westrheene’s translation, could be safely recommended to the more or less free-thinking Protestant readers of Het Leeskabinet. Felix Holt, in this critic’s view, was a true radical, a real friend of the people, who did not seek the destruction of the existing order, but wished to achieve improvements wherever they were needed. The ideal type of radical was placed in juxtaposition to Harold Transome, soi-disant radical, who had political ambitions. Felix stuck by his principles of truth and justice under all circumstances. This explained his cordial relations with the Independent minister Lyon, made familiar to Dutch readers by designations such as afgesch­ eiden (independent) and regtzinnig (orthodox). An entire paragraph followed in which the reviewer warned his readers that the election scenes and the legal intricacies were so English that many readers would find them tedious, or would fail to understand entirely. The most successful aspect of the book was the characterization, Het Leeskabinet advised its readers. According to Busken Huet, in his review of Dutch periodicals of 1878, De Tijdspiegel was a predictable purveyor of established church opinion, perhaps not so much in the choice of their contributors, as simply by tradition. Church, in this connection, must be taken as the body of opinion best designated as liberal Protestantism. According to Busken Huet, it was unnecessary to read De Tijdspiegel, for once the contributors had announced their topic, their opinions were entirely predictable. In 1862, De Tijdspiegel found SM a worthy successor to AB. True-to-life characters and the triumph of holy, selfdenying love made this a truly great book (Appendix, no. 15). The author of an 1864 review introduced his readers to an interpretation of the characters in AB with the assurance that all that was offered was morally

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   73 acceptable (Appendix, no. 18). The great merit of the author was to make the reader sympathize with the light-headed sinner who had murdered her own child. To arouse sympathy for what was part of daily life was the author’s main aim, the reviewer concluded. The reviewer remarked that sales had not warranted a second edition. He was referring to the Dutch translation, and would be proved wrong by subsequent reprints. He regarded MF as the most exciting story by Eliot to date, and duly noted its criticism of bourgeois social values. The 1868 review of FH (Appendix, no. 24) provides an interesting illustration of Busken Huet’s typology of De Tijdspiegel (1878). The reviewer had expected a radical solution to the religious and social problem from a novel by Eliot, and he was not disappointed. The knowledge of human nature depicted in the novel was all-inclusive: ‘The writer knows that, as to form, human religion often consists of puritanical nagging, and as to content, it is typified by the worship of sensuality and the idolatry of respectability.’3 Felix Holt emerged as the ideal of a woman’s heart: an original thinker, a natural character with an honest heart, a man who defied the world, and proudly chose the life of a watchmaker. Perceptively, although unusually, the reviewer saw the true question in the novel as that of the real power of women. Felix’s social activities, like his address to the working men, were deemed well worth studying: Felix had no need of the New Testament to clarify his position, nor did he quote the Tübinger critics (theologians of the University of Tübingen such as Strauss and Feuerbach – shorthand for historical criticism of the Bible), in spite of which he was very well able to find his way into the hearts and conscience of his audience. ‘Respectable’ people could read the novel as a true work of art. They would find the pleasure to be had from the pure imitation of nature. The review ended by praising the translator, although a number of flaws were listed. The 1873 notice of the Romantische Werken (a collected edition of the novels to date, in translation) in this periodical referred to previous flattering reviews, probably foreign ones. The reviewer found AB by far the best work, followed by FH. The rest of the article was about the desirability of cheap editions as a general good (Appendix, no. 28). Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen, a monthly magazine founded in 1760, was a fixture on the literary front throughout the nineteenth century. Like the previous two, as Aerts (1994, 52) persuasively shows, Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen followed a middle-of-the-road policy in matters of politics and faith, thus avoiding alienating members of the writing establishment as far as possible. Holland provided a limited market, and a periodical’s survival depended on reaching a broad audience. The standard procedure was for editors to present themselves as fervent nationalists publishing in support of national culture and science. Kalmthout (2009) has also identified the trend to include foreign literature as part of the national canon. 3

Roorda van Eysinga in De Tijdspiegel (1868): 93. ‘De schrijfster weet dat de godsdienst der menschen veelal, wat de vorm betreft, bestaat in orthodox gezeur, en wat het wezen aangaat in de eerdienst der zinnelijkheid en de afgoderij van het fatsoen.’

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74   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe In 1868, P. Bruyn, the later editor of the collected works, reviewed the English Tauchnitz edition of FH (Appendix, no. 21). He started his review by establishing that the novel was going through a new stage of development: from romantic, romanesque and spine-chilling adventure, the new tendency was towards the description of homely scenes, everyday situations softly idealized and microscopic studies of human nature. The best examples were to be found in England. This social, philosophical, realistic novel had grown into an instrument of education and improvement. Eliot’s works were especially good examples of the kultuur-roman (based on the German ‘Kulturroman’). In Bruyn’s opinion they were the best available, meeting all the requirements of philosophical realism. Eliot’s reputation was firmly based on AB, but she never repeated herself, neither as to content nor as to theme. He praised her versatile genius, as the translator of Strauss and the author of sound theological [sic] essays for the Westminster Review. Bruyn quoted from Edmond Schérer’s panegyric in the Revue des deux mondes, and went on to an appreciative discussion of R. It was especially the transparent psychology that constituted Eliot’s talent. Bruyn did, however, point a critical finger at weaknesses in the novel, such as Romola’s independence from Savonarola, and the overly romantic interlude in the leper colony. According to Bruyn, FH was at least equal to the author’s earlier work. He agreed with another reviewer, who had drawn attention to the masculine strength of the novel, but Eliot’s fine feminine feeling was unsurpassed (van Vloten 1867, to be discussed). Bruyn recognized the precise scrupulous morality and sense of duty with which Eliot endowed Felix, offset by the farcical narrow-mindedness of Felix’s mother. Bruyn’s outline of the story concentrated almost entirely on the romance between Esther and Felix, thus catering to his conception of the typical novel reader. Bruyn’s final remarks made it clear that if Eliot aimed at giving an illustration of her meliorist philosophy of life, she had certainly succeeded with this reviewer. After reading FH he found himself morally fortified, ‘more at peace with himself, stronger and calmer in the face of the great problems of the future’. He did not pretend to be original, and contemporaries would have spotted the reference to Montégut’s assessment of the earlier novels. It is striking that Bruyn’s enthusiasm was so much greater than that of his colleagues. He was the only reviewer in the religiously conformist magazines to regard FH as even better than AB, particularly for its wider social theatre, making the whole intrigue more socially topical. He was also the only one who mentioned that he had read the novel in English. Moreover, it should be noted that he was instrumental in narrowing down the meaning of realism in literature (Streng 1995, 181, 182). In 1868, J. Hoek reviewed the Dutch translation of FH in Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen, quoting from Bruyn’s extensive article of the year before (Appendix, no. 25). This reviewer had not read the English edition. He had enjoyed reading the book, so the translation could not be a bad one, although it lacked fluency. This review included lengthy commentary on the physical execution of the edition and on the poor quality of the illustrations. A warm plea for cheap editions was made, especially as the book tended towards the emancipation of the lower classes, without sacrificing art for this noble cause.

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   75 The 1870 edition of the Romantische Werken thus had everything going for it: translations of good quality, reasonably priced and introductions by an arbiter of taste who could be trusted to sound the right note, P. Bruyn. However, Bruyn did not in fact do his homework thoroughly. The biographical details in his introduction made Miss Evans the daughter of a clergyman, the pupil of Spencer and the intimate friend of J. S. Mill. He sounded suspiciously like the volume of biography called Men of the Time, repudiated by George Eliot herself in a letter of July 1874 (GEL VI, 68 and note. Cf. Ashton 1996, 339–40). Fortunately, perhaps, the mistake was ‘safely shrouded in a haze of Dutch’, as George Eliot wrote to her publisher when she received the Dutch volumes (GEL V, 361). Bruyn set up the signposts in his introduction: George Sand and George Eliot were the two greatest female authors of the age, but as to spirit and tenor of their work the latter had the ethical advantage (Appendix, no. 26). That her work was initially mistaken for a man’s was understandable for another reason besides the pseudonym. The forceful effect of her début was no indication that these sketches had been written by a young lady, and a daughter of a minister at that [sic]. The most striking characteristics of her work were an admirable expressive talent and unusually sharp observation of the practical needs of society. The Scenes already revealed a rare knowledge of human nature. Eliot made herself at once into the advocate of renewed humanism, as the impassioned interpreter of ideal Christianity, which, purged of all strange ingredients, exalted over all forms of dogma, was the fine flower of the human mind. Bruyn praised her psychological edge, which bore witness to her poignant tenderness and greatness of soul. With regard to her erudition and wide-ranging knowledge, he compared her to Goethe and, erroneously, but interestingly because it echoed a remark by Busken Huet (1863), pointed out in a note that AB was almost certainly a later work than SM and MF. In answer to the question of what the moral lesson taught by George Eliot was, he said that she tried to show how all the great themes from philosophy and theology were present in humble daily lives, and how the same moral grounds could be found in the most various of characters. The one lesson that seemed paramount in her work was that human life was too wide and variegated ever to be synthesized into a single religious formula or ethical code. Especially in connection with la question religieuse (the religious question), no cultured person was to leave these novels unread. The above assessments, all from media catering for Protestant readers, show readings of Eliot’s works comparable to many contemporary English reviews. Two or three minor ones could be added to confirm the picture of the supreme popularity in Holland of AB.4 None of her other works, although duly noticed, translated and reviewed, ever rose again to such heights. De Portefeuille, duly listing Strauss, Feuerbach and SCL, spent 350 of its 500-word obituary of Eliot on a reiteration of the Liggins affair (Appendix, no. 40). (Liggins claimed the authorship of AB, thus forcing George Eliot to disclose 4

Those in De Portefeuille and Onze Tolk. Appendix, nos 27, 29, 39.

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76   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe her identity.) This provides another confirmation, if any were needed, that AB was the work George Eliot was known for in Holland, as does a concluding remark on DD: ‘a novel that no-one except George Eliot could have written, but we should conjecture that if it had been written by anyone else, few people would have read it’ (Appendix, no. 349).5 It is remarkable that the one response to the English version of FH should have been so much more enthusiastic than the standard assessments about brilliant characterization and the token establishment of the moral uprightness and improving nature of these novels. Where M was mentioned, the most popular characters were the ones most reminiscent of the rural setting of AB: the Garths. Although Jews may have been more familiar to the Dutch than to the English, there was no sign of sympathetic notice for DD in Jewish magazines. Some of the assessments appear to have been echoes of foreign reviews, as they repeatedly stated that Eliot needed no further praises. The main complaint about both M and DD is that they were (much) too long. The importance of morality and the edifying nature of literature, which was a feature of all the reviews discussed so far, point to the literary principles of Alexandre Vinet, whose influence on the thinking of George Eliot, Pierson and Busken Huet deserves discussion at greater length. Contributions from Liberals In his 1878 review of Dutch periodicals, Busken Huet labelled De Nederlandsche Spectator a liberal party mouthpiece, in which people, publications and events were invariably highlighted from the same point of view. Much of what they published in the field of art and literature was copied from foreign publications. The Nederlandsche Spectator’s contributions to the name and fame of Eliot may well be second-hand. According to Busken Huet, the editors liked to make one believe that they emulated The Athenaeum (of infamous repute in George Eliot–George Henry Lewes circles since the Liggins affair) (Ashton 1996, 223). In Busken Huet’s words, ‘the Athenaeum is a magazine which pretends to have a monopoly of knowledge and wisdom’ (LFK 10: 184).6 On the other hand, according to Busken Huet the editors and contributors did not obtrude their opinions on their readers to the same extent as in some other publications. A very long review of SM is remarkable because it is the only one that discussed the English edition of the book (Appendix, no. 5). All quotations were in English. This is the first instance in which the fees paid to the author were found exorbitant (£2,500). The novel would stand a second reading, which was seldom the case with novels. It was a moral novel, and that was 5

‘[…] een roman zooals misschien geen ander dan George Eliot had kunnen schrijven, maar wij mogen er bijna de gissing bijvoegen, dat indien hij door een ander geschreven ware, weinigen hem zouden gelezen hebben’. 6 ‘Het Atheneum is een blad, dat zich inbeeldt, de wetenschap en de wijsheid inpacht te hebben.’

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   77 found to be creditable. It was about the love of humanity, or rather Christian love, without being sentimental. The reviewer spotted the rather determinist nature of George Eliot’s writing: (mis)deeds were never without their consequences in a character’s later development. The realism of all Miss Evans’s novels was commended. The reviewer referred to several British reviews, one of which had criticized Eliot’s undiscriminating descriptions of acceptable forms of faith. Typically, the 1867 notice of FH opened with a trumpet call for new ideals. The old ones were fading and losing their influence (Appendix, no. 23). Felix Holt was the ideal radical, shunning vanity and hypocrisy. He valued human nature highly and never disavowed it. His collaboration with the dissenting minister was a sign of Eliot’s true understanding: Cromwell’s men and the rigoristes of the French Revolution were equally strict in their principles, the reviewer remarked. Reading FH was warmly recommended, to dispel the childish fear which the term radical inspired. De Nederlandsche Spectator was aware of the fact that Miss Evans made £4,000 by the novel, and went on a trip to Germany to shield herself from any adverse criticism.7 This was hardly a radical thing to do, according to the reviewer. The article ended with a call for a Dutch novel on the same theme by Mrs Busken Huet or by Mrs Van Westrheene. A comparison to Mrs BosboomToussaint’s novels showed the latter to be too far removed from modern life. This constitutes one of the few references to Dutch literature in the corpus of Eliot reviews. Between 1885 and 1940 the reviews were either part of systematic overviews, or author portraits (e.g. Balsem 1881), which showed the development of English as a compulsory subject in the higher levels of secondary education and the unassailable position of Eliot in the canon. One of them reflects the fall in popularity and is atypical in its complete dismissal of Eliot’s ponderous style and moralist intellectualism (Querido 1910). Another is a gushing hagiography by Jeanne Kloos, wife of the most prominent poet of the innovative generation of Dutch poets and novelists after 1880 (1925–26). Her voluminous contribution (more than 130 pages running for two years over 13 issues, mainly consisting of summaries of the plots) has no new literary insights to offer. Her later misguided choice for National Socialism demolished her reputation forever. It is remarkable that between 1880 and the first decade of the new century, Eliot’s name is mentioned in the Dutch press regularly. The electronic database of digitized newspapers yields hundreds of references. A superficial scrutiny shows quotations and announcements of lectures, underpinning the thorough familiarity with Eliot in the canon. For present purposes, the fact that some of those lectures were held in meetings

7

In 1865, 1 pound sterling was 11.85 guilders (f), so £4,000 × 11.85 = 47,400 guilders. In comparison, Zuidema mentions the annual salary of Busken Huet at the time of his wedding: f 2,000, and that of their friend Dr Naber, headmaster of the Haarlem Gymnasium: f 1,900 (Zuidema 1935, 66). The president of the Nederlandsche Bank, Mr W. C. Mees, earned 35–40,000 guilders annually (Van de Laar 1978, 448–49).

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78   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe of the ‘Moderne’ theologians warrants a closer look at three prolific writers about Eliot in Dutch.8 Three Important Readers A number of reception documents and their writers warrant closer attention. The stature of these figures in Dutch letters, their familiarity with the theology and philosophy translated by Mary Ann Evans, the range and reach of their contributions to George Eliot reception, as well as their views on the importance of literature, are all reasons for scrutiny. The three protagonists of this discussion – Allard Pierson, Johannes van Vloten and Conrad Busken Huet – deserve to be put into some perspective. Their views on realism and Naturalism call for a brief explanation, as do their views on Goethe. Eliot was regularly compared to Goethe, and a brief word on Goethe appreciation in the Netherlands may help to shed more light on the literary thinking of the day. Around 1800, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers was among the most popular novels in Holland (Kloek 1985). Due to a strong nationalist bias, and a reaction to Romanticism, Goethe was regarded as foreign and immoral. Goethe became more accessible with Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, published in 1836. The contributors to the prominent and by far the most serious Dutch literary journal, De Gids (founded 1837), quoted from Eckermann as though it were the Bible (Streng 2006, 123), and Goethe is quoted as an authority on numerous occasions. An opposing Christian side to the polemic developed, which depicted Goethe as a pantheist, and thus as anti-religious. The liberals in De Gids voiced admiration and agreement with themes which they found in Goethe, such as a plea for individualism, ordinary life as a suitable subject for art, literature as the expression of thought, and a plea for norms based on reality. Morality was irrelevant to art, and therefore Goethe was not an immoral writer. Some of these concepts are familiar aspects of the poetics of Eliot. Allard Pierson wrote about the German poet in 1855, stressing Goethe’s commitment to reality and proposing a category of idealist realism (Pierson 1855). Even in more conservative circles, the view became current that Goethe’s sense of beauty made him good, above parties, and therefore acceptable. After 1848, according to Streng, there was a sea change in the perception of the previous century (2006). The eighteenth century was recast as an era that was crucial in the development of knowledge, and knowledge was the new buzzword of the 1850s. The spirit of the times was characterized by contentious terms such as realism, Naturalism, materialism and positivism, but the pursuit of knowledge was paramount. Goethe could thus be recast as the genius who could reconcile the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. 8

Algemeen Handelsblad, 5 May 1886, carries a report of such a meeting at which P. H. Hugenholtz Jr spoke on ‘Naturalisme in de letterkunde’ (‘Naturalism in literature’). Eliot was one of his prime examples.

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   79 After 1850, modern came to mean the refutation of Romanticism as unworldly, unrealistic and pessimistic emotionalism. Goethe, meanwhile, came to be regarded as the champion of the anti-romantic movement. Order and harmony, always regarded as classical, were now incorporated into the concept of modern. The debates of the 1850s juxtaposed religion and science, but the relationship between art and religion was more problematic. The upshot was that Goethe was enlisted on the side of Christian thinking as the genius of the modern age. Two further remarks need to be made. First, Goethe was the preoccupation of a literate elite, for there were very few translations of him into Dutch. There are many references to George Henry Lewes’s Life of Goethe, and it is present in many Dutch libraries, both in English and in German translation. Furthermore, the above usage of the term modern in this context made the use of the word in a theological context more problematic. The modern ministers were those who followed the thinking of historical critics such as Strauss and Feuerbach, and they soon came to leave the church. This certainly went for Pierson and Busken Huet. In the context of Eliot reception, when Eliot is compared to Goethe, it is mainly the literary affinities between the two great authors that are brought to bear, rather than the more general opinions of Goethe alignment. A few words also need to be said about Eliot’s connection to Spinoza. He too is regularly mentioned in the writings of the three main Dutch recipients of Eliot, and certainly later the fact that she translated Ethics was common knowledge. There is a growing body of work concerning the connection between Spinoza and Eliot. Moira Gatens (2009), Virgil Nemoianu (2010), Isobel Armstrong (2013) and Yael Wodnitzky (2014) have productively explored Spinozan principles underlying Eliot’s art. Armstrong points out the strong interest of both Eliot and George Henry Lewes in the philosopher, an interest shared by Dutch recipients, notably Johannes van Vloten. There are broader connections between the interests and publications of Eliot and her Dutch admirers. Both Lewes and Eliot were well versed in the philosophy of Spinoza. It is more than likely that Mary Ann Evans translated a substantial portion of Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and her translation of Ethica barely missed publication in 1856, finally appearing in 1981 (GEL I, 142 and 158; Haight 1968, 52; Ashton 1996, 71). Lewes included Spinoza in his Biographical History of Philosophy of 1843, and wrote an extensive article in the Fortnightly Review in 1866. The latter article found its way into Dutch and was published in Kruseman’s Wetenschappelijke Bladen in 1868 (Lewes 1866). Spinoza was found daunting due to the geometrical form given to his argumentation. The study of his writings was surrounded by prejudice: the philosopher was supposed to have been an atheist and a pantheist, and, controversially in the nineteenth-century context, he was a Jew. Serious engagement with the philosopher started with Lessing and Goethe, and this was the root of the interest taken by Lewes and Eliot. Eliot’s early experience of the power of religious feeling is reflected in a number of important characters in her early novels. In Vinet’s Mémoire en faveur de la Liberté des Cultes (1826, republished in 1844) we find a source for some of the pietist and evangelical outlook of her early life. This she held in common with one of the prominent Dutch thinkers, who was one of her greatest admirers, Allard Pierson.

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80   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Pierson (1831–96) trained as a minister in the Walloon Church, a somewhat elite denomination whose services were held in French. The family kept close ties with the Dutch version of evangelicalism, known as the Réveil movement. It was undogmatic, placing emphasis on personal sin and salvation, and advocating radical change in personal life when one became a Christian. Critical analysis or scientific reflection were regarded as detrimental to the real emotional experience that faith should bring. The Bible was a source of inspiration, and life a struggle to live in harmony with the real presence of God. Vinet and Pierson (initially) believed that the signs of such a struggle made for great literature. Allard Pierson’s introduction to the Dutch AB was clearly written from this perspective. Pierson’s passion for reality attracted him to Eliot. His introduction to AB in 1860, always included in the ten editions up to 1927, shows that he was never quite able to reconcile his Réveil (evangelical, pietist) background, steeped in Vinet, with his later bent for natural science, an interest which he also held in common with the famous couple in England. Pierson’s introduction expressed typical views on literature of the day. Literature was an instrument of social feeling, an element of civilization, a means of evoking the emotions of humanity and love in the heart of the reader. Emotional experience was an important source of knowledge, to be developed through imagination. According to Pierson, AB was meant to sketch the rise of Methodism. The novel enabled the reader to contrast Methodism with the precepts of the Established Church. Like all contemporary critics, Pierson praised Eliot’s detailed realism. He showed real understanding for the professional status, but also the pastoral ineffectiveness, of the Reverend Irwine, relating to his own early experience in his first parish. He praised the lack of sentimentality and the earthy realism of the emotions of the characters. There are passing allusions to German literature, especially Goethe, and reflections on sources of biblical inspiration. Eliot is placed above religious contention and sectarianism. In typical nineteenth-century fashion, Pierson derived the author’s character from evidence in the novel, especially praising her ability to communicate the positive aspects and overcome sectarian prejudice. His conclusion was that AB should be read as a testimonial of faith, a contemporary version of the Gospel. This has proved a lasting recommendation to those who would take it as such, although it might well have surprised Eliot herself. For present purposes it may be regarded as a telling expression of horizons both literary and religious in Holland in 1860. Pierson was still to wage his own Holy War, and the lines of combat are already visible in the above interpretation of AB. It should be remembered that Allard Pierson was well-read in classical and contemporary literature, had studied theology, with all that it entailed, published extensively on a range of theological subjects, written on the history of Semitic languages, published some of his own poems, written on French literature and was about to start a translation of Historical and Literary Sketches by Lord Macaulay (570 pages between 1860 and 1865). He had defended his faith against the historical critics and had functioned as a minister in the Eglise Wallonne (Walloon Church), first in Louvain, Belgium, then in Rotterdam. In 1860 he was 29 years of age and not, one would say, a naïve reader (Boersema 1924).

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   81 Pierson’s growing scepticism led him to criticize those who defended historical criticism of the Bible, but who did admit the possibility of miracles as proving the truth of Christianity. To Pierson this was blatant inconsistency. He turned his back on the Church in 1864 and accepted a professorship in Heidelberg. He cultivated his interest in the natural sciences, sharing an interest in physiology with G. H. Lewes. He purged some of his theological difficulties by writing a monumental history of the Roman Catholic Church, illustrating his fundamental Protestantism in his conclusion that it had fallen for every possible seduction of earthly power. His writings at the time were controversial, mainly because they were thought to be confusing, and did not seem to fit any of the major ideological movements of the time. With regard to literary criticism, Pierson remained true to the moral, harmonizing principles of Vinet (Pierson 1871b). Pierson disagreed with the prominent French critics of the day, Taine and Ste Beuve, the former a determinist, the latter explicitly sceptical and radically subjective in his moral judgements. In 1876, Pierson again wrote about Eliot, more especially about her poetry. This contribution is a rare instance of a discussion of Eliot’s poetry, and it was written in the usual nineteenth-century form of a long paraphrase of the content, interspersed with chance remarks. The edition he discussed was ‘The Legend of Jubal’ and other Poems, and he took five pages retelling the story. In a footnote, when discussing the poem Agatha, Pierson saw analogies between the work of Eliot and that of Heinrich Heine (1876, 171). Eliot’s most striking talent, in Pierson’s view, was her ability to distil from images and legends of a distant past whatever was still viable in terms of human feeling and human experience. Agatha showed the best in Catholicism, as the character of Dinah Morris in AB had shown what was best in Methodism. He praised the excellent psychology of ‘Armgart’, but reserved real admiration for The Choir Invisible, giving an extensive prose translation (Pierson 1876, 181). He also welcomed Eliot’s modern readings of Old Testament themes and legends. In 1881, Pierson wrote an obituary for Eliot (Appendix, no. 42). Linking philosophy to literature, he pointed out Eliot’s continuous fame over the previous 25 years. True literature was not the vehicle of philosophy, but was itself philosophy – concrete, dramatic and graphic. The thinker infers his philosophy from reality; the writer creates a reality in which the philosophy is operational, wrote Pierson. Eliot, then, was a real teacher and ‘she took her place among those who think regularly’. Her thinking was among the best of her age, and it came to life in her novels because it was so much a part of her. This was not to say that her novels were tendentious, or that they had an explicit message. She taught us to see like her, after which it was impossible not to become initiated into her way of thinking (Pierson 1881, 263). In his opinion, Eliot had already spread her wings to the full extent in her first novel, AB. The depth of her psychological insights and her moral vision were entirely in place in this first great work (Pierson 1881, 262). It did not surprise Pierson at all that Eliot, in view of her interest in people, had started out by translating Spinoza’s Ethics, since she had felt the need for a more precise determination of the phenomena of man’s inner life. No psychologist should have other intentions or be satisfied with less. Eliot’s novels did not offer the sort of pleasure one owed to la Bruyère, Molière, Balzac and

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82   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe the later Goethe. Rationally speaking, one knew that Eliot was elevated far above what she described, that hers was the voice of reason when the book was closed. While one read, it was as though she was not at all elevated, but living within. The reader became aware that all the abstraction had been a necessary preparation for revealing the inner life (Pierson 1881, 266). Pierson suggested that some readers might think this due mainly to Eliot’s great tolerance. But that could not be so, for tolerance was the virtue of the weak. Vinet had expressed an analogous sentiment, and so had Spinoza in his Tractatus.9 Pierson put it down to the innate passion of the English who knew something higher and more excellent than tolerance: sympathy. It was this union of intellectual power and knowledge with sympathy and understanding which distinguished Eliot from other novelists. Her power was to wield the scientific instrument in search of the fixed laws of consequence, in combination with true veneration for all human foibles (Pierson 1881, 267). Pierson’s lack of appreciation of the later novels, especially DD (which he thought a deception after the first 50 pages), reflects widely held opinions of his day. He thought that she had misplaced her powers of sympathy with the Jewish characters, although this seems surprising in someone as well read as this prominent intellectual. His later turn to aestheticism, and deep learning of a different kind, is still appreciated in the Amsterdam museum of classical antiquity that bears his name. Johannes van Vloten’s was an entirely different personality to Pierson’s. Where Pierson took the positive line of attempting to build a consistent and coherent outlook on the basic problems of his time, integrating his views on science, religion and literature, van Vloten engaged in rabid polemics. He dropped all pretence at Christian faith soon after completing his training for the ministry at Leiden University in the early 1840s. According to his rather idolatrous biographer, he was the first explicit follower of Tübinger biblical criticism in Holland, and his apostasy paved the way for his colleagues such as Busken Huet. His moral ideal was represented by the man Jesus, who showed him the way for his further development: ‘That it was a single principle, shown by Socrates, practically worked out by Jesus, and theoretically developed and expounded by Spinoza.’ He found his religion in society, in analogous fashion to George Eliot: ‘My church is society, and my religion is practised through life itself,’ he wrote as early as 1849 (quoted in Mees-Verwey 1928, 48).10 He made himself unpopular by castigating those of his fellow theologians who remained

9

A. R. Vinet, Mémoire en faveur de la Liberté des Cultes (Lausanne: Librairie Payot, 1944), p. 235: Vinet echoes Spinoza when he talks about tolerance. ‘Tolerance is an insufficient palliative, hidden at the bottom of the hearts of generous people in times of oppression and fanaticism. But its presence reveals the absence of liberty; and the name itself [...] is an injury to human rights.’ (‘La tolérance est un palliatif insuffisant, un remède caché au fond des coeurs généreux dans des temps d’oppression et de fanatisme. Mais sa presence annonce l’absence de la liberté; et son nom, tout beau qu’il semble, est un injure aux droits de l’humanité.’) 10 ‘Mijne kerk is de maatschappij, en mijne godsdienst vindt hare uitoefening in het leven zelf.’

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   83 inside the church for reasons of social profit or tradition. In no uncertain terms he criticized their inconsistencies, raising his voice in theological debate. Van Vloten’s unrelenting rationality fired a quest for truth and nothing but the truth. Truth was the cornerstone in the Spinoza’s philosophy, and truth was a major concern in Eliot’s novels. Truth was what van Vloten found in FH. He admitted that the subtitle ‘the Radical’ had attracted him. His drive for reform made him a tireless advocate of the humanist outlook, and his search for truth took him into fields such as ethics, politics, history, literature and social issues such as education (especially of women), development of the working classes and labour relations. Johannes van Vloten was at the forefront of Spinoza reception in Holland. He made an early and major contribution to the religious debate in favour of Strauss (1843).11 He was also one of the first openly to follow his conscience and leave the church, generating much publicity in the process. The single serious article on Ludwig Feuerbach, the prophet of anthropology, in the Dutch context of this period was also written by him (van Vloten 1867). Mary Ann Evans’s warm-hearted embrace of Feuerbach’s Essence, and the way in which she expressed this in FH, is certain to have attracted the attention of the declared humanist. A brief discussion will highlight the Spinozan aspects of FH and the Feuerbachian implications on the basis of the implicit and explicit contribution made by van Vloten to the serious reception of Eliot in Holland. Van Vloten was well abreast of European literature and thought, and well placed to catch deeper levels of meaning in Eliot’s novel. It was the importance which Feuerbach attached to the feeling of dependence, in line with Schleiermacher and in opposition to Strauss, which van Vloten found so congenial. Van Vloten (writing in 1873) made the connection to Spinoza, who also based himself on the instinct of selfpreservation, which was either refined into self-sacrificial love or degenerated into egoism. Of course, all theology is thus made obsolete, and its pretentious superiority in the field of morals can only lead to the destruction of science, society and life itself. Only the acknowledgement of an inner moral consciousness, instead of an external, imaginary God, a consciousness that is always refining and purifying as sense and reason develop and civilise, can allow a person to work towards the welfare of society, the benefit of science, the refinement of life.12

11

Between 1843 and 1874, van Vloten wrote six other major articles on the subject of Strauss and the Tübinger critics (Mees-Verwey 1928, 242). 12 ‘Alle eigenlijke godgeleerdheid gaat daarmee natuurlijk te niet, en hare voortdurende eigendunkelijke verheffing boven de zedelijkheid, de afhankelijk-verklaring dezer laatste van hare leerstellingen, kan niet anders dan tot verderf van wetenschap, maatschappij en leven leiden. Slechts wie geen denkbeeldigen, uitwendigen God, maar een innerlijk zedelijk bewustzijn erkent, zich altoos louterend en veredelend, naarmate zich verstand en rede ontwikkelen en beschaven; zal op den duur tot welzijn der maatschappij, tot heil der wetenschap, tot veredeling van ’t leven werkzaam kunnen zijn’ (83).

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84   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe In this way van Vloten declared himself on the side of reason and the most radical humanism. From this point of view, van Vloten reviewed FH (1867). He devoted 60 pages of his own periodical to translation and quotation of passages from the novel; he highly appreciated the true-to-life approach taken by the author. Did this enthusiastic promoter of Spinoza make the connection between his philosopher idol and the diligent novelist from England he so warmly commended? The answer to this question is only implicit in the life and publications of this versatile man. In van Vloten we find the connection between the determinist interpretations of Spinozism, the new scientific discoveries in the field of physiology (Moleschott) that also thrilled Eliot and George Henry Lewes, and the principle of free moral choice that was taken as the guiding principle of the life of Jesus. Lewes’s Physiology of Common Life (1859–60) had also been translated into Dutch (1860–61), but there is no documented response from van Vloten. He dedicated his major work on Spinoza to Moleschott (van Vloten 1862b). The latter may be regarded as the founder of physiological materialism. Thus scientifically divested of a personal, immortal soul, man was subject to the laws of nature, and there was no more room for a personal, creative god. Consciousness was the characteristic that distinguished man from animals, and so he was endowed with free will. This consciousness was a fixed quantity that could not be further explained and was of equal status to other laws of nature. Man is morally free, according to van Vloten’s explanation, insofar as he has the aptitude and the ability to develop ideas of religion and morality within himself, and by practice, to gain control over his thoughts and so over his actions. Moreover, he is free to the extent that he has brought all his thoughts and actions into harmony with the higher laws of morality. These higher laws are known to men through what Spinoza termed knowledge of the third kind. The intuitive grasp van Vloten had of Spinoza was reflected in his selective reading of Eliot. His negative stance towards many of his struggling contemporaries, and his high-handed satire of their efforts at finding a new meaning to life and a new basis to their morality, makes his contribution hard to assess. It is by implication that his fiery embrace of Spinoza radiated onto Eliot, and that in the novelist he thought he recognized a sympathizer with the side of rationality. But novels were not usually worth serious attention, as the critic reminded his readers in the opening of his review. Conrad Busken Huet was by far the most sophisticated literary critic in the field, and his consistent approach only served to increase his veneration for Eliot. Dramatic presentation (aanschouwelijkheid) was the mainstay of his literary taste. His was a passion for common sense and good taste. Busken Huet and his wife translated AB and SCL shortly after his popularization of Strauss had been completed in 1858.13 Quite a storm blew up, jeopardizing his position in the church. 13

At this stage Busken Huet was unaware of Mary Anne Evans’s translation of Strauss. By training, he would be familiar with German, and will have read the original.

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   85 His admiration for the author of AB proved a lasting one. He was the only one to appreciate M and DD, keenly analysing George Eliot’s implicit criticism of contemporary society. What follows will show how his insights developed from support for Vinet’s Christian morality as the key to criticism to a full-blown, almost scientific, approach to literature. D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1840) was the single most comprehensive expression of the relationship between science and religion in the first half of the nineteenth century. All the major figures in this study were familiar with the growing uncertainties surrounding the nature of Jesus, casting doubt on the very foundation of Christian faith: the resurrection of Christ. The joint efforts of writers and thinkers represented in this study by Spinoza and Strauss had shed light on the mythical content of the Old and the New Testament, firmly placing them in the realm of literature. To a man like Busken Huet, as the following discussion will show, literature was to be treated with the same high seriousness that had earlier been reserved for religion. Busken Huet’s first explicit review of Eliot’s work was published in De Gids in 1863 (Appendix, no. 16). He reviewed (and translated some 15 pages of) R, then in the process of being published in instalments in the Cornhill Magazine. At the time of his review only the first two volumes had been published. Eliot, according to Busken Huet, was one of the greatest writers of the age, and his enthusiasm was as vehement as his satire at other times. His article went into the different characters and, as many a reviewer would do later, he draws the parallels between them. Tito Melema was the male counterpart of Hetty Sorrel, Romola shared characteristics with Silas Marner and Janet Dempster, Milly Barton and Tina Gilfil. She was a well-raised Maggie, a second Dinah Morris. Romola represented that part of human nature that hankered after higher things, not to be found in natural life. He praised the general nature of Eliot’s analysis of the political situation, but it was especially in the field of theology that the reader was made to feel at home. He praised the psychological perspicacity of the portrait she paints of Savonarola. It was by force of character that he won over Romola. The monk’s arguments that convinced Romola were based on sympathy. This made his dogma purely ethical, and sympathy was the locus of George Eliot’s criticism of the spirit of classical scholarship on which her heroine had been raised (116). In 1873, Busken Huet wrote a review of M (Appendix, no. 30), published in his own newspaper in Batavia, in the Dutch East Indies. He started his review by extensive quotation/translation of the passage in Chapter 1 where Dorothea and Celia share their deceased mother’s jewellery. Busken Huet took the episode as a practical course in dramatic presentation. He reminded his readers of the reference to St Theresa and how it was dramatically shaped in the description of Dorothea. M, then, was a novel describing all the human passions usually found in the genre, but it was also a detailed description (volle greep) of English society of 30 or 40 years previously. The first railway lines, the preparation for the Reform Bill, the imminent revolution in conceptions due to the rise of the natural sciences all play an important role in the lives of the characters: ‘No-one in England, one could say, no-one in the whole

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86   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe world, after reading such pages, may call themselves the equal of George Eliot’ (LFK VIII, 129).14 15 There was one objection, however. Although the novelist did go into great detail about Dorothea’s emotional life, she stopped short at depicting the aversion of the newly-wed Mrs Casaubon to her husband. Busken Huet put this down to the tyranny of English prudery (129). It is especially this final remark that makes clear how his views on moralism in literature had changed. By this time, Busken Huet had come to appreciate Flaubert. In his December 1876 review of DD, Busken Huet immediately acknowledged that the two streams that run through the book are intimately connected and are also connected to the same theme: again it is la question religieuse which occupied the author (Appendix, no. 37). He observed that in SCL Eliot had written about the lives of Anglican clergy, in AB she had done ample justice to Methodism, and in R she had described the charm, but also the unsatisfactory nature, of Catholicism. These studies of several forms of Christianity were now supplemented with a study of Judaism. Busken Huet’s general opinion of the book was very high indeed. Never had George Eliot, in his opinion, united so much imagination with so great realism. This was a truly great book, to be enjoyed even if the reader was unfamiliar with Eliot (LFK VIII, 130). For those who had followed George Eliot’s works closely, Busken Huet wished to qualify this statement: FH was the first of a series of works about British society in the recent past. This was followed by M and now DD. DD in fact continued historical developments, and the issues concerning the Christian faith showed a new turn. DD was unmistakably and mainly concerned with Judaism. All the other material must be regarded as belonging to the background. To Busken Huet it was clear that Deronda’s enthusiasm for the Jewish cause was not shared by Eliot. In Eliot’s view, heroes and heroines were only worthy of that status if, in an all-encompassing pursuit of a life task, they put up with the world’s bad opinion. To her, there was nothing higher in a human being than the loving achievement of a labour that involved neither advantage nor vanity. Busken Huet then quoted Daniel as saying that what he was really pursuing was ‘some form of social captaincy, which would come to me as a duty, and not to be striven for as a prize’ (LFK VIII, 132). Busken Huet obviously disagreed with the contemporary critics who found that their interest in DD waned as his Jewish destiny came to the fore. Busken Huet continued with high praises of the depiction of the Cohen family and of the relationship between Mirah and Mordecai. It was certainly untrue that she had underplayed the ‘secondary materials’ in her eagerness for the main theme. The character of Grandcourt was depicted in such detail as would befit the main character of any novel. Gwendolen’s confession after the death of her 14

LFK stands for: Conrad Busken Huet (1881) Literarische Fantasieën en Kritieken. 25 Dln. H. D. Tjeenk Willink (Collected literary criticism in 25 volumes). 15 ‘Niemand in Engeland, kan men zeggen, niemand in de geheele wereld op dit oogenblik, mag na het lezen van zulke bladzijden zich den gelijke van George Eliot noemen.’

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   87 husband was only equalled by that of Hetty Sorrel’s in AB. The humorous element, represented by Hans Meyrick, was certainly not lacking. There might be a number of superfluous pages in DD, as there were in FH and M, where the subtlety of the writing sometimes obscured the meaning, or was lost in philosophical metaphor, but the work remained an admirable creation. The author maintained her place among the great intellects of the age. It is interesting to note that Busken Huet viewed the book as an organic whole, by taking the religious angle. More literary-minded critics found fault with what have notoriously come to be known as the two halves of the novel, Henry James and F. R. Leavis among them. In February 1881, Busken Huet started off his obituary by listing famous contemporaries of Eliot, and remarked that to have excelled among these required truly exceptional qualities in an exceptional combination (Appendix, no. 44). She had a philosophical, German turn of mind, according to Busken Huet, combined with practical knowledge of, and love for, her own country.16 After citing a reminiscent passage from ITS, Busken Huet observed that reading Eliot’s novels made him feel like a contemporary not of Shakespeare or Milton, not of Byron or Shelley, but of Goethe. Again he referred to Eliot’s German formation, that distinguished her from Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. To create a world in itself and to populate it with characters, that was Eliot’s forte. Her powers of dramatization were of the greatest. Busken Huet went on to give a definitely determinist interpretation of Eliot’s novels, and reiterated that Eliot felt most at home when treating religious questions. AB was full of examples, and he preferred R to M: And this is the reason for the even greater composition of R when compared to M. In M and FH she produced an analysis of recent social history that is far beyond any ordinary talent […] and certainly more excellent than anything available in English literature. But in R she could complement the social with the religious, and under another sky, in another age, she could combine all the forces of her English world […] Again the moral law of nature is in evidence, which runs like a harrow across the lives of the characters. (LFK XXI, 69)17

In miniature, the same grandeur can be observed in SCL. None of her clerics was a hero, a coward or a caricature. Their dogmatic feelings were regarded as

16

Appendix 2, no. 39, also lists Busken Huet’s article on Theophrastus Such, Eliot’s last work. It consists entirely of translated passages and has nothing to offer in the way of literary insights. For this reason it is not discussed here (LFK XXI, 52–64). 17 ‘De nog voortreffelijker zamenstelling Romola, bij Middlemarch vergeleken, behoeft geen andere verklaring. George Eliot beheerscht hare stof wanneer zij zuiver maatschappelijke toestanden analyseert, en daaronder die welke aan de analyse van gewone vernuften steeds ontsnappen [...] en is zonder wedergade in de nieuwe engelsche letteren. Doch in Romola kon zij het maatschappelijke aan vullen met het kerkelijke, en, onder een anderen hemel, in eene andere eeuw, al de krachten harer engelsche wereld zich tegelijk laten inspannen […] Weder komt de zedelijke natuurwet van daareven, en gaat als een eg over het leven van Tessa, Romola en Savonarola.’

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88   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe products of nature. She believed in the greatness of human nature, and when she treated her characters as instances of general humanity, it turned out she depicted them true to life. But was depiction her main motive? Was she not rather in search of illustration of her philosophy? Busken Huet concluded that Eliot was above and beyond the issues; on issues which made some men passionate, or left them indifferent, she managed to raise an interest which did not lead to involvement, and if there was involvement it was never without true sympathy. The secret of Eliot’s greatness lay in her elevation combined with her humane sympathy. The clear difference between Eliot’s realism and Flaubert’s was that Eliot was humane; she believed in the goodness of people. In 1885, Busken Huet reviewed Cross’s Life in Letters, Eliot’s husband’s collation of her private papers, which, as later studies have shown, was heavily edited in order to paint an idealized picture of the famous novelist (Appendix, no. 45).18 He sketched her early life and remarked that her growing scepticism was at all times accompanied by a lively feeling of reverence. She saw through the human motivations behind all religion, but held these motivations for the best and most respectable of all. He concluded his resumé of her early reading by remarking that throughout her correspondence she guarded her independence from the ideas and conceptions of the books she read and translated: ‘All she requires to know is what light these writings have shed in her own mind, what beneficent impression they have made on her heart’ (1885, LFK XXI, 72).19 Conclusion There are few direct communications on record between the Dutch actors in the field of production of Eliot’s fiction and the famous author. An exchange of letters with two of the Dutch publishers on business conditions and a reference by Eliot herself constitute the sum total of documented sources (Schepper 2009, 88–90). Eliot’s letters record the couple’s travels through the Netherlands, their preference for Rotterdam over Amsterdam and their visit to Spinoza’s house. The admiration of her Dutch readers remained ‘safely shrouded for me in a haze of Dutch’ (GEL V, 361). ‘There are cries of the heart that awake an echo in every maiden’s soul,’ wrote a young woman from Utrecht in Holland to George Eliot in 1874 (Haight 1968, 492–93). Her eight-page letter, an outpouring of gratitude for the emotional experience that the novels had afforded her is a rare documented example of personal response. There is one other avid reader who deserves to be mentioned: Vincent van Gogh. His letters bear witness to a lifelong admiration and appreciative readership. SCL inspired him to take 18

Conrad Busken Huet, ‘Nieuwe Engelsche Letteren: George Eliot’s Life’ Algemeen Dagblad van Nederlandsch Indië 13 (1885): 97. Rpt. in LFK XXI, 71–74. 19 ‘Zij vraagt alleen welk licht zij voor haar eigen geest ontstoken, welken weldadigen indruk zij op haar hart gemaakt hebben.’

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   89 up the ministry to the mineworkers in Belgium, and throughout his life he would return to the novels, including R, warmly recommending them to his correspondents (www.vangoghletters.org). Much contemporary Dutch reception has a leitmotif of reconciliation to the human condition, and the often recorded effect of the novels on Dutch readers was that they made for a greater understanding of their fellow human beings. It was a recurrent feature of Eliot’s reception, at home and abroad, that readers had difficulty in reconciling the philosopher and the novelist, perceived as two different personae, both involved in the production of the fiction written by Eliot. Dutch readers up to 1880 had their own strategies for solving this difficulty, by reading their own particular blend of rationalist theology into the novels. Dutch reception was particularly rich in its complete set of early translations and in its recognition of the ideologies underlying Eliot’s fiction. Spinoza Connections There is a growing body of literature connecting Spinoza’s philosophy and Eliot’s fiction. Spinoza’s philosophy is also an important contributing factor to the two other major works translated by Eliot: D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1846) and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1854). The empirical basis for making the connection is narrow, but very sound. Before Eliot started writing fiction, she translated Spinoza’s Ethics in 1856, and her letters refer to earlier work on the Theological Political Treatise.20 The following quotation has lent credibility to all endeavours to find elements of Spinoza in George Eliot’s fiction: [W]hat is wanted in English is not a translation of Spinoza’s works, but a true estimate of his life and system; after one has rendered his Latin faithfully into English, one feels there is another yet more difficult process of translation for the reader to the effect, that the only mode of making Spinoza accessible to a larger number is to study his books, then shut them and give an analysis. (GEL I, 321)

Her lifelong relationship with G. H. Lewes also offers connections, since he also published on the great philosopher (1846, 1866). The fact remains, however, that the primary sources (Eliot’s letters, diaries and notebooks) offer very little foothold after 1856. Besides the references to the translations in the letters, and traces of intense engagement during the translation process in the diaries, there is no further explicit reference to the philosopher by the novelist. Though the secondary literature abounds in tantalizing references to contributions made to Spinoza reception in Britain by Eliot and Lewes, and indications of connections to continental thinking, there has been very little real engagement with the topic until quite recently.

20

GEL 1, 142 and 158. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 52. Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: A Life (Harmondsworth: Hamish Hamilton, 1996), p. 71.

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90   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Reasons for this may be found in the nature of the reception of Spinoza in the nineteenth century and an acknowledged fundamentally problematic relationship between philosophy and literature. Nineteenth century In Thissen’s exhaustive study of Dutch Spinoza reception between 1850 and 1907, we find an important clue to the reasons behind the fact that many of the Dutch readers of Eliot also manifested interest in and engagement with the seventeenth-century philosopher without ever explicitly connecting the two. Thissen describes a quite popular movement of Spinozism that was mainly non-academic and tended toward generalization in typical nineteenth-century fashion. Publications would be scattered across a high number of periodicals of all shapes and sizes. When discussing international parallels, Thissen quotes from Eliot’s letters as one of the most succinct renderings of the type of intellectual activity deployed by such contributors. In this early letter (1840), Marian Evans complains: My mind, never of the most highly organised genus, is more than usually chaotic, or rather it is like a stratus of conglomerated fragments that shows here a jaw and rib of some ponderous quadruped, there a delicate alto-relievo of some fernlike plant, tiny shells and mysterious nondescripts, encrusted and united with some unvaried and uninteresting but useful stone. My mind presents just such an assemblage of disjointed specimens of history, ancient and modern, scraps of poultry picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth and Milton, newspaper topics, morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology and chemistry, reviews and metaphysics, all arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast thickening everyday accession of actual events, relative anxieties and household cares and vexations. (GEL I, 29)

Thissen also refers to a general tendency of writers engaging with Spinoza to explicitly state a need for synthesis and clarification, much like George Eliot’s response quoted above. Modern contributions Dorothy Atkins analysed AB in 1978 on the premise that Eliot’s novels present the ‘true estimate’ desired by Eliot. Focusing on Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge, she gives a fascinating but not quite convincing account of how the development of Adam Bede’s character can be construed along the lines of overcoming the bondage of the passions by increasing knowledge. Though it has since been remarked that this account insufficiently accommodates the greatness of George Eliot’s art, the basic idea has lost nothing of its fascination. One of the issues taken with Atkins’s approach to Spinoza is the place of the imagination. Without imagination there can be no sympathy, a crucial element in all Eliot’s work, but imagination is viewed as inadequate knowledge by Spinoza. Moreover, as Armstrong points out (2013, 298), Atkins leaves

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   91 Spinoza’s description of the affects, or emotions, in Ethics part three out of her account. It is beyond the scope of this brief overview to give an in-depth summary of the dozen or so articles that have been published since 1978, most after 2009. Wodnitzky’s thesis constitutes a close parallel reading of Spinoza’s Ethics and AB, MF and SM. Initially following Atkins, she maps the characters onto Spinoza’s account of the three kinds of knowledge. Her focus on the concept of consciousness then brings to light that a more dynamic approach is needed. Maggie Tulliver is shown not just in bondage to her own emotions, but profoundly hampered by her inability to connect to fellow human beings because of her tragic misconceptions of duty to her family. Silas Marner, finally, victimized on the grounds of having fits of unconsciousness, is brought back to the society of his fellow human beings by the dynamic development of affects and thus increased consciousness. Zenzinger, without quoting any of the other authors discussed here beside Atkins, comes to comparable conclusions about the too limited conception of Spinoza presented by her. Nemoianu is another author who, like Gatens and Wodnitzky, suggests that not only does an interpretation of Spinoza enrich our readings of Eliot, but the opposite is also true. Reading Eliot helps us to understand Spinoza in more dynamic ways, and the focus of this discussion is always on the imagination, which is traditionally interpreted as belonging to the first kind of knowledge. The picture is more complex, as all recent authors agree. Gatens goes so far as to propose that the novels of Eliot represent a new form of philosophical writing (2009, 74). Importantly, she stresses Spinoza’s conviction of the unity of physical experience, emotion and ratio as the ingredients of knowledge. It is remarkable that both Moira Gatens and Isobel Armstrong, in their contributions to two recent major collections of Eliot scholarship, focus their philosophical contributions on the parallels between Spinoza’s Ethics and Eliot’s fiction.21 Armstrong’s reading of the Ethics reveals its dynamic nature, acknowledging Spinoza’s central conception of the human condition as one of striving towards self-realization, and the crucial part played by sociability (2009, 300). She offers a convincing reading of DD, employing Spinoza’s dialectical relations between the affects to show how the ‘two halves’ of that novel are in fact complementary: ‘Eliot took from him [Spinoza] an intransigent understanding of the intensity of the passions and the logic of their formative violence’ (2013, 307). Armstrong’s forceful, dynamic reading of Spinoza’s philosophy has strong affinities with that of the passionate and partisan promoters of Spinozism in the Netherlands of the 1860s and 1870s. The reading also seems to do justice to the headstrong and passionate translator who came to write such powerful novels. 21 Amanda

Anderson and Harry E. Shaw, eds, A Companion to George Eliot (Chichester; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); Margaret Harris, ed., George Eliot in Context (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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92   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Works of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes in Dutch translation Britain

Scenes of Clerical Life

1857 Jan. 1858 Jan. 5

Adam Bede

1 February 1859 March

Netherlands Date (Title, if different) Translator Publisher Part I of Amos Barton in Blackwood’s Scenes of Clerical Life, 2 vols, Blackwood 3 vols, Blackwood 2nd edn, 2 vols

The Physiology 1859–60 of Common Life

The Lifted Veil

1 July 1859 July 1 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine

The Mill on the 4 April 1860 Floss 24 November

3 vols, Blackwood 2 vols, Blackwood

Silas Marner

2 April 1861

Blackwood

Romola

July 1862 1863 July 6 August

Brother Jacob

July 1864

in Cornhill Magazine 3 vols Smith, Elder & Co last instalment in Cornhill Magazine

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1861 (Herders en Schapen) Conrad Busken Huet Kruseman 1860 Anne Busken Huet-van der Tholl Kruseman 1910 Dutric (pseud.) Doetinchem: Misset 1860, 1861 (Ons Leven) Herman van Capelle Kruseman 2nd edn 1865, 3rd edn 1870 Amsterdam: van Kesteren 1878 (De Opgeheven Sluier) Zwaardemaker-Visscher Van Druten & Bleeker 1861 (De Molen van Dorlcote) Anon. P. N. van Kampen 1912 (De Molen van Dorlcote) Dutric (pseud.) Doetinchem: Misset 1950 (De Molen aan de Rivier) Roos, Elisabeth de Amsterdam: Contact 1981 (De Molen aan de Floss) W. A. Dorsman-Vos Utrecht: Het Spectrum June 1861 Van Westrheene Van Kampen July 1861 Anon. Ter Gunne 1864 J. C. van Deventer A. C. Kruseman 1878 Zwaardemaker-Visscher Van Druten & Bleeker

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   93 Britain

Netherlands Date (Title, if different) Translator Publisher

Felix Holt

June 1866

3 vols, Blackwood

The Spanish Gypsy Middlemarch

May 1868

Blackwood

‘The Legend of Jubal’

May 1874

1 December 1871 Book I, December 1872 Blackwood’s 4 vols Blackwood

Daniel Deronda February 1876 Book I September 4 vols Impressions of 1879 Theophrastus Such

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Macmillan’s

Blackwood’s Blackwood Blackwood

1867 Van Westrheene Van Druten & Bleeker

1873 Van Westrheene Van Druten & Bleeker 2002 A. Roeleveld and M. Stevens Amsterdam: Atheneum Polak & Van Gennep 1888 (in Dichterlijke Verhalen) C. van Kempe Valk Amsterdam: Rössing 1876 Van Westrheene Van Druten & Bleeker 1879 Anon. F. Bohn

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94   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Appendix Documented reception in Dutch 1860–1885 Author

Type

Title Dutch (English)

1. 2.

Pierson, A. Introduction to Adam Bede Génestet, P. A. de Review of Adam Bede

3. 4.

Anon. (C. P.) Anon. (N. T.)

Review of Review of

5.

Anon.

Review of

6. 7. 8.

Anon. Anon. (R.) Anon. (H.v.d.V.)

Review of Review of Review of

9.

Anon. (J. H. S.)

Review of

Periodical

Zondagsblad

10. Hissink, L. A.

Review of

11. Anon.

Review of

12. Anon. (N. T.) 13. Anon. (W. A. J.)

Review of Review of

14. Anon. (L. A. H.)

Review of

15. Anon. (C.) 16. Busken Huet, C. 17. Anon.

Review of Review of Review of

18. Anon. (N. T.) 19. Anon. (***S)

Review of Review of

20. Vloten, J. van 21. Bruyn, P.

Review of Review of

22. Anon. (A. M.) 23. Keerom

Review of Review of

24. Roorda van Eysinga, S. F. W. 25. Hoek, J.

Review of

Adam Bede Leeskabinet Herders en Schapen (Scenes Leeskabinet of Clerical Life) Silas Marner Nederlandsche Spectator Silas Marner Leeskabinet Silas Marner Nieuwe recensent De Molen van Dorlcote Leeskabinet (Mill on the Floss) De Molen van Dorlcote Nieuwe recensent (Mill on the Floss) De Molen van Dorlcote Vaderlandsche (Mill on the Floss) letteroefeningen Silas Marner Boekzaal der geleerde wereld Silas Marner Leeskabinet Silas Marner Vaderlandsche letteroefeningen Silas Marner Vaderlandsche letteroefeningen Silas Marner Tijdspiegel Romola Gids Adam Bede, 2nd edn, Tijdspiegel. Herders en Schapen (Scenes of Clerical Life), De Molen van Dorlcote (Mill on the Floss) Adam Bede, 2nd edn Leeskabinet Adam Bede, 2nd edn Vaderlandsche letteroefeningen Felix Holt Levensbode Felix Holt Vaderlandsche letteroefeningen Felix Holt Leeskabinet Felix Holt Nederlandsche Spectator Felix Holt Tijdspiegel

Review of

Felix Holt

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Vaderlandsche letteroefeningen

Date Vol / page 1860 1860 June / 34–40 1860 / 374–76 1861 / 346–50 1861 / 228–30, 244–46 1861 / 289–92 1861 1 / 365–68 1862 / 33–37 1862 1 / 80–83 1862 3 / 167–72 1862 1 / 497–99 1862 / 37–38 1862 1 / 546–48 1862 3 / 38–41 1862 2 / 58–59 1863 2 / 95–121 1864 1 / 559–68

1864 / 95–96 1864 4 / 268 1867 / 321–86 1867 3 / 662–76 1867 / 182–84 1867 / 237–38 1868 1 / 92–95 1868 3 / 65–68

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   95 Author

Type

Title Dutch (English)

30. Busken Huet, C.

Introduction to Romantische Werken Review of Romantische Werken (De molen van Dorlcote) Review of Romantische Werken (Adam Bede) Review of Romantische Werken (Adam Bede) Review of Middlemarch

31. Hoek, J.

Review of

32. Hoek, J.

Review of

Romantische Werken (Novellen en Felix Holt) Middlemarch

33. Anon. (H.) 34. Pierson, A. 35. Admiraal, A.

Review of Review of Review of

Middlemarch Poetry Daniel Deronda

36. Anon. (L. H.)

Review of

Daniel Deronda

37. Busken Huet, C.

Review of

Daniel Deronda

38. Hoek, J.

Review of

39. Busken Huet, C. 40. Anon. 41. Balsem, N. C.

Quotes from Obituary Obituary

Romantische Werken (Adam Bede en Romola) Theophrastus Such

26. Bruyn, P. 27. Anon. 28. Anon. (W. L.) 29. Anon.

42. Pierson, A. Obituary 43. Berckenhoff, H. L. Obituary 44. Busken Huet, C.

Obituary

45. Busken Huet, C.

Review of

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Cross, George Eliot’s Life in Letters

Periodical

Date Vol / page

Onze Tolk

1870 1871 / 155

Leeskabinet

1873 / 196–98

Onze Tolk

1873 / 91–92

Algemeen Dagblad van Nederlandsch Indië Tijdspiegel

1873 3 July

Vaderlandsche letteroefeningen Tijdspiegel Gids Nederlandsche Spectator Nederlandsche Spectator Algemeen Dagblad van Nederlandsch Indië Tijdspiegel

1874 4 / 272–77

Nederland Portefeuille Mannen van beteekenis in onze dagen De Gids Nederlandsche Spectator De Amsterdammer, weekblad voor Nederland Algemeen Dagblad van Nederlandsch Indië

1879 2 / 407–22 1880 / 400–01 1881 / 131–90

1874 1 / 310–12

1874 3 / 225–26 1876 1 / 161–83 1876 / 86–87 1876 / 377–79 1876 20 and 21 December 1877 2 / 170

1881 1 / 261–68 1881 / 46–48 1881 9 January 1881 / 4 1885 27 April

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96   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Dutch translations of George Eliot’s works: A checklist in chronological order Main entry ISBD(M) format; first editions unless otherwise stated. Sub entry: \ = page | = line [] = unnumbered pages {} = additional information No. 1. Adam Bede / George Eliot. – Haarlem: A.C. Kruseman, 1860. – 3 vols: 3 ill.; 22cm. – transl. by Mrs. A. D. Busken Huet-van der Tholl; ill. steel engravings by Jacob Israels. location: Utrecht University Library Zoct.3567 Amsterdam University Library 1308 B 17 – 19 The Hague: Koninklijke Bibliotheek 9192 A 67–69 No. 1 a. Adam Bede | door | George Eliot [single rule] vertaald door| Mevr. Busken Huet [single rule] Eerste Deel [single rule] Haarlem | A.C. Kruseman | 1860. coll.: [11] 284 [1] contents: [1]\ Adam Bede\ ill.\ title page with Wordsworth quotation and translation on back\ Inhoud [1]\ Voorrede by A. Pierson I-X {dated: Rotterdam, 4 april 1860.}\ Eerste Boek\ 3 – 284\ [1]. illustrations: 1: ‘Hetty Sorrel’, steel engraving by J. Israels. No. 1 b. —Tweede Deel coll.: [6] 320 [1] contents: [1]\ Adam Bede\ ill.\ title page with Wordsworth quotation and translation on back {id. part 1}\ Inhoud [1]\ Tweede Boek\ 3–118 \Derde Boek\121–190\ Vierde Boek\193–320\ [1]. illustrations: 1: ‘Adam Bede’, steel engraving by J. Israels. No. 1 c. —Derde Deel coll.: [5] 285 [1] contents: [1]\ Adam Bede\ ill.\ title page with Wordsworth quotation and translation on back (id. part 1)\ Inhoud [1]\ Vijfde Boek\ 3–174\ Zesde Boek\177–285\[1]. illustrations: 1: ‘Dina Morris’, steel engraving by J. Israels. (No. 2.) Herders en Schapen. Drie Novellen.= De Wederwaardigheden van Ds. Barton; De Hartsgeheimen van Ds. Gilfil; De Nalatenschap van Ds.Tryan. / George Eliot. – Haarlem: A. C. Kruseman, 1861. – 2 vols: ...; 22cm. – orig. tit. Scenes of Clerical Life; transl. by Cd. Busken Huet. location: Minderbroeder Kapittel ‘s-Hertogenbosch

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   97 No. 3. De Molen van Dorlcote / George Eliot. – Amsterdam: P. N. van Kampen, 1861. – 3 vols: 3 ill.; 22cm. – orig. tit. The Mill on the Floss; transl. anon. location: Amsterdam University Library P 66 – 5576–5578 No. 3 a. De Molen van Dorlcote | door | George Eliot | Schrijver van Adam Bede | uit het Engelsch. | Ie deel | ill. | Amsterdam | P.N. van Kampen | 1861. coll.: [3] 312 [1] contents: [1]\tit.page + illustration\Eerste Boek \208\Tweede Boek\312\[1] illustration: C.G.A. Last lith. P.Blommers te ‘s Hage. No. 3 b.—IIe Deel different ill. No. 3 c.—IIIe Deel different ill. No. 4. Silas Marner. De Wever van Raveloe / George Eliot. – Amsterdam: P. N. van Kampen, (June) 1861. – 1 vol.: ill.; 22cm. – transl. by Mrs. Jacoba van Westrheene-van Heijningen. location: Amsterdam University Library P 66 – 1950 The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek 830 A 26 coll.: [2] 305 [1] contents: [1]\ Silas Marner | de Wever van Raveloe | door | George Eliot | schrijver[sic] van Adam Bede | uit het Engelsch door | Mevrouw van Westrheene | ill. | Amsterdam | P. N. van Kampen. | 1861.\ 305 \ [1]. illustration: C.G.A. Last lith. P.Blommers te ‘s Hage. No. 5. Silas Marner. De wever van Raveloe / George Eliot. – Deventer: A. ter Gunne, (July) 1861. – .... – Ser.:Ter Gunne’s Huis en Reis Bibliotheek Nr. ... No. 6. Adam Bede / George Eliot. – 2nd revised edn – Haarlem: A.C. Kruseman, 1863. – 1 vol.: 3 ill.; 16cm. – transl. by Mrs. A. D. Busken Huet-van der Tholl; ill. steel engravings by Jacob Israels. location: Amsterdam University Library 435 C 15 coll. : [1] [ill.] VI-XVI 1–218 [ill.] 220–464 [ill.] 465–682 [1] contents: [1]\ill.\Adam Bede | door | George Eliot [double rule] uit het engelsch door Mevr. Busken Huet met eene voorrede van Dr. A. Pierson [single rule] tweede herziene druk | met drie staalplaten | eerste deel. [single rule] Te Sneek bij | Van Druten & Bleeker. \coll. illustration: 3 steel engravings by J. Israels, identical to those in first edn, in different order: 2,1,3.

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98   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe No. 7. Romola / George Eliot. – Haarlem: A.C. Kruseman, 1864. – 3 vols: 3 ill.; 22cm. – transl. by Dr. Julius Christiaan van Deventer. location: Amsterdam University Library 1260 A 7–9 No. 7 a. George Eliot [single rule] Romola [single rule] Uit Het Engelsch | door | Dr I. C. van Deventer [single rule] Eerste Deel [single rule] Haarlem | A. C. Kruseman | 1864. coll.: [5] 283 [2] contents: [2: gedrukt bij Gebr. v. Asperen van der Velde.] illustration: opp. title page, lith. Emrik & Binger No.7 b. —Tweede Deel coll.: [5] 285 [2] No. 7 c. —Derde Deel coll.: [5] 266 [1] No. 8. Felix Holt, De Radikaal / George Eliot. – Sneek: Van Druten en Bleeker, 1867. – 2 vols: 2 ill.; 22cm. – transl. by Mrs.Van Westrheene. location: Amsterdam University Library P 67 – 4386–4387 No. 8 a. Felix Holt, de Radikaal [double rule] Een Verhaal | door | George Eliot | schrijfster van “Adam Bede” enz. enz. | Uit Het Engelsch door | Mevr.van Westrheene. | Eerste Deel. | Te Sneek bij | Van Druten & Bleeker | 1867. coll.: [4] 377 [2] contents: [1]\ill. \title page \Inhoud \ 377 \advertisements [2]\[1] illustration: lith. No. 8 b. —Tweede Deel coll.: [6] 352 No. 9. George Eliot’s Romantische Werken = Vol 1. Novellen; vol. 2. Adam Bede; vol. 3 De Molen van Dorlcote; vol. 4 Romola; vol. 5 Felix Holt / George Eliot. – Nieuwe Uitgaaf / ed. P. Bruijn. – Sneek: Van Druten & Bleeker, (vol. 1 1870; vol. 2 1873; vol. 3 1870; vol. 4 1871; vol. 5 1870). – 5 vols: 5 ill.; 18cm. – orig. tit. vol. 1 Herders en Schapen, 1860 + Silas Marner, 1861; transl. by C. Busken Huet and Mrs Van Westrheene (vol. 1, 5), A. D. Busken Huet-v.d.Tholl (vol. 2), vol. 3 anon., Dr J. C. van Deventer (vol. 4). location: Amsterdam University Library 1222 C 33–37 No. 9 a. George Eliot’s | Romantische Werken [single rule] Uit Het Engelsch [single rule] Nieuwe Uitgaaf, Met Inleiding En Onder Toezicht Van | P. Bruijn. [single rule] Deel I. | Novellen [single rule] Te Sneek, Bij | Van Druten & Bleeker. \ Novellen | door | George

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   99 Eliot. [single rule] Uit Het Engelsch. [single rule] Nieuwe uitgaaf, onder toezicht van | P. Bruijn. [single rule] Te Sneek, Bij | Van Druten & Bleeker. coll.: [5] I-XIV 543 [1] contents: [1] tit.p.ed.\ tit.p.vol. with ill. on back \ tit. p. without mention of ser.title \ inhoud \ Inleiding by P. Bruijn I-XIV \ De Wederwaardigheden van Ds. Barton \ 74 \ De Hartsgeheimen van Ds. Gilfil \ 200 \ De Nalatenschap van Ds. Tryan.\ ... \ Silas Marner \ 543 \ [1]. No. 9 b.-e. —Deel II. 504; Deel III 543; Deel IV 488; Deel V 444 [2 advertisements]. No. 10. Middlemarch / George Eliot. – Sneek: Van Druten & Bleeker, 1872–73. – 4 vols; 22cm. – transl. by Mrs Van Westrheene. location: Amsterdam University Library P 66 – 3761–3764 No. 10 a.: Middlemarch [single rule] Een Verhaal | door | George Eliot | Schrijfster van “Adam Bede”, “Felix Holt, de Radikaal” enz. [single rule] Uit Het Engelsch | door | Mevr. Van Westrheene. | Eerste Deel [single rule] Te Sneek Bij | Van Druten & Bleeker | 1872. coll.: [4] I-IV 5–360 contents: [4]\ I-IV preface by G.E. \ 5 – 360. No. 10 b.-d.: —Tweede Deel. – 1873. – 307 [1]; Derde Deel. – 1873. – 5–330 [2 advertisements]; Vierde Deel. – 1873. – 5–318. No. 11. Daniel Deronda / George Eliot. – Sneek: Van Druten & Bleeker, 1876. – 4 vols; 22cm. – transl. by Mrs.Van Westrheene. location: Amsterdam University Library 1260 B 33–36 No. 11 a.: Daniel Deronda [single rule] Uit Het Engelsch | van | George Eliot | door | Mevr. Van Westrheene. | Eerste Deel [Double Rule] Sneek | J.F. Van Druten | 1876. coll.: [3] 7–292 [1] contents: No. 11 b.-d.: —Tweede Deel. – [4] 7–296; Derde Deel. – 7–320; Vierde Deel. – 7–300 [2 advertisements]. No. 12. De Opgeheven Sluier. Broeder Jacob / George Eliot. – Sneek: Van Druten & Bleeker, 1878. – 1 vol.; 18cm. – transl. by Mrs. Zwaardemaker(-Visscher). location: Amsterdam University Library 1537 E 6 coll.: ... contents:  De Opgeheven Sluier | Broeder Jacob \ George Eliot [single rule] De Opgeheven Sluier | Broeder Jacob [single rule] Uit Het Engelsch | door | Mevr.

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100   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Zwaardemaker [single rule] Te Sneek Bij | J.F. Van Druten. | 1878. \ ... No. 13. Indrukken van Theophrastus Dinges / George Eliot. – Haarlem: Erven F. Bohn, 1879. – 1 vol.; 18cm. – transl. anon. location: Leiden University Library ... The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek 830 A 26 coll.: [3] 226 [2] contents: [1]\ Indrukken van Theophrastus Dinges\ George Eliot [single rule] Indrukken | van | Theophrastus Dinges [single rule] Uit het Engelsch [single rule] Haarlem | De Erven F. Bohn. | 1879. {signed and dated by the publisher, October 1879}\ 226\ [Inhoud]\[1]. (No. 14.) Dichterlijke Verhalen: Navolgingen van François Coppée, Louis de Ronchaud, George Eliot, John Keats / C. van Kempe Valk. – Amsterdam: Rössing, 1888. – 136 p.; 22cm. location: Amsterdam University Library ... coll.: ... contents:  Het Wrakhout / naar het Fransch van François Coppée; De Legende van Jubal / naar het Engelsch van George Eliot; De Pleegzoon van den dood / naar het Fransch van Louis de Ronchaud; Hyperion / naar het Engelsch van John Keats. No. 15. Felix Holt: opnieuw bewerkt uit het Engelsch. / George Eliot. – ‘s-Gravenhage: Blankwaardt & Schoonhoven, 1909. – ed. (transl.?) Th.A.Quanjer. – ... location: The Hague, O.L.B. (?) No. 16. Adam Bede / George Eliot. – Opnieuw vertaald. – Doetinchem: Nederlandsche Drukkers en uitgevers Mij. “C. Misset”, 1910. – 1 vol.: 15 ill.; 20cm. – transl. by Dutric (pseudonym); ill. by B. Hickling(?); condensed. location: Amsterdam University Library P 73 – 700 coll.: [2] 478 [1 advertisements] contents:  Adam Bede | door | George Elliot [sic] | [double rule] opnieuw vertaald | door | Dutric. [single rule] geïllustreerde uitgave [single rule] Nederlandsche Drukkers en uitgevers Mij. “C. Misset”, Doetinchem. illustration: 15 No. 17. De Molen van Dorlcote / George Eliot. – Doetinchem: Nederlandsche Drukkers en uitgevers Mij. “C. Misset”, (1912?). – 1 vol.: ill.; 20cm. – transl. by Dutric (pseudonym). location: The Hague: O.L.B. (?)

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George Eliot in the Netherlands   101 No. 18. Adam Bede / George Eliot. – 10e druk. – Amsterdam: L.J. Veen, 1927. – 1 vol.: 3 ill.; 22cm. – transl. by A. D. Busken Huet-van der Tholl; ill. identical to 1st edn; preface by A. Pierson identical to 1st edn; spelling modernized. location: Amsterdam University Library P 73 – 713 No. 19. P.M. {Condensed, anonymous, translations of Adam Bede and The Mill were published in the 1920s (?) in Amsterdam by Hollandsch Uitgeversfonds.} location: Home; Amsterdam University Lib. 1326 G 15 and FK 91 342 and FK 91 341. No. 20. De Molen aan de Rivier / George Eliot. – Amsterdam: Contact; Antwerpen: Contact, 1950. – 1 vol.: 1 ill.; 21cm. – transl. and introduction by Elisabeth de Roos; ser. De Onsterfelijken. location: Home; ... No. 21. De Molen aan de Floss / George Eliot. – Utrecht: Het Spectrum, 1981. – 546 pp.; 22cm. – transl. by W. A. Dorsman-Vos; ser. De Klassieken. location: The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek VD 1168/54–1 Depot No. 22. Middlemarch / George Eliot. – Amsterdam: Atheneum – Polak & Van Gennep, 2002. 916 pp.; 24.5cm. – transl., postscript and annotations by Annelies Roeleveld and Margaret Stevens; ser. Grote Belletrie Serie. Notes on checklist General note: Detailed description of titles has only taken place if they appeared to be sufficiently rare or interesting enough. Not all titles described have actually been inspected. No. 5: In Nieuwsblad voor den Boekhandel 1861: 4 April Van Kampen announces Van Westrheene translation of Silas Marner. On 20 June, publication is duly registered. On 4 July, Ter Gunne’s publication is registered, no translator mentioned. I have not been able to compare the two editions yet (cf.Verheul, note 11). No. 6: Pierson in foreword to second edition, dated 1863, refers reader to article by Edmond Schérer in Etudes Critiques sur la Littérature Contemporaine (Paris 1863). No. 7: Binding by Lees-Bibliotheek van der Hoek, Leiden. No. 9: No new translations were used for this edition. No. 9 b.–e.: The collation of three title pages is identical in all volumes. No. 11: See note to No. 7. No. 11 d: The publisher advertises 4 vols Daniel Deronda at ¦11.80 and 4 vols

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102   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Middlemarch at ¦13.00. Also ‘Goedkoope uitgaven van G.E.’s werken’ at ¦2.90: Adam Bede 3rd edn, Felix Holt 2nd edn, Romola 2nd edn, Novellen 2nd edn, De Molen van Dorlcote 2nd edn.

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4



‘Spirit of the Age(s)’: The Reception of George Eliot in Sweden Git Claesson Pipping and Catherine Sandbach Dahlström

Introduction One of the most striking features of the reception of George Eliot in Sweden (and Swedish-speaking Finland) is the brief period of enthusiasm in the 1880s. This produced the translation, or retranslation, of a large proportion of her work as well as numerous reviews and articles. Although it is evident that many of the early critics and reviewers had a limited understanding of the nature of Eliot’s work, the sheer scale of interest in the 1880s is remarkable when viewed in the context of the reception of European authors in general. The twentieth-century reception, as will be apparent, is far from clear cut and often ambivalent. Moreover, even if Eliot’s status in the English-speaking world is now recognized by most critics, her writing is relatively little known to the Swedish reading public as a whole. In what follows we trace how genre expectations and cultural norms have influenced reception, both in the nineteenth century and in more recent years. We deal first with George Eliot’s reception in the nineteenth century with particular reference to those critics, Ellen Key and Helena Westermarck, who recognized Eliot’s philosophical and moral standpoint for what it was. Following on from this we investigate her influence on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors. We then discuss the role that translation has played in directing readers’ responses to the novels, and finally we turn to the critical commentary published over the course of the twentieth century. Although we have written the article together, Git Claesson Pipping has been responsible for research into the nineteenth-century reception while Catherine Sandbach Dahlström has studied the translations and twentieth-century responses. In this context, we note the relatively modest contribution to reception coming from English Studies. Academic dissertations from language departments have, moreover, had little effect on the Swedish reception. They are written in English, or some other vernacular, and seldom reviewed in the Swedish press.

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104   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Reception in the Nineteenth Century Novels in English written by women were popular in Sweden as early as the late eighteenth century and such authors as Maria Edgeworth and Susan Ferrier were popular during the 1830s and 1840s. There is also convincing evidence that Jane Eyre was not only well received in Sweden but seen as an aesthetic ideal, fulfilling the idea of what contemporary Swedish scholars such as Carl Johan Backman (1851) thought was artistically perfect (Claesson Pipping 2006). Significantly, however, the Swedish interest in English women novelists appears not to have included Jane Austen, probably because her irony either went undetected or was found inappropriate in a lady (Claesson Pipping and Wikborg 2007). One reason for the great interest in British novels was the upsurge of liberalism in the middle of the nineteenth century. Swedish liberals turned to the British for inspiration. There is ambivalence, though, in their interest in British women writers. As early as the 1850s the connections between women, the novel and slightly didactic and inoffensive leisure reading had led to these kinds of literary works being given the specific epithet ‘tea-water novels’. (Claesson Pipping 1993, 26). As a well-known critic, Herman Bjursten (1856), put it, novels written by women from Great Britain mainly consisted of depictions of tea making and barns, that is, rural environments. On the other hand, ironically, novels with a serious content were found to be lacking in artistic ability. In the course of the three decades that elapse between the time when George Eliot is first noticed in Sweden, around 1860, and the last nineteenth-century translation in 1890, Swedish cultural life experienced what is known as the moderna genombrottet (‘modern breakthrough’). The literary ideal of the 1860s was ‘idealrealism’, a term denoting not Kantian idealism but rather that of the Swedish philosopher Christopher Jacob Boström (1797–1866). However, during the 1870s an increasing number of Swedish authors employed the realist form of the novel to debate various problems in society. Nonetheless, the women novelists of the day who raised women’s issues of different kinds were quickly denounced as tendensförfattare, that is, writers of tendentious fiction. This meant that the contemporary literary debate derived from the idea that fiction written by women was a separate genre. The term tendentious for women novelists’ critiques of society was in use well into the 1880s, in spite of the fact that the so-called ‘’Eighties movement’ brought about a shift towards Naturalist writing, closely connected to French Naturalism, which also focused on social issues of different kinds. The ’Eighties movement was also influenced by contemporary scientific knowledge and the rejection of traditional Christian belief, which was the radicals’ weapon against the establishment at the time. Understandably then, Eliot’s reputation remains strong throughout the 1880s and 1890s, but interestingly her work is praised by both conservative and radical reviewers and journal editors alike.1 1

The relationship between the aesthetics of the 1870s and 1880s and George Eliot’s reception are discussed at length in Claesson Pipping, Könet som läsanvisning: George Eliot och Victoria Benedictsson i det svenska 1880–talet; En receptionsstudie (Stockholm; Stehag: Symposium Graduale, 1993).

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‘Spirit of the Age(s)’: The Reception of George Eliot in Sweden   105 Reviews and Articles From 1860 until about 1887, however, only about 20 reviews or articles about Eliot were published. Moreover, some of these consist of very short notices, simply announcing that a new instalment of a novel is available. The reviews were often, but not always, occasioned by the publication of a new work by Eliot in Sweden or – sometimes – in Britain (for example, Bergstedt’s 1873 review of Middlemarch). On her death there were also a few articles and short biographical sketches, and a handful of articles in journals on Eliot’s works and/or her life and philosophy. Most of the nineteenth-century reviews, then (about 40), are from the period 1887 to 1890, that is, the time when Norstedts published most of her novels in translation. Interestingly, this makes her the most reviewed of all foreign authors during the 1880s. Holmberg (1974, 9), a literary scholar, has commented on the reception of writing from abroad and finds that Eliot was reviewed 26 times for five novels. However, Holmberg has fewer newspapers in his study than we do. There are more reviews of Zola (35 reviews of 19 works), Ohnet (27 of 13) and Verne (26 of eight), but Eliot receives more reviews per novel than they did. Considering that all the reviewers, ranging from the utterly conservative to the fiercely radical, were positive about her, she must have been one of the most appreciated authors of the time. Similarly, short notices in the newspapers announcing the appearance of a new part of a novel may well contain the comment that ‘the name of George Eliot speaks for itself ’ (Krook 1890). Eliot’s Influence on Swedish Nineteenth-Century Authors Although most educated people learnt French and German before English, there is good reason, if no concrete evidence, to suppose that the British women novelists were role models for the Swedish women writers. It is known that Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865), in her day a celebrated and wellknown author, read English novels. Eliot, for her part, admired Bremer and they met in the early 1850s, well before Eliot turned to fiction (Cross 1885, 1: 261). We also know that Bremer read Silas Marner and found it delightful (Howitt 1867, 1: 205). This was, however, too late in Bremer’s career to influence her writing. The author who was most visibly influenced by Eliot was Victoria Benedictsson (1850–1888) who wrote realist novels under the male pseudonym Ernst Ahlgren. Sometimes compared to Strindberg, Benedictsson wrote mainly about feminist subjects. Her first novel, Pengar (Money) (1885), portrays a young woman who enters a loveless marriage but subsequently leaves to make a life of her own. As Claesson Pipping (1993) has demonstrated, when writing her second novel, Fru Marianne (Mrs Marianne) (1887), Benedictsson, in describing the moral awakening of her heroine, made use of the depiction of moral development in the lives of Adam, Hetty, Arthur Donnithorne and Dinah in AB. Fru Marianne’s moral sense has been destroyed by reading too many novels, and the parallel to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is clear, but the

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106   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe outcome is reversed for, as a consequence of pregnancy, Marianne awakens from her dreamlike trance to achieve a dignified moral state through work, making her a cultured Mrs Poyser. Another similarity is found in her husband Börje who is Adam’s equivalent in moral stature. Like Adam he has to modify his preconceived ideas, in this case coming to recognize that even a beautiful woman can become a good housewife. Börje’s seductive friend Pål is Arthur’s obvious counterpart, but, unlike Arthur, Pål does not succeed in seducing Marianne. Eliot’s influence can be traced in other writers of the time. Helena Westermarck (1857–1938), a Finland-Swedish critic, biographer and novelist whose extensive Eliot criticism is discussed below, was influenced in another way. A main theme in almost all of Westermarck’s fiction – a number of short stories and novels published between 1889 and 1922 – and certainly in all of her numerous biographies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women professionals is a strict work ethic coupled with moral maturity or even moral superiority (Claesson Pipping 2007). As for Anne Charlotte Leffler, a successful dramatist and novelist (1849–1892), we know from a letter to Viktor Lorén (21 July 1880) that Leffler read Eliot and recommended her as a great novelist. Leffler’s career was cut short, but it seems that the novel she was working on at her death was intended to be a broad depiction of society not unlike Middlemarch. As part of a conscious strategy to present herself as the great storyteller, Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) – Sweden’s most prominent woman novelist and first woman to take her place in the Swedish Academy – was at pains to destroy any trace of which authors might have influenced her (Nordlund 2005). But there is every reason to believe that she had read Eliot: she was educated at the time when Eliot’s reputation in Sweden was at its height; and this was at a teachers’ college for women, an environment that was well known for promoting intellectualism and wide reading. Moreover, Lagerlöf was interested in the natural sciences and much inspired by Darwin (Lagerroth 1963). The most compelling evidence for Eliot’s influence, though, is to be found in the realistic technique that Lagerlöf uses, which is reminiscent of Silas Marner. In several novels, Herr Arnes penningar (The Treasure) (1904), Körkarlen (Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness!) (1912) and Kejsaren av Portugallien (The Emperor of Portugallia) (1914), for instance, she employs supernatural events to explain simple people’s actions. These events are not represented as real in themselves, but they are real to those who experience them and consequently the characters’ actions are made rational, human and tragic. In giving poor, uneducated people dignity, Lagerlöf is like Eliot but unlike her Swedish predecessors. Realism and Philosophy There is a strong tendency in the Swedish critical tradition to connect artistic expression with French literature and good morals with British (Claesson Pipping 1993). In Eliot’s case this is apparent when even otherwise sympathetic critics, such as Westermarck, fault her composition, claiming that it is an example of the English ‘lack of concern when it comes to composition’ (1884,

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‘Spirit of the Age(s)’: The Reception of George Eliot in Sweden   107 188).2 Similarly, like other Swedish critics, when reviewing FH, liberal critic and journal editor Carl-Fredrik Bergstedt (1871) extols the novel for being socially sound but never stops to consider if the weaving of the plotlines could be an artistic experiment, claiming that this mode signifies a British national trait. Indeed, in his review of Middlemarch (1873) he goes so far as to claim that it is not a novel at all but a collection of stories about different personalities. In thus relieving himself of any responsibility to review the novel as a work of art, he can use the rest of the review to praise Eliot’s ability as an outstanding portrayer of characters. Many later critics have observed the close connection between Eliot’s philosophical position and her artistic practice. George Levine, in particular, has studied how Eliot’s philosophical and ethical position is closely intertwined with her realist aesthetic (2008). He also demonstrates how with Romola she had achieved a realism that derived from an idiosyncratic sense of the real in the spirit of Auguste Comte. If Eliot’s experiments with composition went undetected in the Swedish context, her realist intentions did not. The link between Eliot’s philosophy (her debt to positivism) and her aesthetics is clear in relation to the two writers, Ellen Key and Benedictsson, who officially acknowledged Eliot as a source of inspiration. Key’s later international career as a feminist activist and educationalist whose writings were translated into many languages is well known. In the 1880s and 1890s she was an influential voice in the cultural debate in Sweden and one of the first Swedish feminist writers to admire Eliot. We know from Key’s philosophical diaries and from her extensive correspondence with her lover, Urban von Feilitzen (also an admirer of Eliot), that Eliot was directly responsible for Key’s development from Christianity to atheism (Wittrock 1953). Moreover, Key was a pioneer when it came to connecting Eliot’s realism to her philosophical position. This applies particularly to her perception of Eliot’s rejection of the transcendental and emphasis on ethical awareness as a key to dignified living. In her later years, Key’s concept of maternalism in society was very influential internationally and it is an open question whether or not her philosophical position originated in her early admiration for Eliot and analysis of her work. Be that as it may, Key’s early recognition of Eliot’s philosophical position was controversial. As noted, English female novelists were not expected to write novels with serious intellectual pretensions. Rather derogatory designations such as ‘tea-water novels’ tended to convey a sense of tepid though Christian moral themes. The urge to place Eliot within genre expectations was so strong that the man who was to become Sweden’s most prominent conservative critic, C. D. W. (Carl David af Wirsén), could not recognize Eliot’s agnosticism. In three reviews he extolled Eliot’s morality while criticizing her for being too harsh on High Church clergy and too appreciative of Low Church priests (1888a, 1888b, 1890). Similarly, genre expectations might explain why the anonymous reviewer of DD in Nya Dagligt Allehanda (‘DD’ 1878) could express both surprise at Eliot’s English reputation as a female Shakespeare and disgust at the 700 or so pages of boring philosophical discussion the reader was 2

‘sorglöshet om kompositionen’.

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108   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe forced to plough through. Likewise, a long obituary article in the same paper (‘George Eliot och hennes författarskap’ 1881) believed that interest in Eliot would soon decline as her work was too intellectual and lacking the literary emotion that could guarantee survival. Nonetheless some contemporaries were appreciative of Eliot’s agnosticism and positivist philosophy, but this was controversial. The well-known disagreement between Key and her mentor, an older Christian feminist and editor of a feminist journal, Sophie Adlersparre, in 1882 is evidence of this. When Adlersparre’s journal Tidskrift för hemmet (The home journal), the first feminist journal in Sweden, was about to publish Key’s extensive presentation of Eliot’s position, they exchanged letters debating Eliot’s philosophy. Adlersparre’s distaste resulted in the erasure of a section in which Key presented Eliot’s philosophy. It was replaced by an editorial comment explaining that it was too philosophical to ‘succeed in providing [the readers] with the intended explanation of the contradictory, and in our view inexplicable view of life that the great authoress eventually arrived at’ (1882, 258; italics in original).3 The editorial comment also includes a summary of the excised section, but this emphasizes the similarity between Eliot’s ethic and the Christian one while Key’s manuscript gives this issue less space than it does Eliot’s philosophy. Here Adlersparre even goes so far as to suggest that feminine humility lay behind Eliot’s inability to accept the Christian doctrine of immortality: the reason being that ‘she herself did not dare reckon’ with it (1882, 259).4 Adlersparre’s refusal to acknowledge Eliot’s beliefs was probably a result of her own strong adherence to the Christian faith – a refusal to believe that anything but Christianity could ever be ethically sound. One of the best-informed commentators is Helena Westermarck, who often emphasizes that Eliot’s philosophy and literary realism are associated with one another. As early as 1884, she compared Eliot with contemporary French Naturalists Zola and Bourget and argued that Eliot took Comte’s positivism to its logical conclusion, that she was the most Naturalist of all.5 As Westermarck interprets Comte, determinism in a character is a consequence of inner developments. Thus even a character who appears to be innocent can come to commit a crime. One of her examples is from AB and the description of Hetty, whose beauty is described in terms of innocence. A French Naturalist, rather than sticking to this truth, would have marked her fate as inevitable, ‘would probably have made her beautiful in a more vulgar and sensual way, or he would have indicated the crime that she would commit in the course of the narrative by some personality trait’ (Westermarck 1884, 7: 193).6 Through

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‘att kunna gifva dem [läsarna] den åsyftade förklaringen af det motsägande och i vår tanke oförklarliga af den lifsuppfattning den stora skriftställarinnan småningom tillkämpat sig’. 4 ‘hon sjelf inte vågat räkna’. 5 Nils Erdmann (1888) also compares Eliot to other naturalists, Bourget and Tolstoy; see Claesson Pipping (1993, 101). 6 ‘hade troligen gifvet henne en skönhet af mer vulgär eller sinlig art, eller hade han med något drag antydt brottet hon under berättelsens förlopp ska begå’.

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‘Spirit of the Age(s)’: The Reception of George Eliot in Sweden   109 her definition of Naturalism and her analysis of Eliot’s aesthetic standpoint Westermarck suggests that Eliot is more of a Naturalist, that is truer to science, than the French Naturalists. But, above all, she emphasizes how closely Eliot’s view of life was linked to her kind of realism. Westermarck was later to develop this argument in her book about Eliot, where she writes, ‘Nature […] teaches us that if we confuse red with green, for instance, then our eye is abnormal. Nature can thus correct, complement or destroy our observations, and for this reason we must always obey her’ (1894, 160–61).7 Westermarck, who had a fundamentalist belief in scientific truth as opposed to religious faith, thus stresses that Eliot, under the influence of contemporary scientific study, was obliged to respect evidence for the laws of nature that are not accessible to perception; laws that are regular if not absolute. Another critic to make the connection between Eliot’s philosophy and literary practice, Hellen Lindgren (1886), draws far-reaching social consequences from her realism. He argues that the fact that Eliot depicts the lower classes and allows them to use ‘their own inadequate and prejudiced, simple and crippled language’ is part of her objective unwillingness to judge (1886, 20: 452).8 This in turn implies that social questions cannot only be solved by impositions from above, or changes in the law, but must come about by the privileged voluntarily abdicating some of their power and authority. For Lindgren, Eliot’s practice conveys both a moral and a socio-political message. Translation Eliot comes to the reader in two guises: in the original English and in the interpretation that is translation – and it is the latter which reveals, as much as do critical comments, how her texts have been understood or converted to fit the Swedish context. However, insofar as the nineteenth-century translations of AB (1861a), FH (1867b), DD (1878), R (1887) and SCL (1888a) have not been reprinted, the role of translation in the recent reception of George Eliot’s work is limited. Moreover, old-fashioned syntax and an earlier form of spelling present difficulties for modern readers who might be tempted to borrow early editions from a library. At present, those who are unwilling to read in English can access more modern translations of SM (1944), LV (1956), M (1961) and MF (Bror och Syster) (2002), though of these only the last, having recently appeared in paperback, is in print. Nonetheless, the history of nineteenth-century translations is evocative in itself. In the 1880s a publishing house, Norstedt and Sons, launched an ambitious project aimed at providing Swedish readers with translations of hitherto untranslated works by Eliot. A biography of the author was to be included in the series, but this never came about. The standard of translation 7

‘Naturen […] lär oss, att om vi t.ex förväxla rödt med grönt, är vårt öga abnormt. Naturen skall sålunda rätta komplettera eller tillintetgöra våra iaktagelser, därför måste vi ständigt hålla oss till henne.’ 8 ‘sitt eget bristfälliga och fördomsfull, simpla och stympade språk’.

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110   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe is high throughout and each title has a different translator, some professional translators, others cultured literati, like Anna von Feilitzen whose interest in Eliot may be due to her father Urban von Feilitzen’s influence. Neither AB (1861a) nor DD (1878), which had already been translated, were included, whereas SS (1861b, 1888c), in a new translation, was.9 DD had been published fairly soon after its appearance in England. Although it is called a collation or summary, the book is in fact a more-or-less complete translation – if without epigraphs – and, barring a few mistakes, it follows the original text closely. That the book was published by Albert Bonnier and Sons is presumably attributable to the Jewish theme, as the members of this major publishing family were practising Jews at the time (När Albert 1937). There are other indications that translations are the result of private interests: namely Felix Holt’s speech to working men (‘Tal i arbetarfrågan’) and a short extract from ‘Judgments on Authors’ (‘Om författarskap’) from Leaves from a Notebook, the first translated by Urban von Feilitzen (1884) and the second by Anna von Feilitzen (1886). Norstedts did not usually publish works of literature and the decision to do so presumably came from an unidentified enthusiast. The preliminary pages of these editions are interesting: while on the one hand they express some uncertainty as to how well the Eliot translations will be received, on the other hand the introductory advertisements clearly aim to excite readers and make them aware that they are on the verge of encountering a major talent. There is also an awareness of the implications of the realist aesthetic that resembles Key’s and Westermarck’s responses. Eliot’s attraction lay not only in the perfection of her realist descriptions but also ‘in the nobility of her mind, sensitivity to nature and an excellent memory for and awareness of reality’.10 Of Middlemarch it is said that ‘the particular focus and depth of the characterization and the openness to nature and reality which permeate the plot’ compensate for any weaknesses deriving from the novel’s inception as two narratives.11 At the same time the reader is assured that Eliot’s qualities of moral and verbal restraint make the novels particularly well suited to family reading. Indeed this is given as one of the reasons for commissioning the translations. That the project was successful in arousing interest in Eliot is proven by the substantial reviewing already discussed. From the very beginning, one effect of translation was to highlight Eliot’s nationality, which is hardly surprising. As Venuti suggests, ‘the selection of foreign texts and the development of translation strategies can establish peculiarly domestic canons for foreign literatures, canons that conform to domestic aesthetic values’ (1998, 67). As Claesson Pipping (1993) has demonstrated, the English novel was subject to specific expectations and, in contrast

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Norstedts published R (1887), SCL (Bilder ur engelska presters lif) (1888a), SM (SM vafvaren i Ravelowe) (1888c), M (Ur Landsortslifvet) (1888–89) and MF (Qvarnen vid Floss) (1889–90). 10 ‘ett ädelt sinnelag, en fin naturkänsla och ett utomordentligt minne af och sinne för verkligheten’. 11 ‘karaktärsteckningens sällsynta skärpa och djup och det vakna sinne för naturen och verkligheten, som däri på hvarje punkt röjer sig’.

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‘Spirit of the Age(s)’: The Reception of George Eliot in Sweden   111 to French writing, was considered in terms of both its morality and its aesthetic qualities. Silas Marner’s popularity – it has been translated three times – may thus be due to the rural setting and moral implications of the narrative, as well as its being an example of relative purity of form, and thus more in line with late nineteenth-century Swedish aesthetics. Be that as it may, readers of the nineteenth-century translations of the novels set in England were constantly reminded that the narrative, however realist, belongs to a world other than theirs. With the exception of AB (1861a), English place names, titles and modes of address – young women are Miss, the Squire is the squire and so on – are retained. An early translation of Middlemarch (1888–89), moreover, peppers the text with notes designed to explain, on occasion erroneously, the many references to historical figures and English social and political conditions, thus reminding the reader that the environment described is picturesque and foreign. The Swedish translator in the twentieth century, however, must make Victorian novels accessible to their readers. As Lesa Scholl has observed, translators inevitably bring their ‘own system[s] of cultural values to the space of the text’ and are obliged not only to ‘create a translation that is valid in terms of the original’ but also to provide a new more digestible text, one that is responsive to present-day usage (2011, 2). Gun-Britt Sundström’s translation of MF (2002) has been rightly praised for readability but is also an act of reinterpretation. She has chosen to rename the novel Bror och syster (Brother and sister), justifying her choice partly on the grounds that this is the title Eliot would have preferred, but also because Sundström, herself a novelist, believes that the sibling relationship is the main theme of the novel. Both the new title and the translator’s introduction direct the reader’s attention to the private and the individual at the expense of the novel’s historicity and concern with social constraints in a way that fits Swedish novelists’ current obsession with the personal and confessional.12 Matthis’s (2012) introduction to the paperback reprint reinforces the trend. That ‘[t]ranslation is not just linguistic transmission, but an ambiguous, problematic and sometimes acrimonious cultural exchange’ (Scholl 2011, 3) is further illustrated by Sundström’s (2002) account of her travails with MF. Not only has the content been refocused via the title and introductory remarks, but the translator has also struggled to accommodate the text itself in presentday Swedish usage. Indeed, Sundström represents Eliot’s syntax as an almost insurmountable problem: ‘Her sentences are not only long and complicated, and her irony is sometimes heavy-handed but the linguistic constructions can also be so verbose that the translator begins to feel as if s/he was involved in a Latin text, treading water, and desperately searching for a finite verb to hang onto in order to drag oneself up to survey the rest’ (2002, 12).13 The

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For a critique of this, see Ulf Olsson, ‘Nödens engagemang’, Expressen, Stockholm, 5 April 2002. 13 ‘Hennes meningar är inte bara långa och komplicerade, och hennes ironi är stundom tungfotad. De språkliga konstruktionerna kan vara så vidlyftiga att översättaren börjar känna sig som i latinska texter: man trampar vatten och spanar desperat efter ett finit verb att gripa och hala sig på för att få överblick över resten.’

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112   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe solution, which is shared with other twentieth-century translators (von Tell in Silas Marner (1944) and Tollet in Middlemarch (1961), for example), is to divide sentences and at times cut up the paragraph structure. Inevitably some of the fluidity of the writing – so well adapted to the flow of the river in the case of MF – is lost, as indeed is a good deal of the irony. Nonetheless, Sundström’s translation was a success, widely reviewed and soon reprinted as a paperback. Sundström’s dilemma is to some extent a contemporary one; nineteenthcentury Swedish was far better at accommodating long sentences, for example. But she shares another dilemma with her predecessors, namely how to cope with dialect. It is ironic – in the light of the history of reception – that the re-representation of the rural world provides translators with their greatest challenge, and it is here that they almost always fail. Most translations solve the problem by largely ignoring it and allowing all the characters to speak more or less standard Swedish, which has the effect of downplaying the pathos and humorous treatment of the rustic that is so noticeable a feature of the English texts. In addition, the pervasive sense of class differences reproduced in varying patterns of speech is lost when characters from all walks of life speak cultivated Swedish. Since Swedes lack the British sensitivity to class differences conveyed through language, readers do not necessarily notice. Thus Sundström has been praised by some reviewers for turning the dialect in MF into believable rustic Swedish, but Bergsten (2002) more acutely faults her for the weakness of her reproduction of dialect, which means that important nuances are lost. Sundström is aware of how class difference is indicated in language, but has decided that too thorough an attempt to reproduce this would be disturbing to the reader (2002, 12). Twentieth-Century Reception If we look to George Eliot’s reception in Sweden through the twentieth century and into the present one, the picture is confused. On the one hand her reputation seems to have declined, not least in the universities. Today her work is only studied sporadically, even in English departments where Victorian specialists teach. On the other hand, when new translations, films or television series appear there is a spate of interest in the press providing an opportunity for well-known cultural figures and critics to write longer, well-informed and appreciative articles about Eliot’s work as a whole. The lack of interest, even in the academic world, mirrors cultural preoccupations in a country obsessed with modernity. In English Studies departments much attention has been given to post-colonial literature and theory and indeed to theoretical approaches in general. Moreover, the British canon must compete for space in tight curricula with the literature of the United States. Admittedly, Catherine Sandbach Dahlström and Eleanor Wikborg taught Eliot, notably Middlemarch and Silas Marner, in the late 1990s in the English Department in Stockholm, but in most places Jane Austen, the Brontës and Dickens have been more commonly studied. There have, however, been a few dissertations: Helena Granlund’s ‘The Paradox of Self-Love: Christian Elements in George Eliot’s Treatment of Egoism’ (1994) takes its starting point in the sin

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‘Spirit of the Age(s)’: The Reception of George Eliot in Sweden   113 of pride and demonstrates Eliot’s profound debt to Christian theology. Sara Håkansson’s (2009) dissertation from Lund, ‘Narratorial Commentary in the Novels of George Eliot’, is a sophisticated theoretical and technical study of how narratorial structures guide the reading of AB, MF, SM, FH, M and DD. (We shall return to a couple more, namely Helena Bergmann’s 1979 thesis and Barbro Norbelie’s 1992 thesis, later.) As suggested initially, this work has very little influence on the wider Swedish context, especially today when young scholars in the field who wish to further their careers must promote their work in journals belonging to the English-speaking world. Even if Git Claesson Pipping’s 1993 dissertation, written in Swedish for a department of Comparative Literature, alerted Swedish scholars to Eliot’s status in the English-speaking world, the thesis was reviewed primarily as a contribution to gender theory. Moreover, despite this attention, Eliot’s novels still do not appear on any course lists in departments of Comparative Literature. Thus most students are dependent on handbooks, or to be more accurate, usually on Ingemar Algulin and Bernt Olsson’s influential Litteraturens historia i världen (The history of world literature) (1995). As we have seen, Eliot’s reputation in Sweden was at its height in the decades immediately following her death. With shifts in literary ideals in the 1890s, however, this changed. The flurry of articles in the 1880s was followed by almost complete silence in the press. Admittedly literary histories and encyclopedias continued to praise Eliot’s contribution to the novel, and in 1912 a commentator in Dagny praised AB as a masterpiece that assured Eliot’s reputation (Platen 1912). Dagny was an influential feminist journal, published by a feminist association, and according to its cover the journal aimed ‘to promote a healthy and peaceful development of the task of raising woman both in virtue and intellectually as well as regards social and economic factors’.14 Ingeborg Tegner’s (1929) impressive dissertation, ‘George Eliot: en studie i hennes religiösa och filosofiska utveckling’ (‘George Eliot: a study of her religious and philosophical development’) also counteracts the trend. Westermarck had defended her 1894 biography of Eliot on the grounds that a new era all too easily turns its back on the preceding period and had sought to define Eliot’s work against prevailing notions of Naturalism, realism and idealism in Scandinavian literary studies. Tegner, in contrast, aims to introduce Eliot to the Swedish reader by placing her in her intellectual context. Tegner gives extensive consideration to intellectual influences, not least Eliot’s debt to Feuerbach, Goethe and Comte, but her concern is nonetheless primarily with what she sees as Eliot’s attachment to the spirit of religion – if not to the letter. The main focus of this study, then, is Eliot’s tolerance of different beliefs as well as her faith in the connectedness of things and the overriding importance of human sympathy and care for the other. The aesthetic aspects of the novels are only touched upon and the texts are read primarily for their insights into the private beliefs that gave meaning to Eliot’s life (1929, 222). 14

‘att verka för en sund och lugn utveckling af arbetet för kvinnans höjande i sedligt och intellektuellt, såväl som social och ekonomiskt hänseende’.

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114   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Since Tegner had a long career as a teacher at a leading school in Sweden (the Cathedral School in the university city of Lund), we can presume that her interest in Eliot – and other British authors – was conveyed to generations of readers. However, it fell to Fredrik Böök (1933), a leading figure in literary studies in the first half of the twentieth century, not only to pick up on the religious theme but also to give careful consideration to aesthetic elements. Like many others, he is critical of the extended discursive elements and the over-intellectualism of both R and FH, but he is sensitive, nonetheless, to the powerful realism of M and to Eliot’s indebtedness to Wordsworth in both SM and MF. A recurring feature of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism is how contemporary aesthetic norms and genre expectations influence reception. Nineteenth-century commentary often made Eliot foreign by emphasizing her Englishness and comparing her with another foreign literature, namely the French. At the same time, critics praised aspects of Eliot’s writing that fitted preconceived notions of Englishness. They were particularly appreciative of novels such as AB and SM because of the rural settings and psychological perception. Something of this can be seen in the twentieth century; one critic, for instance, waxes lyrical over SM as ‘an idyll with no trace of embellishment or sentimentality, and throughout the novel a mild and refreshing wind sweeps over the landscape of southern England’ (Hagberg 1944, 230).15 Silas Marner was often read in schools earlier in the century and is still to be found in school libraries. Moreover it is favoured by English departments – presumably because of its length and accessibility. But most mid-twentieth-century criticism responds to the aesthetics of the Modernist era by emphasizing Eliot’s unfashionable difference as a Victorian woman writer and a realist. Ruth Halldén, an established and influential Anglophile critic who has commented on Eliot more than any other, has admittedly opposed this view, insisting that ‘all talk of George Eliot’s hardedged heaviness is actually rather strange and has its roots in a flirtatious and limited aesthetic’ (2004, 123). Nonetheless, the notion that Victorian writing is out of fashion has been pervasive.16 In his postscript to Middlemarch, a professor of literature in Lund sums up the situation in drastic terms: Female writers from a somewhat earlier age readily run the risk of being associated with something old-lady like and completely uninteresting – particularly by those who know nothing about them. Nothing but a dramatic life, or interesting death, seems to be able to prevent this fatality. (Lagerroth 1961, 2: 458)17 15

‘Det är en idyll utan spår av försköning och sentimentalitet, och genom hela romanen sveper det sydengelska landskapets på en gång milda och friska vind.’ 16 ‘Allt tal om George Eliots kantighet och tyngd är egentligen underligt, och härstammar från en lite kokett och begränsad typ av estetik.’ 17 ‘Kvinnliga författare av litet äldre årgång löper gärna risken att associeras med något sentimentalt tantigt och menlöst ointressant – särskilt om man inte vet mycket om dem. Knappast annat än ett dramatiskt liv eller intressant död tycks kunna förhindra denna fatalitet.’

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‘Spirit of the Age(s)’: The Reception of George Eliot in Sweden   115 Even Jane Lundblad, a critic and translator who did much to promote English language writing, could observe that, ‘Of all the riches of Victorian literature, the realist novel is not the kind that captures the imagination of the modern reader’ (1956, 6).18 Likewise Hagberg, commenting on Silas Marner, praises Eliot for intelligence, personality and learning but finds that generally ‘her works evoke more respect than enthusiasm’ (1944, 229).19 There is, he argues, a lack of spontaneity that is not completely compensated for by the depth of reflection that characterizes her writing.20 Such views may explain why Halldén (1981) could believe that Eliot had been regarded as a heavyweight realist until her rediscovery in recent decades. Symptomatically, scholars such as Lagerroth (1961) and Hedberg (1985), seem rather surprised by Leavis’s (1948) estimate of Eliot’s greatness while Lindblom (1982) sees The Great Tradition as important for Eliot’s revival. As already noted, and as the Norstedt blurbs indicate, Eliot’s novels, like nineteenth-century English fiction as a whole, are associated historically with morally sound entertainment (cf. Claesson Pipping 1993). Traces of this remain today both in positive and negative critical commentary. One journalist notes of Middlemarch that it possesses ‘much of the charm of British narrative art’ in its portrayal of character (Theorin 1994, 5),21 while Lagerlöf (1990b) suggests that Middlemarch enables us to believe in the quality of goodness and to identify with both Will and Dorothea. Others, however, are troubled by elements in the novels that are less accessible. Halldén (2002), for example, is critical of the narrative digressions in MF since they make the text wordy and didactic. Throughout the century, in fact, critics express unease at the philosophical aspects of Eliot’s work and particularly the role of the narrator persona, or ‘the masculine old maid’ (Hedberg 1985, 92).22 Hedberg (1985), an important figure in English Studies, is admittedly appreciative of Eliot’s representation of rural life, but also extremely critical of the intrusive narration and ‘didacticism’ he perceives in most of Eliot’s works. This is offered as a background to Eliot’s declining reputation when compared to Dickens and Thackeray. Hagberg too feels that Eliot is only on ‘the safe side’ when ‘her memories of rural English life and rustic characters were her material’ (1961, 229).23 In contrast, Strömholm – novelist, Professor of Law and former Vice Chancellor of Uppsala University – names Eliot as ‘the English novel’s most rewarding, superiorly intelligent, artistically sound and humanly mature representative’ (1981, 8).24 Strömholm, 18 19

20

21 22 23

24

‘Den realistiska romanen hör inte till de av den rika Viktorianska litteraturens alster som mest fängslar en’ (see Claesson Pipping 1993, 139). ‘i det hela har George Eliot framkallat mer respekt än entusiasm’. ‘Men i det hela har George Eliot framkallat mer respekt än entusiasm, ty inom diktens sfär kunna djup reflektion och gedigen konst dock aldrig helt uppväga den spontana genialiteten, och denna ägde knappast den stora författarinna, som skrev under namnet “George Eliot”.’ ‘mycket av charmen i brittisk berättakonst’. ‘den maskulina nuckan’. ‘där hennes minnen av engelskt lantliv och rustika människor utgjorde stoffet’. ‘den engelska romanens mest givande, överlägset intelligenta, artistiskt säkra och mänskligt mogna företrädare’.

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116   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe also an influential cultural critic, sees failure to appreciate Eliot as a weakness in such readers who are unable to recognize the significance of her intervention in the post-Darwin debate around issues of good, evil, free will and determinism. Undoubtedly, as one literary scholar has observed, Eliot asks more of the reader than they are accustomed to in the English novel: ‘expansive as but a few are, she is an ironist whose study of manners is always historically determined, thus she is heavier and more demanding than her colleagues’ (Olsson 2002, 6).25 The difficulties readers encounter can be exemplified by some of the criticism of Middlemarch. Two reviews by Halldén indicate the problem. Both pay lip service to the novel’s greatness, but the ensuing comments are reductive. The first (1963) is most noticeable for what is missing, that is, any mention of the multiple plot lines, the politics of 1832 or the importance of scientific and medical innovation. Halldén understands the novel only as a critique of the academic type. Some 20 years later, the main topic is read as the ‘story of two marriages that are as hesitant and unnatural as much else in the novel’, which is also a devastating critique of a sick social environment (Halldén 1984, B2).26 But Halldén’s remarks are not representative of all criticism of Middlemarch; in two extended essays, Lagerlöf (1990a, 1990b), starting from Turgenev’s appreciation, places the novel on a par with the works of Zola, Maupassant and Dostoevsky. While Eliot’s status as a great writer is often acknowledged, many critics and commentators are constrained by assumptions about women’s writing as a separate genre. The choice of a male pseudonym is frequently brought up with reference, for instance, to Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, George Sand or Ernst Ahlgren, and a desire to be judged as a man is represented as a feature of women’s authorship in general; less conventionally, Melberg (1984) describes this choice as masquerade rather than true concealment. Moreover, Eliot is repeatedly compared to, or, as in the encyclopedias, bracketed with, other women writers of the nineteenth century – although in Böök’s (1933) case this is also to acknowledge women writers’ pre-eminence. In Algulin and Olsson’s influential work, Eliot features in the chapter on ‘Realism to Naturalism’ and is placed in a subgenre, ‘female depicters of society’ (1995, 332),27 while Halldén situates Eliot beside Austen, Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë as one of those who give ‘the everyday depth’ (1980, 104). Ironically many feminist critics are also implicated in this trend. Wishing to create a specifically female literary history they also subsume Eliot into the category of woman writer, and attribute features to her work on this basis. Birgitta Svanberg and Ebba Witt-Brattström, two prominent feminist scholars, are fully aware of Eliot’s general pre-eminence as a novelist, ‘the greatest next to Dickens’ (1997, 50).28 But true to the critical paradigm of the time, and searching for signs of resistance to masculine norms, they also place Eliot 25

‘Utförlig som få är hon en ironiker vars sedeskildring alltid äger rum under ett historiskt tvång. Därför är hon tyngre, mer krävande än de flesta av sina kolleger.’ 26 ‘två äktenskapshistorier, lika haltande och onaturliga som allt annat i skildringen’. 27 ‘Kvinnliga samhällsskildrare.’ 28 ‘främsta engelska författare efter Dickens’.

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‘Spirit of the Age(s)’: The Reception of George Eliot in Sweden   117 amongst those oppositional women’s voices ‘without which the world might have been even worse off than it is’ (1997, 7).29 Another response, typical of the period, is Norbelie’s doctoral thesis, ‘“Oppressive Narrowness”: A Study of the Female Community in George Eliot’s Writings’, which attempts, rather unconvincingly, to find evidence of feminist solidarity amongst the female figures in Eliot’s novels. As in much nineteenth-century commentary, Eliot’s private life also functions as a controlling trope. Practically speaking, all critical commentary is accompanied, and sometimes dominated, by biographical information: Eliot’s relationship with her father; her loss of faith; the liaison with Lewes; the break with Isaac; and finally the marriage to Cross (e.g. Frykman 1980, Mazzarella 2000). Laggeroth (1961), for instance, argues that Eliot does not fit the skewed view of the Victorian woman writer because both in life and opinions she broke with convention. Relatively few touch on the degree to which Eliot was later accepted by parts of society, nor do many mention the significance of Lewes’s intellectual influence – though there are exceptions (e.g. Strömholm 1981, Lagerlöf 1990a and 1990b).30 Biographical information that would explain Eliot’s intellectual development is relatively seldom reported while, unsurprisingly, her childhood home is given as the explanation for the convincing descriptions of rural life and specifically the depiction of Maggie Tulliver (Bergsten 2002, Matthis 2012). On occasion too, Eliot’s presumed radicalism is projected onto her work (Frykman 1999, Halldén 1981). The most striking example comes from a journalist, Petersen (2002), whose overriding thesis is that George Eliot literally changed the face of Victorian society. One noticeable feature of more recent criticism is the desire to identify the relevant and universal in George Eliot’s work. Swedish culture is characterized by a belief in the modern. Works that are regarded as being in advance of their time (cf. Lundgren 2002), or still relevant to the present day, are particularly valued. The most extreme example is a comparison made between MF and a notorious case of honour killing. Based on a misunderstanding of the use of the word ‘clan’ to describe the Dodsons, the reviewer equates Maggie’s plight and Tom’s notions of family honour with a recent much-publicized murder of a young Swedish/Kurdish woman, Fadime, by her father – who had been spurred on by the extended family (Bromander 2002). Others are more moderate: Halldén (1963) appreciates Middlemarch for its convincing portrait of an ageless academic type, while Louise Vinge (1985), a professor of comparative literature, reads Silas Marner as a universally applicable parable regarding the consequences of catastrophic mistakes. Sometimes the universal is approached in more or less psychological terms: for Ulla Bossik (1987), Robert Evans’s love for his daughter explains her self-confidence and later success, and Lacanian psychoanalyst Matthis (2012) considers the brother–sister relationship in MF as a mirror image of her own relationship to her brother. It seems too as if it is easier now, in a world of post-colonial and postmodern readings, to appreciate Eliot’s aesthetic. Olsson (2002), for instance, observes 29 30

‘utan vilken världen möjligen hade sett ännu värre ut’. That Lewes’s work was known in Sweden is clear from the library catalogues.

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118   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe how Eliot’s characters are embedded in social systems of power that compel them to act as they do, and how they are converted into objects that further the author’s meliorist project. It is this chilling vision that makes her so interesting today. For his part, Mikael Enckell (2009) explicitly identifies Eliot as a model for our time: She is perhaps even more of a pioneer and a contemporary of ours thanks to the open and indeterminate position she managed to maintain in relation to all the dogmatic attempts to stop and exorcise the anxiety that is associated with existential questions.31

Finally, there are examples of Eliot used for special pleading with relation to social and political issues of the day. As early as the 1867 translation of FH, the cover reprints Erika’s (Sophie Adlersparre’s) praise of the novel for addressing the ambitions that characterize contemporary society, namely ‘public education, universal suffrage and indirectly the establishment of women’s role and position in society’.32 The 1884 translation of ‘Tal i arbetarfrågan’ (‘Address to Working Men’) indicates too that Eliot’s arguments were of relevance for Swedish political debate. In our time, Bergmann’s (1979) inclusion of FH in her doctoral study of the so-called industrial novels can be understood as typical of the contemporary interest in the novel as a social document. Writing later in a journal for language teachers, Moderna Språk (Modern languages), Bergmann (1980) admitted, however, that the novel did not really fit the genre. The most striking example of special pleading, however, is Paul Slomovitz (1943) writing in the Judisk Tidskrift ( Jewish journal). In an article about DD that totally ignores the Gwendolyn Harleth plot line, Eliot is praised for her extensive research, her clairvoyant understanding of the Jewish soul and dilemma. The novel’s importance for Jews around the world is highlighted as well; Slomovitz believes that, ‘It is thanks to DD that the great friendship between the English and the Jewish people was assured, and it is to no small extent George Eliot’s doing that Great Britain is in charge of the Palestinian mandate today’ (Slomovitz 1943, 273).33 A more moderate view appears in Enckell (2009), who suggests that Eliot’s significance as a writer lies not in the particularity of realism, but in a need to seek a spiritual and intellectual root that might be found in the philosemitism which Enckell associates with Lewes. For Enckell, George Eliot is relevant today not only because of her ability to see early Zionism as a solution to the Jews’ problem in an anti-Semitic Europe, but also because of her ability to

31

‘Hon kanske är ännu mer en föregångare och en samtida till oss tack vare den öppna och obestämda hållning hon förmådde upprätthålla till alla dogmbundna försök att hejda och besvärja den ångest de existentiella frågorna är förknippade.’ 32 ‘en sund folkupplysning och beviljande af allmän rösträtt, samt, om ock indirekt, bestämmandet af qvinnans uppgift och ställning i förhållandet till samhället’. 33 ‘Det är tack vare “Daniel Deronda” som den stora vänskapen mellan det engelska och judiska folket befästes, och det är inte i ringa grad George Eliots förtjänst, att det är Storbritannien som i dag har mandatet over Palestina.’

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‘Spirit of the Age(s)’: The Reception of George Eliot in Sweden   119 depict a private relationship that promotes development and where the answer lies with he who asks. (Enckell 2009, 28)34

Conclusion Writing this chapter, we have asked ourselves if there are elements in Eliot’s reception in Sweden over the last 150 years or so that resemble one another. It is apparent that, though critics and commentators are all firmly embedded in their time, certain features recur. Many of the critics and commentators are constrained by genre expectations, concepts of Englishness, women as authors and the role of the novel as entertainment. It is also clear that, although Eliot has been much admired, certain aspects of her writing – in particular the longer discursive sections – are less attractive to readers than others. On the other hand, novels set in the English countryside and Eliot’s skill in portraying character are generally appreciated. We have found that, even if much commentary and criticism is responsive to the concerns of its age, there are significant examples of inclusive, serious and reflective reception both in the nineteenth century and up to the present day. Last but not least, there is a fascination throughout with the life of a woman who has been so hard to fit into prevailing notions of nineteenth-century society and women’s lives.

34

‘är idag aktuell på nytt inte bara i kraft av sin förmåga att tidigt se sionismen som en lösning på judarnas problem i ett antisemitiskt Europa eller i sin förmåga att skildra en utvecklingsbefordrande personlig relation, där svaren regelmässigt finns hos den som frågar’.

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5



George Eliot’s Reception in Denmark Ebbe Klitgård

A number of translations appeared in Denmark in Eliot’s own lifetime and in the following couple of decades. AB was translated in 1859–60, SM in 1863, M in 1873 and MF in 1877, and magazine stories as well as stories from SCL were published separately with translations of MG in 1861 and LV and BJ in 1879. Amos Barton appeared in 1887, preceded by R in 1885. The second wave of translations followed at the beginning of the twentieth century with new translations of AB (1906), SM (1909), MF (1912b) and LV (1912a). Apart from a republication of the 1906 AB translation in 1924, a long silence followed until as late as 2000, when SM was retranslated, followed by M in 2003. This survey of Danish translations suggests that Eliot was quite popular in Denmark during her lifetime and the following decades, then until the twentyfirst century was not read widely. Another immediate conclusion seems to be that Denmark follows the pattern seen in many European countries, where four novels especially stand out as having been translated more than once: AB, MF, SM and M. DD has never been translated into Danish. However, the translation of R in 1885 and the inclusion of chapters from FH in a glossed English reader for secondary schools in 1907, as well as the translations of many magazine stories, indicate that Danish readers were in fact better served than readers in most other European countries, as will appear from the other contributions in this book. If we add to this that Eliot has often been read in English in Denmark, and that Eliot reception includes a fair amount of writing about her, the tentative conclusion must be that Eliot has been well acknowledged in Denmark. In the remainder of this chapter I will try to give a more nuanced picture of Eliot’s translation and reception history, and I have chosen to arrange my discussion chronologically. 1859–1900 In a long article in the Modern Language Review from 1948, ‘Anglo-Danish Literary Relations 1867–1900’, Brian W. Downs, a Cambridge professor of Scandinavian Studies, lists a series of Danish translations from English literature

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George Eliot’s Reception in Denmark   121 and discusses academic reception in particular, considering such prominent Danish scholars as literary critic Georg Brandes and linguist Otto Jespersen. Brandes’s Main Currents in 19th Century Literature in six volumes, the first of which appeared in Danish in 1871, was translated into English and published in 1906, and following this Brandes became internationally renowned for his work on the Romantic poets particularly and on John Stuart Mill. Jespersen became one of the foremost linguists of his time, but here Downs discusses his less well-known work on English literature. Downs’s article gives a good impression of the sometimes curious patterns of reception, ascribing much of this to Brandes’s and Jespersen’s strong influence. For instance, Brandes was an expert on Shakespeare, but appears to have had hardly any knowledge of Chaucer. His knowledge of Victorian authors was substantial, and in particular he admired Dickens, Swinburne, E. B. Browning and Kipling, whereas Downs notes that he apparently never read the Rossettis (Downs 1948, 149–51). Jespersen for his part was one of the first Danes to acknowledge Chaucer (see Klitgård 2013, 83–108) and also took a keen interest in more contemporary English writers. He was the chief architect behind the language and humanities side of the Danish secondary school reform which in 1903 led to the new gymnasium system that gave more space to modern languages. German was still the main foreign language, but the status of English had grown throughout the nineteenth century, and in due course, English was on offer in most schools. Jespersen’s effort in promoting more English included scholarship, participating in public debates and the publication of both English readers and grammar books for schools (Rahbek Rasmussen 2006, 96–99; Klitgård 2013, 93–105). I have checked Jespersen’s school books and found a true miscellany of English texts, but no George Eliot. Downs’s article leaves it unclear whether Jespersen and his colleagues and fellow publishers of English schoolbooks and literary histories, Adolf Hansen and Niels Møller, knew Eliot’s work well (152–53). While the early Eliot translations discussed below are mentioned in passing in Downs’s article, he does not cite examples of popular or scholarly treatment of Eliot in the period before 1900. I have located a single substantial Eliot publication, Therese Brummer’s To Kvindeportraiter (Two portraits of women) from 1895, in which she gives a 70-page ‘Skitse af hendes Liv og literære Virksomhed’ (‘Sketch of her life and literary works’), followed by a second, much shorter portrait of the Austrian pacifist and writer Bertha von Suttner. The occasion of Brummer’s short book is specifically given as ‘Kvindernes Udstilling’ (‘The women’s exhibition’), which took place in Copenhagen that year. Brummer, who became interested in women’s rights through her mother Andrea Engelbrecht, a founding member of the Danish Women’s Society, had herself previously written novels using a pseudonym, although unlike Eliot a female one, Fru Elisabeth (Mrs Elisabeth) (Mortensen 2003). The two portraits can be generally characterized as appreciations. They are written for the general reader and, as the publication details suggest, mainly for women. The emphasis in Brummer’s presentation is very clearly on life rather than works, and she has consulted Eliot’s letters as well as biographies, although no specific references are given. Among the novels included, MF is given

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122   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe prominence, and this is clearly because Maggie Tulliver’s childhood experiences are identified in a very direct way as Eliot’s own childhood memoirs. However, AB is also referred to in a discussion of Eliot’s relationship to her brother (9–12). AB, Amos Barton and DD are represented by rather long summaries, with Brummer offering her occasional sympathies and antipathies in relation to the main characters. Brummer claims that AB is regarded as Eliot’s main work, and mentions R, SM and FH only in passing (36, 54). M is treated only in a cursory way, with a two-page summary. However, Brummer’s remarks about Lydgate and Rosamunde (sic) are quotable as representative of her often very direct emotional response to reading Eliot: The story of Mr. Lydgate and Rosamunde’s [sic] marriage is so sadly true that it could be a kind of textbook for marriageable young men. It is a remarkable, forceful illustration of the old moral: ‘Infatuation in a pretty face is not enough to build a life together’.1

This is of course a reaction shared by many readers, and Brummer’s tone bears witness to her deep involvement. Whereas Brummer thus here and elsewhere is passionate in her criticism, she does not think highly of Eliot’s own passion, nor for that matter of her fellow English novelists’. In a passage where she also discusses Dickens and Thackeray she claims that ‘It is not the strong point of the English authors to portray erotic passion.’2 I shall refrain from commenting on this general observation, except to suggest that Brummer will no doubt implicitly have compared her reading experience of English, French and German novels. Before turning to the translations it should be noted that Eliot was in fact often read in English in nineteenth-century Denmark. Among several copies of Eliot novels I have seen with Danish owners’ names in them, I can give the specific example of my Blackwood edition of MF, which according to a title page inscription was acquired by one Karen Fauerholdt on 10 April 1894, then passed on to another woman, Esther Hansen, in the Christmas of 1909 (Eliot, n.d.). Translations, however, were more often preferred, since many readers had no or little English. In the second half of the nineteenth century even the poets Tennyson and Browning were translated extensively, as was the case with earlier poets, including the classical poets (Klitgård 2013, 64–67, 85–89; Downs 1948). British novelists were generally well received and often translated, probably because Dickens paved the way with his enormous popularity. Jørgen Erik Nielsen’s 2009 study Dickens i Danmark (Dickens in Denmark) records a huge number of translations and retranslations, as well as a good many adaptations for young readers, even before Dickens’s death. In some, but

1

‘Mr. Lydgate og Rosamunde’s [sic] Ægteskabshistorie er saa sørgelig sand, at den kunde være en Slags Lærebog for giftefærdige unge Mænd. Den er en ejendommelig, kraftig Illustration til den gamle Moral: “Forelskelse i et kønt Ansigt er ikke nok at bygge et Samliv paa”’ (1895, 53). 2 ‘Det er ikke de engelske Romanforfatteres Styrke at fremstille den erotiske Lidenskab.’

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George Eliot’s Reception in Denmark   123 not many, cases the Danish reception of British novelists was delayed, most notably in the case of Jane Austen. Her first novel in Danish was Forstand og Hjerte (Pride and Prejudice), which was translated by Carl Karup in 1855–56. Peter Mortensen has observed that Anglo-Danish relations were strained in Austen’s time as a result of the British Navy’s bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, which was followed by many years of hostile feeling, and this is certainly a possible cause for the delay (2007, 118–19). However, Nielsen’s (1976–77) doctoral thesis on the Danish translations of English literature in the period 1800–40 shows that a great number of works were still translated in the years following 1807, and a better explanation of the delay could well be that other kinds of literature appealed to the Danes. Thus the two most translated British authors in the period were Byron and Scott, with such authors as Bulwer and Marryat also having a substantial following (I, 595–607). Austen apparently had to wait until a wave of realism had crossed the Danish shores, and it is noteworthy that Pride and Prejudice was the only one of her novels translated in the nineteenth century and that it appeared only three years before the first Danish Eliot translation. Famous novelists such as Dickens, Charlotte (but not Anne and Emily) Brontë and Thackeray were quickly translated and thus more familiar to Danish readers than Austen was by the time the first Eliot translations appeared, but Pride and Prejudice, like the Brontë and Thackeray novels, had a specific appeal to female readers that may well have paved the way for Eliot’s success. For a small country the number of translations in Eliot’s own lifetime is rather impressive, if not outstanding compared to other translated novelists. Furthermore, I would characterize the standard of translation among the mostly anonymous translators as generally high. The translations of AB in 1859–60 and of MG in 1861 appear very loyal to the source texts, including straightforward translations of the titles as respectively AB and Herr Gilfil’s Kjærlighedshistorie. The AB translation includes the translator’s initials, ‘J. K.’, on the title page, and J. K. has taken care with both precision and idiomatic Danish. His or her strategy when translating names has been to keep them, rather than transform them into Danish equivalents. Thus Dinah, Dolly and the dog Gyp keep their English names, and even nicknames like Mum Taft, Wiry Ben and Sandy Jim, or Jim Salt, are used, though sometimes alternating with more sensible simplifications like Ben and Jim where the source text has the nicknames. The Danish, with its old Danish grammatical forms such as ‘vi have’ and ‘vi kjende’ (rather than ‘vi har’ and ‘vi kender’, we have, we know) is now as outdated as the blackletter (gothic) type of the early translations, but I have no reason to doubt that the translation would have been easily accessible for contemporary readers. The translator of Mr  Gilfil’s Love Story is, like J. K., inclined not to use Danish correspondents to English names and titles, maintaining Mr and Mrs, Lady Sheverel, Miss Evans and Sir Christopher. Mr Gilfil is referred to as ‘Vicaren’, translated directly from ‘the Vicar’, where Danish would normally substitute ‘præsten’ or ‘sognepræsten’, the Danish words for vicar. There is thus a tendency in both translations to keep the English textual universe English, in Venuti’s terms a foreignization rather than a domestication strategy (Venuti 2008).

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124   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe The translator of Silas Marner in 1863 was P. V. Grove (1832–1893), who is best known as a journalist and war correspondent (Læssøe-Müller, n.d.). The publishing house, Eibe, also published Dickens, whose first regular Danish translator was L. Moltke (Nielsen 2009), but Grove apparently was not a regular translator. Despite this, Grove has provided a fine and faithful translation. For example, the turning point in Chapter 12, where Marner first discovers the small child Eppie, is just as moving in Grove’s Danish as in Eliot’s original: Gulddyngen syntes at glimre og voxe for hans forvirrede Blik. Han bøjede sig endelig frem og udstrakte sin Haand; men istedetfor de haarde Pengestykker med de vel bekendte skarpe Omrids, rørte hans Fingre ved bløde, varme Lokker. (181)3

In this and the following passage, Grove captures the hallucinatory mind of Marner well and emphasizes it in his translation. Thus the word ‘glow’ could have been translated as the simple correspondent ‘gløde’, but ‘glimre’ carries the right connotations of a disturbed and unstable mind. On the same lines, ‘darted’ is translated as ‘gennemkrydsede’ (literally ‘crossed through’) in the following passage about what goes through Marner’s mind, a colourful and idiomatic translation in the context. The construction ‘hard coin’ is well translated into the plural, definite grammatical form ‘de haarde Pengestykker’, and ‘the familiar resisting outline’ is translated as ‘de vel bekendte skarpe Omrids’, which also gives the right impression in Danish, although ‘resisting’ is interpreted somewhat freely as ‘skarpe’ (sharp). This works well in opposition to the soft, warm curls. Grove is in other words not afraid to find dynamic equi­valence in Danish, rather than transferring the source text as directly as possible. The only exception I have found to this in my sample tests of the translation is the somewhat unfortunate direct transfer of the repeated ‘the Squire’, which becomes ‘Squiren’, but should have been translated, for instance, as ‘godsejer’, simply because the term will have been quite unfamiliar to most Danes. The three remaining translations in Eliot’s lifetime, M in 1873, MF in 1877 and the stories LV and BJ in 1879, are all by anonymous translators. M: Studier af det engelske Provinsliv translates also the subtitle A Study of Provincial Life, transforming the singular ‘study’ into the plural ‘studier’. Such small changes are often as here unavoidable and forgivable, as the translator has to take different patterns of sentence construction into account. It is more remarkable and rather questionable that MF’s first title in Danish is Dorlcote Mølle (Dorlcote Mill), taking the specific name of the mill for the general title. The two novels were published by the newspaper publishing house Berlingske, and the same printer’s name, Kaldar, is given on both title pages, but whether the publishers or the translator made the title decision is, as is often the case, impossible to determine. Having compared the two translations, I have a strong impression,

3

‘The heap of gold seemed to glow and get larger beneath his agitated gaze. He leaned forward at last, and stretched forth his hand; but instead of hard coin with the familiar resisting outline, his fingers encountered soft warm curls’ (Eliot 1967, 167).

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George Eliot’s Reception in Denmark   125 however, that we are dealing with the same translator. For instance, both translations use ‘Mr’, ‘Mrs’ and ‘Miss’ (e.g. Mr Casaubon, Miss Brooke, Mr Tulliver, Mrs Deane), rather than the corresponding Danish titles ‘Hr’, ‘Fru’, ‘Frøken’, although as we have seen, this practice was also used in the 1860s translations. However, ‘Sister Celia’ is translated as ‘Søster Celia’. Sample tests indicate that both translations are very good, and the same goes for Et løftet Slør og Broder Jacob: To Fortællinger (LV and BJ: Two tales), also published in Copenhagen but giving neither the publisher’s name nor that of the translator. The translation of Romola in 1885 fortunately bears the translator’s name, Frederik Winkel Horn. Horn (1845–98) was a scholar, but he also produced literary histories, encyclopedia entries and other literary writings, which made him very well known to the general public. By 1885 he was also an experienced translator from several languages, including Icelandic, Latin and Greek (Petersen, n.d.). It is understandable if his passion for classical literature led him to Romola, and he certainly provides a very readable translation, also for a modern audience, since this is the first Eliot translation not printed in blackletter type. Horn uses the by then already old-fashioned forms of address in formal language, ‘I’ and ‘Eders’, rather than ‘De’ and ‘Deres’ (you, yours), but this is almost standard in historical novels from this period and well into the twentieth century. Modern Danes should be able to manage that, and the alternative would be to read Romola in English, since it has never been retranslated. Worse problems than the forms of address are the quotations from Italian, which Horn sometimes, but not always, translates in notes. Presumably it is Horn himself who provides his readers with an introduction – the first time this occurs in a Danish Eliot translation – and although it is rather short, just over one page, it is quite informative about Romola. The novel is praised as ‘one of the finest historical novels ever written’, and Horn also entices his prospective reader by calling it ‘unusually captivating and exciting’.4 If Horn, as I assume, wrote this introduction, it only goes to show that he was himself taken in by this novel in such a way that his enthusiasm cannot be hidden. In the introduction little is said about Eliot herself, but the general characterization of her as ‘without comparison the most important female writer England has produced’,5 followed by a comparison with Dickens and Thackeray, is no less enthusiastic. It also shows that Horn, after all a literary historian, is not in a position even to consider Jane Austen or the Brontës as authors that can be compared to Eliot in quality and importance. Amos Bartons sörgelige Skæbne (Amos Barton’s sad destiny) appeared in 1887 and was also translated by another well-known literary figure, V. Østerberg. Østerberg (1865–1945) studied for a Copenhagen University degree in English and became a teacher and translator, first of all known for his highly praised complete translation of Shakespeare’s works (Rubow and Sørensen, n.d.). The Eliot translation was among his first, and in it we see the young Østerberg diligently at work with something he later became well known for in the 4

‘en af de ypperste historiske Romaner, der nogen Sinde er skrevet’; ‘usædvanlig fængslende og spændende’. 5 ‘uden Sammenligning den betydeligste Forfatterinde, England har frembragt’.

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126   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Shakespeare translations: concise explanatory notes. Thus, for example, on his page 7 there are brief notes explaining evangelism, the Catholic question, the holy Laurentius and dissenters, and on the following page he explains that the term ‘Vikaren’ that he uses to translate ‘the vicar’ is really what we Danes call a ‘sognepræst’ (county vicar). Later in the translation, Østerberg seems to have lost his willingness to provide explanatory notes, and he somewhat strangely ends without any notes on the final 70 pages. The translation itself is of a high quality, and he has an especially keen ear for dialogue, which often comes across as very lively, just as in Eliot’s original. There is also a short introduction, where Østerberg (again I presume) agrees with Horn that ‘in England’s modern literature George Eliot, according to everyone’s judgement, takes up the first position’.6 We are beginning to see a pattern of very high regard in the Danish late nineteenth-century Eliot reception. 1900–50 As indicated in my chapter introduction, Eliot’s popularity in Denmark remains high for the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, then drops dramatically, at least as far as translation frequency is concerned. In the period 1900–50 there are of course encyclopedia entries and other short pieces written about her, but very little substantial material is published, even though modern English Studies also reach Denmark, with Professor Jespersen and, later, his pupils Brusendorff, Bodelsen and Bøgholm at work at the University of Copenhagen, and from 1928 some English literature also included at the new University of Aarhus. This meant that in effect Chaucer, Shakespeare and eventually an increasing number of modern authors were taught, although English university education chiefly involved a heavy load of historical linguistics (Klitgård 2013, 110–12, 138–40, 158–64). From the Victorian period, Dickens and Kipling became the chief interests of English literature Professor C. A. Bodelsen, but I have found no scholarly Eliot publications by him or any other Danish academics before 1950. In fact there appears to be only one substantial publication altogether: Aslaug Mikkelsen’s ‘En victoriansk Forfatterinde’ (‘A female Victorian writer’) in Foregangskvinder i engelsk litteratur (Women pioneers in English literature) (1942). Mikkelsen, later Mikkelsen Møller (1876–1964), took a Master’s degree in English from the University of Copenhagen in 1903. In 1932 she became a co-founder of Kvinderegensen, a students’ residence exclusively for women, which still exists. Unlike most of Jespersen’s students, Mikkelsen gave up teaching from the beginning and started a career as a very diligent translator of English literature, including Silas Marner: Væveren fra Raveloe (Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe) (1909), which I regard as being equal to the high standard of Grove’s 1869 translation. She also translated such writers as Jack London, Upton Sinclair and Harriet Beecher Stowe in a growing market for translated 6

‘i Englands moderne Literatur indtager George Eliot efter alles Dom den förste Plads’.

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George Eliot’s Reception in Denmark   127 British and American literature. Besides Foregangskvinder i engelsk litteratur, she published further books on literary subjects, including a book about the Brontë sisters in 1953 (Hilden 2003). Mikkelsen’s 30-page chapter on Eliot in Foregangskvinder i engelsk litteratur is accompanied by other chapters on Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. Like Therese Brummer before her, she does not state her sources, and also like Brummer she cites Eliot’s letters and uses MF as a direct guide to Eliot’s own childhood. Once again Maggie is Mary Ann without any reservations. Mikkelsen is interested in Eliot’s life more than her works, and this also results in very personal assessments of the characters in the novels, rather than literary analysis. There are many engaged remarks about Eliot’s female characters. Thus she finds Dinah Morris in AB ‘truly womanlike in relation to everyday problems’.7 Less positive are the remarks following this assessment about Eliot’s descriptions of men, which Mikkelsen finds generally weaker. Her personal involvement reaches a no doubt unintentional comical high point as she voices her opinion of Will Ladislaw in M as ‘downright irritating’ (‘rentud irriterende’). One has, she continues, ‘an embarrassing feeling that there is a flaw in George Eliot’s knowledge about human beings’.8 A male author of a feature article in the newspaper Fyns Venstreblad, writing the year after Mikkelsen, also takes a rather personal stand in relation to Eliot’s works, more specifically AB, MF and SM. In his 1943 article ‘George Eliot: En engelsk hjemstavnsforfatter’ (‘George Eliot: An English regional author’), K. Brunn, a retired headmaster, proves especially fond of Dinah Morris, Maggie Tulliver and Silas Marner, but much of his presentation of the works involves plot summary in the past tense, a sure sign of an amateur. His comparison of Eliot with the Danish poet Jeppe Aakjær praising the countryside life in Jutland is not absolutely far-fetched, but finally unconvincing. Besides Mikkelsen’s translation of Silas Marner, the first two decades of the twentieth century saw retranslations of AB, MF and LV. One obvious reason for this second wave of translations is that blackletter type had now become not only out of fashion but difficult to read for most Danes. Eliot was apparently still treasured by readers. The first of these translations, of AB, was published under special circumstances in 1906. Den Rette: En Landsbyhistorie (The Right One: A Village Story) is the new title of this novel, and the translator, N. P. Madsen, says on the title page that it is ‘frit efter engelsk’ (‘freely translated from the English’). This is in fact very apt, as it turns out that the translator is a vicar, and that the publisher is connected with the Inner Mission, a conservative Christian brotherhood. Not only has he edited the title so as to suggest a focus on the moral importance of waiting for the right partner in marriage, he has also edited the main text substantially. In some cases the changes involve the main plot, such as leaving out a line near the end of the novel where we learn that Arthur never received Hetty’s letters. The epilogue is about a page 7

8

‘ægte kvindelig i forhold til Livets daglige Problemer’ (Mikkelsen 1942, 173). ‘en pinlig Følelse af, at der er en Brist i George Eliots Menneskekundskab’ (Mikkelsen 1942, 172–73).

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128   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe shorter than in the original, and omissions are found in several places. In the opening chapter sentences are also skipped here and there, and Madsen often translates the present tense into the past tense, with little success. A general domestication strategy involves changing almost all names to Danish. Dinah is turned into Dina, Mary becomes Marie, Dolly is here called Marthe, and the workers Sandy Jim and Mum Taft become respectively Røde Jim and Tavse Toft (Red Jim and Silent Toft). Gyp is given the unusual dog’s name Busk (Bush). Madsen has made no attempt to translate the sociolect of the workers into a corresponding Danish sociolect, and he is generally not a very good translator. The translation was published again in 1924 with a revised title, AB: En Landsbyhistorie, but that is the only improvement. It can thus be concluded that Danish readers of AB have been ill served by having a heavily edited and inadequate translation, which has furthermore been in public lending libraries for more than a hundred years. The anonymous translator of LV (1912a) has performed well and faithfully, including the straightforward title translation Et løftet slør. The same can be said of Paul Læssøe-Müller, whose Møllen ved Floss (1912b) restores the proper title to the Danish equivalent of MF. Læssøe-Müller follows a moderate domestication strategy by using the Danish ‘Hr’ and ‘Fru’ rather than Mr and Mrs, but he keeps the names of the main characters and only occasionally finds a Danish equivalent to the names of minor characters, such as Old Harry becoming ‘Gammel Erik’ (Old Eric) (19). He also makes a good effort to translate dialect or sociolect. Thus he translates ‘eddication’ by ‘oplærelse’ rather than the correct word for education, ‘oplæring’, and ‘scholard’ becomes someone who has ‘stoderet’, a fine working-class expression for a person that has ‘studeret’ (studied). Læssøe-Müller’s translation is certainly an improvement on the 1877 translation. There is good reason for Læssøe-Müller (1878–1957) being such a skilful translator. He held a degree in history, but had undertaken further studies for almost five years in Paris and London, followed by a fine career as an author and journalist. One of his other publications was also on George Eliot, Engelske Kulturbilleder: Uddrag af Felix Holt, The Radical (English cultural images: Extracts from FH, The Radical), which he co-edited with Ingemann Ottosen and published in 1907. This is not a translation of FH, but a reprint of just over 100 pages from the novel, with a six-page introduction in Danish. Læssøe-Müller and Ottosen say that the new gymnasium requires textbooks for English classes, and they make it clear that their chief purpose in choosing FH is to use it as cultural history. They add glosses and commentary, mainly about historical background. Also for young people in the first half of the twentieth century is Q. Meilbo’s adaptation Møllen ved Floss: Genfortalt for Ungdommen (MF: Rendered for young people) (1924)]. Meilbo evidently published it before the spelling reform of 1948, and it seems to be from the 1920s, where Meilbo’s name appears as translator in a couple of other children’s books. With 114 pages, this is a heavily abbreviated version, and most remarkably has a completely reworked main plot. The characters and parts of Eliot’s plot are intact, and translations such as ‘Maggimor’ (Maggie-Mum) for Tom’s endearing address to Maggie, ‘Magsie’, are in place, as are some sociolectical translations and the

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George Eliot’s Reception in Denmark   129 naming of Gyp as the equivalent Danish dog’s name ‘Snap’. It could perhaps consequently be forgiven that many descriptive passages, such as the novel’s opening, have been edited out for this age group. However, I find it hard to swallow that the novel is completely undermined in connection with miller Tulliver’s death scene. In Meilbo’s version, Tom and Maggie now make peace and never quarrel again! In this way a happy ending is invented and we never get any near-elopements, nor any dying in each other’s arms. Having now reached the department for curiosities, let me finish this section by mentioning that the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen holds what appears to be the only publicly available copy of an original piece of music that includes a translation of Eliot’s poem ‘Sweet Evenings Come and Go, Love’, probably composed in the 1930s or 1940s. The single page of this unique manuscript contains music by Kai Rosenberg and lyrics by P. A. Rosenberg, and is entitled ‘En Aften; De gyldne Tider gaa, Ven’ (‘An evening: The golden times will pass, friend’).9 The translation of the poem’s repeated address ‘love’ is thus ‘ven’ (friend), which is less idiomatic in Danish than ‘min ven’ (my friend). Generally the poem is not very well translated. 1950–2013 I have elsewhere surveyed the development of the influence of English language, literature and culture during and after World War II (Klitgård 2013, 158–64, 194–96, 235–38), so let me restrict myself to saying here that English had already replaced German as first foreign language in Denmark in the 1930s, and that cultural as well as literary imports from Britain and the United States grew so much in the following decades that all other foreign languages in Denmark became minor ones. Eliot for some reason was not part of the waves of new translations of older English literature in the decades following World War II, and as far as translations are concerned it is only Claus Bech’s translations of SM (2000) and M (2003) that have filled a long-standing gap. These translations will be discussed at the end of this section. However, we should not forget that since the mid-twentieth century many more Danes have been able to read Eliot in English, and judging from the number of writings about her in the period considered here, it can safely be said that many have in fact done so. Besides general Eliot readers in English, an increasing academic interest in her work can be noted in the register of Masters’ theses in the English programme of the University of Copenhagen, available in the Royal Danish Library catalogue. The main student interest is concentrated in the 1960s and 1970s, when there are nine theses written about Eliot, and given the overall number of theses this is a substantial figure. Here I will only give one example: Bodil Moltesen Agger’s 1965 MA thesis, ‘Eksempler på den tragiske proces i George Eliots romaner’ (‘Examples of the tragic process in George Eliot’s novels’), which discusses tragic elements in AB, MF, M and DD. Agger 9

Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, MA ms 5844, mu 9912.1100.

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130   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe is clearly most interested in the main female characters and admits in the conclusion that it is impossible to find a common tragic pattern in the novels (64–66). Professional Eliot criticism before the 1980s is scarce. Among the few odd pieces I have been able to locate, I will mention a review by Jens Kruuse (1908–1978), in Jyllandsposten from 1967, of Barbara Hardy’s The Novels of George Eliot and a review by Christian Kampmann (1939–1988), in Information from 1969, of Gordon S. Haight’s George Eliot. Kruuse, a well-known critic and Aarhus professor of literature, writes his short review of Hardy’s book together with a consideration of A. Walton Litz’s Jane Austen, and besides general praise he reveals little interest in what these critics have to say – his real purpose being apparently to tell his reader that he much prefers Austen to Eliot. Despite his respect for the effort, Kampmann’s review of Haight’s biography is very critical, as he finds it pedantic and failing to reach an essential appreciation of the ingenious author, Eliot. Perhaps the most interesting point about the review is that it is written by Kampmann, who in 1969 was himself at the point of breaking through as the most important Danish realist author of his time, a position he held until he was sadly murdered in 1988. As a keen reader of Kampmann in the 1970s and 1980s, it is not surprising to learn that he took so much inspiration from the realist Eliot, all of whose major works he shows familiarity with in the review. In the 1980s there was a new wave of feminism in Danish universities, resulting in kvindestudier and kvindecentre (women’s studies and women’s centres) that often excluded any male participation, which I personally experienced as a student of English. Looking back with little regret on that, I can say now that there were of course a number of important achievements in these feminist studies. Three academic studies of George Eliot were among them. First, Hanne Tang Grödal’s ‘“That passionate sensibility”: Lidenskabens ambivalente triumf i George Eliots MF’ (‘“That passionate sensibility”: The ambivalent triumph of passion in George Eliot’s MF’) from 1983 is a thorough and well-informed reading of the role of passion in MF. Grödal (b. 1950), like many young scholars from the 1980s, soon disappeared from the academic world in a time of heavy university cutbacks in the humanities, but this article stands as a fine piece of criticism. Here is her reading of the ending of MF: At floden til sidst løber over sine bredder og Maggie og Tom drukner i hinandens arme kan dels tolkes som det umulige i at fortrænge lidenskaben, der vender tilbage i monstrøs og destruktiv form, og dels som en følge af Maggies aggressioner over for Tom, som jo dør med hende.10

This is a very convincing and thought-provoking reading, and it is well supported in the remainder of the 20-page article.

10

‘That the river in the end overflows its banks and Tom and Maggie drown in each other’s arms can partly be interpreted as the impossibility of repressing passion, which will return in a monstrous and destructive form, and partly as a consequence of Maggie’s aggressions in relation to Tom, who dies with her’ (Grödal 1983, 227).

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George Eliot’s Reception in Denmark   131 Two further articles published by a women’s centre in the 1980s were both written by Marianne Sørensen (b. 1947). The titles are ‘Mellem erfaring og metafor: Æstetik, køn og kulturkritik i George Eliots romaner’ (‘Between experience and metaphor: Aesthetics, gender and cultural criticism in George Eliot’s novels’) from 1987 and ‘Den lille snehvide og den onde stedmoder: Om rivalisering og kvindelige forfattere’ (‘The little snow-white and the wicked stepmother: About rivalry and female authors’) from 1989. Sørensen, whose main academic work is on Charlotte Brontë (1982), is actually very critical of American feminist criticism in particular of the time, including Gilbert and Gubar, whereas she quotes F. R. Leavis at length and in general agreement (Sørensen 1987, 38–43 and 1989, 26–27). Sørensen, like Grödal, is a very competent Eliot critic, but also like Grödal she never made it to a tenured position at university level. Sørensen published two further, short articles on Eliot in 1996 (Sørensen 1996a and 1996b), both introducing Eliot and M to a broad reading audience. Other short introductions of a similar kind include Birgit Brunsted’s ‘Med en passion for idéer’ (‘With a passion for ideas’), Claus Bratt Østergaard’s ‘Lidenskab og selvindsigt’ (‘Passion and self-insight’) and Else Sandvad’s ‘Drama i Victoriatiden’ (‘Drama in the Victorian age’) (all 1996). The occasion for all these articles in 1996 was the screening in Denmark of the seven-part television series M.11 Sørensen’s and Østergaard’s articles bear the mark of their respective academic backgrounds, whereas Brundsted’s and Sandvad’s also provide sensible introductions. However, Brundsted’s claim that M had by 1996 never been translated is not true, as we have seen. A few more recent Eliot articles deserve to be mentioned in passing before turning to the translations. Lis Møller’s short article ‘En anderledes kærlighedshistorie’ (‘A different love story’) (1995) appeared as a newspaper feature article the year before, and it is one of very few Danish discussions of DD. This is a well-informed as well as informative piece. The same can be said about another article addressed to the general reader, Arne Melberg’s ‘George Eliot og middelvejen’ (‘George Eliot and the middle road’) (1988). This is a fine example of the generally high standard of articles in literary histories and encyclopedias, which I have otherwise not included here. There is a translation by Lisbeth Hertel from 1991 of Phyllis Rose’s biographical study Parallel Lives, here translated with a more descriptive title, Fem victorianske ægteskaber (Five Victorian Marriages). Another treatment of DD, ‘DD: den viktorianske zionist’ (‘DD: the Victorian zionist’), written by Eva Lehrer and published in a magazine on Jewish lives, appeared in 2003. In 2007 the Danish-educated British scholar Simon Frost was published in translation in a special volume of the literary magazine Passage, which focuses on book history. His title, ‘A handsome volume’, is preserved in the Danish translation. The article, handsomely illustrated, recounts the highly interesting publication history of M. Finally in this section, Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen’s (2013) portrait ‘George Eliot’ in De Gyldne Riger: En lystvandring gennem den engelske litteratur (The 11

M, dir. Anthony Page (BBC, released 12 January 1994), Danmarks Radio, August 1996.

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132   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe realms of gold: A pleasure walk through English literature) is among the most substantial chapters of his book, which records the fruits of a working life with English literature and translation studies. Hjørnager Pedersen, a retired associate professor from the University of Copenhagen, is an ardent supporter of the English realist tradition, and in this study he convincingly establishes Eliot as one of its finest practitioners. Claus Bech’s translations of SM (2000) and M (2003) were published by the biggest and most respected publishing company in Denmark, Gyldendal, in the case of M by its subsidiary company Rosinante. In recent years Gyldendal has been a guarantee for high quality, despite pressure from a waning book market, especially as far as translated books are concerned. The two Eliot translations are indeed of high quality, not least because Claus Bech (b. 1943) is one of Denmark’s most experienced translators of English literature, whose work includes translations of Henry James, Tom Wolfe, Arthur Miller, Flann O’Brien, E. L. Doctorow and Julian Barnes (Tetzlaff 2013). His translation of A. S. Byatt’s Possession from 1992 was widely praised and may well have given him a further appetite for Victorian literature, and after 1996 interest in Eliot in Denmark had revived, as we have seen. In Silas Marner: Væveren i Raveloe (Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe), Bech demonstrates his renowned ability to strike the tone of the original author and loyally, almost self-effacingly, let her text be transformed into Danish of a similar style and voice. Bech’s Danish is old fashioned without being archaic, and he makes use of the many nuances in his rich Danish vocabulary. I will give a single example here of his fine translation abilities, from the beginning of the ‘Conclusion’ in Silas Marner: I Raveloe var der en bestemt årstid, som ansås for at være særlig velegnet til bryllupper. Det var den tid, da de store syrener og guldregn i de gammeldags haver lod deres overdådige pragt af gyldne og violette blomster komme til syne over de mosbegroede mure, og da der endnu var kalve, som var spæde nok til at trænge til spandfulde af nymalket mælk. (Bech 2000, 222)12

This translation generally catches the spirited, poetic tone of the novel’s grand finale. The ‘overdådige pragt af gyldne og violette blomster’ (‘exuberant wealth of golden and violet flowers’) for ‘their golden purple wealth’ is a transformation and specification, but it covers the sense accurately, while transforming the idiom into one that works in Danish. Also the first sentence includes a structural change by foregrounding ‘I Raveloe’ (‘In Raveloe’), and again this is very sensible because of different clause structures in the two languages. Finally, it is a fine idiomatic choice to translate ‘calves still young’ as ‘kalve, som var spæde nok’, the key word being ‘spæde’. There is a corresponding noun,

12

‘There was one time of the year which was held in Raveloe to be especially suitable for a wedding. It was when the great lilacs and laburnums in the old-fashioned gardens showed their golden purple wealth above the lichen-tinted walls, and there were calves still young enough to want bucketfuls of fragrant milk’ (Eliot 1967, 241).

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George Eliot’s Reception in Denmark   133 ‘spæde-kalv’, for a suckling calf, and Bech chooses this specification instead of ‘unge’ (young), achieving both a precise adjective and the cute effect of a suckling calf, which fits well in this passage. In the case of Bech’s M (2003) it is worth noting that this translation, unlike his Silas Marner: Væveren i Raveloe, is accompanied by explanatory notes and an introduction to the works of Eliot. This book production has been enabled by financial support from three literary foundations, and as a consequence the novel finally reaches Danish readers again in a deluxe edition. The introduction is written by author and critic Bo Green Jensen (b. 1955), and over eight pages it serves as a substantial introduction to Eliot’s works. Green Jensen is clearly familiar with all of Eliot’s novels, and his well-known combination of academic insight with a rare gift for communicating clearly to a broader audience makes his introduction quite brilliant. Bech, again, displays his skills as a translator and it can thus be concluded that Eliot’s arguably best novel is treated with all the respect it deserves. Coda Thus the translation and reception history of George Eliot in Denmark so far ends on a happy note with Bech’s excellent translations of SM and M. However, the picture is not wholly positive. The leading Danish publishers often complain that it is becoming next to impossible to make a business out of translations, except for thrillers, certain works for children and young readers and other best-sellers. Translators for their part complain that it is hard to make a living from translating literature. Fortunately some private foundations as well as government-supported art funds sometimes make it possible to provide quality translations of great literature, as in the case with Bech’s M. It is a fair hope that at least Eliot’s other main novels could be translated or retranslated. As this chapter has shown, AB in particular needs a new, good translation, and it is also time to replace the more than 100-year-old translation of MF. FH and DD have still never been translated.

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6



George Eliot in Norway: The Enthusiasm that Petered Out Marie Nedregotten Sørbø

In 1861 Norway’s most famous linguist of all time, Ivar Aasen, sat in his study in Christiania (Oslo) poring over a text by George Eliot. It was AB, her first full-length novel, only published a couple of years before and to great acclaim. Aasen wanted to see if he could translate her language. His aim was not to produce complete translations of works, but to try out the possibilities or limitations of his own language. And the language in this case was literally his own: he was constructing a new standard Norwegian based on meticulous, and what was to be lifelong, research into all Norwegian regional dialects. The project was also politically motivated. The official language was almost identical to Danish as a result of the 400-year-long union that had ended in 1814. Although closely related to Norwegian, Danish was felt to be the language of the foreign masters. Constructing a language was part of constructing the nation, along with painting its motives, composing its music and collecting its fairy tales. Aasen had published a dictionary in 1850 and a collection of ‘samples of the country language’ (Prøver af landsmaalet i Norge) in 1853. When he turned to Eliot it was to provide another sample of what the language could do; would it suffice to render the intricate prose of this new English novelist? He also tried it out for old, classic texts: an Icelandic Saga and Don Quixote, for example, and Shakespeare. His Eliot sample did not appear in print until 1901,1 but he achieved what he wanted. Reading the piece now, and looking beyond its old-fashioned quaintness, the similarity of these two authors’ projects is striking. Eliot was often praised for her vivid portrayals of country folk, their habits and their idiom. Aasen’s fundamental idea was giving the common people their voice back. His choice of extract is significant; it is from Chapter 17, ‘In which the story pauses a little’; a passage in which the narrator defends her choice of ordinary characters over idealized ones.2 Her appeal to paint ‘those old women 1

The date 1861 is supplied by the editor of his posthumous collected works, Knut Liestøl (Ivar Aasen, trans., Skrifter i Samling (Kristiania: Gyldendalske, 1912), 3: 385). 2 From ‘These fellow mortals’ to ‘ever conceived by an able novelist’. He translated from the Tauchnitz edition of 1859, I, 235. Curiously, his choice of text is the

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George Eliot in Norway: The Enthusiasm that Petered Out   135 scraping carrots with their work-worn hands’ sounds very Norwegian in Aasen’s version.3 Their ‘brown pitchers’ are very much at home in Norwegian farm kitchens, and ‘their rough curs’ are here specified to be of the Viking race ‘Buhund’. He in effect selects from the vocabulary of Norwegian farmers to fit Eliot’s ‘common coarse people’. Aasen thus manages to turn her language into his. George Eliot could speak the Norwegian ‘Landsmaal’ (country tongue), later known as ‘New Norwegian’. In actual fact she has only done so once more through 150 years of reception, in 1919 (see below). All other translations have used the other, dominant form of Norwegian. The fact that she was selected for translation from the early days is a sign of Eliot’s status in Norway as one of the greatest authors, even a genius, not least in the early phases. However, an overview of the entire reception history shows that she has not always been widely read. When researching the Norwegian reception of Jane Austen some years ago, a pattern appeared: the two authors seem to take two distinct places in Norwegian reception. Eliot dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when Jane Austen was a minor figure, while Austen has totally eclipsed Eliot in recent decades (Sørbø 2014, 146). This pattern is visible in scholarly and critical reception, and in the number of translations, but is modified by the literary histories. The First Period of Translations There was an interest in Eliot as a contemporary author, and an eagerness to translate her that has not been equalled since, despite sporadic bursts of interest. Two translations were published in her lifetime, of M and LV, and three more before the turn of the century. Also worth noting is that she already appeared in the school curriculum five years after her death (Wesenberg 1885). This interest continued in the decades after her death, until the 1919 translation marks the end of this first era of Eliot reception in Norway. Apart from Ivar Aasen’s early and brief response to her first novel, the Norwegian translations began with her second-to-last one, M, in 1873–74. The choice is more logical than it seems; it was clearly chosen for its newness, the English publication having finished only the year before. It was published as a newspaper serial, and then reissued in book form, a common way of publishing literature at the time, also in Norway, and fitting for a novel that had originally been published in eight parts over a year. The editors evidently preferred contemporary best-sellers to a more classic selection. In this case, they seem to have competed for the latest Eliot novel. Normally editors tried to avoid publishing the same works (according to Nøding 2010, 357), but Middlemarch appeared simultaneously in Aftenposten (the Evening Post) and Bergensposten, the major newspapers in Norway’s two largest cities, Oslo and Bergen. opposite of the two other Norwegian translators of AB, who both deleted this chapter. 3 ‘desse gamle Kvendfolk, som skrapa Kaalrøter med sine trælharde hender’ (Aasen 1912, 378).

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136   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Comparing these, it becomes clear that they are not identical. The Oslo version is in Danish, the Bergen version in Norwegian. The Danish language of the Oslo edition (1873a) reveals its origin: it turns out to be an import of the Danish Middlemarch: Studier af det engelske Provindsliv (1873b) of the same year, although with the same adjustment of the subtitle as the Bergen edition (1873–74). The relationship between the three Scandinavian 1873 M editions seems puzzling, yet a close examination of the three, all now extremely rare, yields some evidence. The Bergen Norwegian translation is very close to the two Danish language editions, just in a modified language. Because of the similarity between the two languages, much of the text could be reused, only exchanging some of the vocabulary and adjusting some verb forms and sentence structures. Still, the changes are numerous enough to mean an entire reworking of the text, but, we can conclude, without referring to the English original. Deletions, mistakes or summaries are often the same in all three: for instance, misreading ‘Polish blood’ (‘polsk blod’) as ‘political paper’ (‘politiske Blad’, I, 102), or translating ‘provision’ as ‘Fornøielse’ (‘pleasure’) instead of ‘Forsørgelse’ (III, 6). There is therefore one translator from English behind all three versions: the Copenhagen translator. A second observation is that the Bergen translator must have worked from the Oslo text. The proof lies in the extraordinary deletion of almost six pages of Dorothea and Lydgate’s conversation in Chapter 76, which occurs in the Bergen and Oslo versions but not in the Copenhagen one. We thus have three editions and two languages, but only one translation from English. The following evaluation – although based on the Bergen edition – will therefore also apply to the two other versions. Middlemarch: En Fortælling af det engelske Provinsliv is an intelligently translated, rich and readable version of the novel, but it is not complete. There are deletions throughout, though these are sensitively done; it may very well take an Eliot expert to notice when anything is missing from the story. The quite frequent abbreviations are done in a manner that keeps most incidents and dialogues in place, but gives a slimmer version of them. It still reads well, and Eliot’s own language is there. There are only a very few instances of summary; as a rule, her own sentences are translated. The motive for such consistent abbreviation cannot be the twentieth-century one: to modernize the text for new readers. In this case, the text is a brand new novel on the market. Whether it was done to fit the novel into a more limited newspaper format, or from a wish for a tighter structure, it was done by somebody very well qualified for the task of translating and editing. And it presents itself as a full novel, with three parts bound in two volumes of 1,074 pages, in a petite size comparable to the modern-day ‘Collector’s Library’ edition of the novel. The gothic typeface is typical for the time, but would have made the edition less accessible for a modern reader, had it been more readily available. As it is, there is only one complete set of each of the two editions published in Norway, at Bergen University Library and the National Library in Oslo, respectively.4 There is no trace of any reprint, but the lack of an afterlife is compensated 4

There was previously also one copy of the Copenhagen edition at the Deichmanske Library (Oslo Public Library).

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George Eliot in Norway: The Enthusiasm that Petered Out   137 for by the potentially wide readership of a novel published in two national or regional newspapers. In addition, the newspaper serial instalments were designed to be cut out and collected. It was a means of providing people with literature they perhaps could not have afforded to buy. The readership is therefore greater than what would be indicated by sales figures or numbers of editions. What, then, is lost in the deletions? Starting with the loss of the ‘Prelude’, which contrasts St Theresa with the ‘blundering lives’ of ordinary women, Eliot’s focus on women’s lot is sometimes reduced. The long passage on women’s ‘great mental need’ in Chapter 3, and parts of the narrative commentary on Dorothea’s disillusioned awakening in Chapter 20, are gone. Later, Dorothea’s thoughts on girls and inheritance in Chapter 37 are lost, as is a passage about her need to manage her own affairs rather than remarrying in Chapter 77. The issue is still there, but less emphasized. There seems overall to be little deliberate editing in the deletions; they are not consistent enough to form a strategy, and there are other victims than the women. One of the main sacrifices is of narrative commentary. Yet again, this is a thinning out, rather than an omission of commentary; it is rarely entirely lost. The translator has as a rule kept Eliot’s playful invitations to the reader to follow the narrator about, observing the characters, as in the explanation of the necessity of changing vantage point which opens Chapter 40. Her narrative voice is preserved and well rendered. However, comments, not least when they digress to consider common human experiences, more easily fall prey to reductions than dialogue does. Longer deletions tend to sacrifice minor characters, typically townspeople’s talk, for instance on Lydgate’s plans (Chapter 45) and Mr and Mrs Bulstrode’s respective faults (Chapters 71 and 74). Or issues that are perhaps not seen as essential, like Mrs Cadwallader’s admonishing of Mr Brooke in Chapter 6, where all political details are removed. Although the translator’s method is generally mere deletion, and not rewriting, he/she sometimes substitutes a summary of what has been deleted, as in the case of the entire conversation between Mrs Bulstrode and Mrs Plymdale in Chapter 31 being reduced to one sentence, or a long conversation in Chapter 16 being replaced by the words ‘the discussion was lively’ (210). The 1873 abbreviations sometimes serve to reduce the personal characteristics of speech, to wit Mr Brooke’s helpless repetitions of empty phrases like ‘and that sort of thing’, which are mostly deleted. In the same way, Casaubon’s awful syntax in his letter to Will is considerably milder (II, 173). Another victim of the translator, literary and other allusions, must often be felt to be too obscure, although these include references to The Pilgrim’s Progress and Henry Fielding, for instance. More curiously, the abbreviations also affect some descriptions of strong emotions. One of the places we really regret losing the original narrative is the long passage on Will’s reaction to the surprising entrance of Dorothea in the opening of Chapter 39, a wonderful description of the effect of the touch of love on a nervous system, which is here reduced to a lame report that he ‘started’, ‘coloured’ and that ‘there was vividness in his glance’. The ‘electric shock’, ‘the tingling at his finger-ends’ are gone, with the ‘message of the magic touch’ and the rest of the paragraph.

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138   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Will’s fierce emotions are also reduced in his confrontation with Rosamond in Chapter 78, when he throws her words back at her ‘as if they were reptiles to be throttled and flung off’. Losing such expressions lessens the intensity of the scene. Not many chapters are entirely free of cuts. Everywhere, the main structure of the story is preserved, but the padding of humour, examples and allusions is sometimes reduced. The new version makes eminent sense, but is less expansive and colourful. There is almost no attempt at echoing Eliot’s extensive use of rural accents. Even Hiram Ford, one of the workers putting up a fight in Chapter 56, gives his threats in impeccable language, not forgetting the polite form of the pronoun (‘De’ instead of ‘du’), and the poor peasant Mr Dagley at the end of Chapter 39 sounds equally correct, in all his drunkenness. 1878 The next translation came five years later: Det løftede slør (LV) (1878). Again, it is an immediate response to the English publication (Eliot’s 1859 story was re-edited as a book in 1878). And again it was printed as a serial in Aftenposten, followed by book release. The anonymous translation seems to be based on the second edition, although the epigraph is missing. It is said to be ‘translated from English’, and George Eliot is presented on the title page as ‘the authoress of “Adam Bede”, “Daniel Deronda”, etc’, neither of which had then been translated, but were obviously still noticed.5 The method of translation is different from the one seen in M. This time, Eliot’s sentences are often rephrased and quite significantly expanded, as if by a translator who likes to play novelist. He/she elaborates on the original text, adding sentences as if to clarify or explain or remind the reader. A modest example is seen in the translation of ‘my unread books’, which becomes ‘my books. I could tolerate no other company than theirs, and still, I did not read much.’6 In some cases, the translator supplies information that is not there in the original (as when memories of Geneva are added to the memories of Prague). The translator also tends to sharpen emotional expressions, notably in the passage describing Bertha’s furtive flirting with Latimer. Another expression of a more expansive stylist is seen in the tendency to translate two or three adjectives for one, or, in the extreme case, replacing the pronoun ‘me’ with 13 Norwegian words: ‘this awful, unnatural human being, with whom she had to live’.7 There are only minor deletions – some sentences here and there are skipped – and the meaning of the story is mostly well understood and rendered. In spite

5

‘Oversat fra Engelsk’; ‘Forfatterinde af “Adam Bede”, “Daniel Deronda”, o.s.v.’ (Eliot 1878). 6 ‘mine Bøger. Jeg taalte intet andet Selskab end deres, og dog læste jeg ikke meget’ (Eliot 1878, 45). 7 ‘dette fryktelige, unaturlige Menneske, med hvem hun var nødt til at leve sammen’ (Eliot 1878, 62).

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George Eliot in Norway: The Enthusiasm that Petered Out   139 of thinking that a ‘public school’ is really for the public (8), and interpreting ‘morning callers’ as a nuisance rather than a social routine (61), mistakes are relatively few. The main characteristic of the 1878 translation is the tendency to take over the story and rewrite it. 1892 SM had been translated into Danish in 1863, and copies were found in some Norwegian libraries at the time,8 but it received its first (undated) Norwegian translation in 1892 (according to Øksnevad 1949). It formed part of a new series – Bibliothek for de tusen hjem (literally, ‘library for the thousand homes’, or everyman’s library) – aimed at transmitting the best literature to all classes of readers. The editor Johan Sørensen’s postscript to the series offers a strong apology for the ‘immensely civilizing effect of reading’, and an assertion that he wants Norwegian readers to have the same access to ‘the literary treasures of the civilized world’ that English, French and German readers have.9 Eliot, then, is clearly seen to belong in such a selection. She is not a rebel, but a civilizing influence. The simple beauty of the book supports the aims of the series: bound in brown cloth with gold lettering and Arts and Crafts-style endpapers. So does the quality of the translation. The anonymous translator clearly knows English well, has few problems understanding Eliot’s more intricate phrases, and attempts rendering her rural, lower-class dialects in corresponding Norwegian ones. He/she understands, for instance, Mrs Winthrop’s twisted vocabulary and creates his own variants, perhaps playing with other words than the ones chosen by Eliot, but achieving the same effect. When she in English says ‘carril’ for carol (Chapter 10), she says ‘melodonter’ for ‘melodier’ in Norwegian (121). Likewise, there is an excellent concoction of misconstrued words in the farrier’s speech in Chapter 7. The translator also makes use of colloquialisms such as ‘aassen’ for ‘hvordan’ (how) (79). The translator has a mostly impressive grasp of vocabulary and syntax, and manages a smooth Norwegian as well as keeping closely to the original text. He/she has no problem grasping the meaning of more obscure expressions such as ‘ride to cover’, which is translated as foxhunting. Only occasionally are there debatable choices and mistakes, as when ‘the old fellow’ becomes ‘the old fool’.10 Eliot’s philosophical comments on her characters are also very well understood and transmitted.

8

Two copies still exist. ‘en overordentlig civilisatorisk virkning’; ‘den civiliserte verdens litterære skatter’ (Johan Sørensen, series postscript, repr. in George Eliot, Silas Marner: Væveren fra Raveloe, trans. anon., 1892 (Høvik: Bibliothek for de tusen hjem, 1887)). 10 ‘den gamle tulling’(Eliot 1892, 46). 9

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140   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe 1895–96 Møllen ved Floss (MF) (1895–96), translated by Christian A. Bugge, was published in two handsome volumes, bound in red and with Eliot’s portrait (the photograph) inside as well as in gold embossing on the cover. The translator is presented as ‘pastor’ in the first volume and ‘dr. theol.’ in the second, another example of Eliot’s status in the early reception. Moreover, he gives a very readable version of the story, translating all details with excellent understanding. There are very few deliberate alterations, although the whist-playing vicar is changed to simply ‘a jovial man’ – perhaps the pastor translator objected to the practice?11 Otherwise, there are only about four small deletions, including a Greek quotation. There are a few more misunderstandings, but these are the exception rather than the rule. One of the more conspicuous ones is the repeated translation of ‘grand piano’ as simply an excellent piano.12 Bugge also contributes some explanatory footnotes, for instance of an untranslatable pun (I, 217). Another instance of punning, Eliot’s five-times repetition of ‘poor’ in the double meaning of penniless and weak, is translated thrice as the first (‘fattig’) and twice as the second (‘elendig’), which keeps the double meaning. In comparison, the 2002 translator of the same novel opts for the repetition and uses ‘weak’ (‘dårlig’) five times, thereby losing the reference to poverty. In contrast to SM three years before, there is very little attempt at rendering non-standard accents. The Tullivers, and even Bob and Luke, speak standard Norwegian. A colloquial word such as ‘wench’ is less colloquial but still informal when translated as ‘jente’ instead of ‘pige’ (I, 317). A contemporary reviewer of the translation recommends Eliot to ‘the attention of the cultivated public’, but also connects her to a recent women’s exhibition that has taken place in Copenhagen, and thus to contemporary feminist interests.13 What seems to be another Norwegian MF (Eliot 1908–09), published for the Scandinavian market in the United States a decade later, is really a new edition of Bugge’s translation, without his name. In contrast to the first, this is set in gothic type, perhaps a testimony to the more conservative habits of the emigrants. 1896 Janets Anger (JR) (1896) was translated by Thora Storm for a newspaper serial in Dagsposten in Norway’s third largest city, Trondheim, and then published in book form. Storm, politician and pedagogue, had founded a school for girls as 11

‘en godslig Mand’ (Eliot 1895–96, II, 5). ‘et storartet Piano’ (Eliot 1895–96, I, 216, and II, 139 and elsewhere). 13 ‘Det er derfor en Forfattervirksomhed, som i særlig Grad har Krav paa den dannede Almenheds Opmærksomhed ogsaa hos oss’ (Kristofer Randers, ‘George Eliot’, Aftenposten, Kristiania, 20 October 1895). 12

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George Eliot in Norway: The Enthusiasm that Petered Out   141 well as a feminist society in her home town. Her choice of text is very much in keeping with these interests: the story of the abused wife Janet Dempster. Eliot’s striking argument that ‘a brutal man needs no motive to prompt his cruelty; he needs only the perpetual presence of a woman he can call his own’, rings clear also in translation (Eliot 1999b, 436). Storm’s style of translation is the opposite of that of the anonymous translator of LV 18 years before: much cleaner and conscientiously following Eliot’s sentences, rendering her narrative in almost all of its details. At the same time, she finds idiomatic Norwegian substitutes for Eliot’s alliterations, expressions and dialects. One of the few changes is the insertion of more paragraph divisions, to suit the small page format. There are very few cuts – even a Greek quotation is kept – but the elaborate parody of a comedy playbill is somewhat shortened, although still sarcastically funny (Chapter 9). As for use of dialects, a kitchen scene between two servants (Chapter 21) is a treat of colourful accents also in Norwegian. A contemporary reader, however, was not amused. The only extant copy is inscribed with ‘gibberish’ (‘kaudervælsk’) in the margin (265), clearly signifying annoyance at the substandard language employed.14 1910 AB had already been translated into Danish in 1859–60 and would to a certain extent also have been read in Norway. The 1910 Norwegian translator, Anna Lassen, refers to this as having long been sold out, and she persuaded the publisher that ‘this masterpiece’ should not ‘be lost’ to those ‘who do not read English’.15 Lassen is a competent translator who makes sure that the masterpiece is, indeed, not lost. She makes relatively few mistakes, although the odd monkey becomes donkey and ‘dose’ becomes ‘doze’ (Eliot 1910, 262, 290). She sometimes also stumbles on foreign or obscure phenomena, turning ‘inglenook’ into ‘bed place’.16 The only significant weakness is, however, that her version of the novel is not entirely complete. On a number of occasions a page or two is missing; in two instances half a chapter (in Chapters 29 and 30); and once an entire chapter (Chapter 17). Although there is no systematic deletion of particular elements, the reduced passages include explanations of Methodism (Chapter 3); the biting irony regarding Hetty’s selfish vanity (Chapter 15); women’s gossip in church (Chapter 18); the flowers in a farmhouse garden (Chapter 20); a scene in the night school (Chapter 21); and Adam’s feelings and Dinah’s letter (Chapter 30). Adam’s language is also altered. Adam and Seth both speak standard Norwegian; there is no equivalent of their thees and thous, their ays and nays. 14

This copy is held in the Gunnerus Library, University of Trondheim. ‘dette mesterverk helt skulde gå tabt for den del av publikum som ikke læser engelsk’ (Anna Lassen, ‘Forord’, in George Eliot, Adam Bede (Kristiania: Steenske bogtrykkeri og forlag, 1910)). 16 ‘sengekrok’ (Eliot 1910, 25). 15

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142   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Where Eliot indicates Adam’s accent in the spelling ‘Donna fear, mother’ (Eliot 1999a, 105), the translator chooses standard usage: ‘Do not be afraid, mother.’17 His mother is, however, allowed to speak with substandard vocabulary with, for instance, contractions. The 1910 edition testifies to Eliot’s status in Norway in several ways. The book itself does: a heavy volume bound in red cloth with golden Art Nouveau-style ornaments and floral patterned endpapers. Also, the translator opens her preface by stating that ‘A recommendation of one of George Eliot’s books is naturally totally superfluous’, and refers to her as ‘the highly regarded authoress’, almost apologetic for giving any foreword at all.18 Furthermore, the translation was reviewed in a major journal, For kirke og kultur (For church and culture), in 1911. Pastor Olaf Strømme agrees with the translator that this is just the kind of book that people, not least young people, need: ‘we do not have to endure endless smoking, Anglo-Saxon sports or embarrassing descriptions’.19 Instead, Eliot represents wisdom and ‘old art’, like the Düsseldorf School, something to treasure in one’s collections. The short passage demonstrates Eliot’s place in Norwegian reception in the early century: a solid counterweight to modern influences.

1919 Eliot’s very first story about Amos Barton, which had previously attracted the attention of a textbook author, was translated for the first and only time by Henrik Rytter in 1919. Amos Barton og vanlagnaden hans (Amos Barton and his sad fate) was published separately as a booklet, equipped with three pages of explanatory notes by the translator. This cheap paperback is one of the few of all Norwegian translations that are still sometimes available from second-hand booksellers. It is the only full translation of an Eliot text into New Norwegian, after Ivar Aasen’s short 1861 experiment. The translation is kept in an oral, humorous tone that seems curiously related to Eliot’s own. In addition, the rhythm of the New Norwegian feels similar to her English. Apart from Rytter being a country-tongue translator for a country-speak author, he was primarily an excellent translator per se, later known not least for his Shakespeare translations. He frequently employs a colourful Norwegian vocabulary quite on a par with Eliot’s, and finds good solutions for rendering her humour. Only on a handful of occasions does he misunderstand English expressions, and only one line is lost from the story.

17

‘Vær ikke bange, mor’ (Eliot 1910, 125). ‘At komme med nogen anbefaling av en av George Eliots bøker er naturligvis helt overflødig […] den høit ansete forfatterindes’ (Lassen 1910, n.p.). 19 ‘Slippe at maatte ty til masser av tobak, angelsaksisk sport eller at føle sig flau og pinlig berørt’ (Olaf Strømme, ‘George Eliot: Adam Bede’, For kirke og kultur (Kristiania: Kristiania, 1911), p. 188). 18

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George Eliot in Norway: The Enthusiasm that Petered Out   143 Other prominent men had a hand in the project. The preface was written by Knut Liestøl, later Minister of Education. The book was reviewed by Olav Midttun, at the time Associate Professor of New Norwegian at the University of Oslo and editor of the journal Syn og Segn (Vision and legend). Their views will be considered below. It is not a coincidence that the centenary of Eliot’s birth marks the end of the early period of Norwegian reception. As Midttun comments, the translation was commissioned for this year to honour her, and he is surprised that no journals or newspapers seem to have remembered (Midttun 1919, 431). In retrospect, we might see this as a sign of the coming neglect of her authorship. The Second Period of Translations A gap of three decades then followed, in which no new Eliot translations appeared. This is the time when her popularity was rapidly waning, as recorded also by literary historians (discussed below). She was increasingly seen as old fashioned and moralistic. When, however, she is again introduced to Norwegian readers, it is precisely her moral qualities that are wanted. 1950 The publishing house Ansgar published religious works (including the books of Billy Graham) and fiction between 1940 and the end of the century, and George Eliot was among the few selected foreign novelists in the early period, alongside Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens and Selma Lagerløf. She was clearly regarded as a moral and religious teacher, and there is no trace of her unorthodox views on theological matters. According to the publisher’s blurb, ‘the beauty and poetry’ of her own heart infuse her masterly descriptions of English village life and give us characters that get through their adversities with ‘victory and new faith’.20 Ansgar’s first choice was SM, followed four years later by AB. Veveren fra Raveloe (The weaver of Raveloe) (1950) was translated by Ruth NissenDrejer, whose translations are sometimes marked as a reworking or retelling of the story. Her version of SM is, however, closer to the original than this leads us to expect. Moreover, it is by far the better of the two Ansgar translations. Nissen-Drejer mostly understands Eliot’s meaning, but does not attempt a complete translation. Although rarely deleting longer passages, such as the full page that is gone from Silas and Eppie’s hunt for Lantern Yard in the penultimate chapter, she frequently omits two lines here or eight lines there. Moreover, she opts for simplification of Eliot’s stylistic richness, for instance

20

‘den skjønnhet og poesi som hennes eget hjerte var så rikt på […] går ut av den med seier og ny tro’ (Eliot 1950).

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144   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe by reducing details about food or rooms or behaviour. Where Eliot writes of ‘pork and black-puddings’, Nissen-Drejer substitutes ‘Christmas food’.21 Narrative comments tend to be sacrificed; especially in ‘I’ form, although some ‘we’-comments are kept. What she does retain is the colourful dialects, although dialogue can also be abbreviated and she loses the funny passage on the snobbish Misses Gunn who say ‘orse’ instead of ‘oss’ in Chapter 11. In the same situation, Priscilla speaks rather more rudely in Norwegian where she says ‘I don’t give a damn about the menfolk’ rather than ‘I’ve no opinion o’ the men.’22 There is also a tendency to cut or modify the issue of class in Chapter 19, where Eppie’s choice between becoming ‘a lady’ or marrying ‘some low working-man’ is here more a question of feelings and loyalty, not of two opposite worlds, where inclusion in one is exclusion from the other. Still, the Ansgar edition of SM is mainly a readable and decent, if somewhat thinner, version of the novel. The same cannot be said of their AB, published four years later. 1954/1972 It takes only a glance to see that the 1954 translation of AB is not a full one; its 200 or so pages could not possibly contain Eliot’s novel. Still, the later 1972 issue of the same edition presents itself bound in brown leather, with gold lettering, and the words ‘Great Classics’ on the cover. Paradoxically, Eliot’s greatness is literally much reduced. Other authors have seemingly been subjected to the same treatment in the series. Rarely have books promised so much and delivered so little. The classics are not only abbreviated, but amputated (and make for a pitiful sight as they hobble along). The deletions are fatal to the readability of the novel. Ten entire chapters are gone without a trace (14, 17, 21, 25, 32, 41, 49, 50, 53, 55). In addition, Chapter 19 is reduced to two pages, which are then transferred to the beginning of Chapter 20. No chapter is complete; even the cameo Chapter 47, the intense ‘The Last Moment’, has lost two sentences as if deletion is an unbreakable principle. What is kept is mainly (abridged) dialogue, plus some fairly utilitarian narrative paragraphs. The translation has two (not quite redeeming) qualities: the fragments that remain are translations of Eliot’s own language, or pitiful remnants of it, and there is no rewriting or paraphrasing. Some of Eliot’s striking expressions, whether in dialogue or narrative, are kept, and give a pale reflection of her style, insofar as a few bones can give an impression of the living body. Second, and the only thing this translation really adds to the Norwegian Eliot reception, is a consistent use of dialects/sociolects. Only here do Mrs Poyser and Lisbeth Bede wallow in rural or working-class non-standard language. It is a pity that the translator did not give us a proper translation, rather than this mutilation. 21 22

‘julematen’ (Eliot 1950, 96). ‘Jeg gir blanke blaffen i mannfolka, jeg’ (Eliot 1950, 115).

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George Eliot in Norway: The Enthusiasm that Petered Out   145 It is not clear whether the translator, Sverre Brændeland, himself did the abbreviation, but in all likelihood Ansgar imported an already abridged version. It would otherwise be odd for a religious publisher not to include Dinah’s letter in Chapter 30 or her prayer in prison in Chapter 45. Unfortunately, this impoverished version of the novel still exists in libraries today. While there are only four remaining copies of the far better 1910 translation, there are altogether 21 copies of the two editions of Brændeland’s (1954) translation. 1960/2009 In between these two editions, another Norwegian version of an Eliot text appeared, superficially similar to the previous in combining the label of ‘classics’ with a radically abbreviated work, but still a more honest and enjoyable version. This is the American children’s comic book version of SM in Classics Illustrated (1949), which was translated into Norwegian as Illustrerte klassikere (Eliot 1960). It was reissued in 2009, with a three-page article introducing the author’s life and work from the perspective of the scandals surrounding her (Espeland, 2009). 1995 The recent period has seen two full and competent translations by the same translator: Mona Lyche Ramberg. The first of these, Middlemarch (1995), was immediately reissued in Den norske bokklubben (The Norwegian book club) the year after, and then again in 2008, which ensured a wide readership. Not only is it more complete than the first Norwegian Middlemarch (1873a), it even occasionally elaborates, providing explanations of obscure points. The tendency to add words to make the meaning clearer may sometimes weaken the sentence by causing repetitions in an otherwise enjoyable translation. In her afterword, the translator focuses on the challenges of rendering Eliot’s rich and old-fashioned style for modern readers. Intriguingly, in two instances, the translator chooses to censor Eliot’s use of the word ‘Jew’ (Eliot 1995, II, 318 and 377). This is not just a post-war phenomenon, as the 1873–74 anonymous translator did the same (III, 316). Both delete the word and keep only the information that Will Ladislaw is the grandson of ‘a thieving […] pawn broker’, presumably motivated by a reluctance to spread hideous prejudice. However, it means denial of the historical fact of the existence of such prejudice; an attempt to purge history and erase all such traces. Eliot is here reporting the town’s talk about Ladislaw – not sharing their attitude, but revealing their bigotry. Ladislaw is part Polish, nicknamed Italian, and finally scandalously revealed to be Jewish, all of these being suspect, but the last really the nail in the coffin as far as English small-town standards are concerned. The narrow minds of Middlemarch accept only their own sort; all others are ‘interlopers’ (Mr Vincy’s word) and ‘cursed alien blood’ (Mr Hawley’s words). Eliot, however, clearly does not share Mr Hawley’s or Mr Vincy’s opinions on ‘alien blood’.

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146   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe The strength of Eliot’s feeling in this matter is seen in her letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe following the publication of DD, where she declares her aim to confront the ‘national disgrace’ and ‘stupidity’ of common English prejudices against Jews (Carroll 2000, 405). It is by no means irrelevant to the story of M that Will Ladislaw is part Jewish, and the fact should not be expunged from the book. The relationship between Will Ladislaw and Daniel Deronda is thereby also rendered invisible. Ladislaw is Eliot’s, and Dorothea’s, hero, Jewishness and all. Paradoxically, such anxieties make us lose the Jewish hero of the story.23 2002 Ramberg’s translation of MF came in 2002. Both novels were launched by their respective publishers as important classics: M in the series ‘Verdensbiblioteket’ (‘the world library’) and Møllen ved Floss in the series De store romaner (the great novels). Nevertheless, a decade and a half later, neither is available on the market, and entering a bookshop in 2015 asking for George Eliot in Norwegian will prove fruitless. Again, she is beaten by Jane Austen, who had five novels translated in the same period, and who is still on the shelves. Compared to Bugge’s translation a century before, Ramberg’s major advantage is the attempt to translate rural accents and sociolects. She keeps Mr Tulliver’s elisions,24 although not necessarily his mispronunciations, like ‘eddication’ and ‘raskill’. For some reason, those of his wife are not copied (‘iver’ for ‘ever’, or her double negations). The social hierarchy is illustrated in the much broader language of the servant, Luke, or the poor man, Bob, who both revel in substandard or rural word forms and who both typically use the plural pronoun (‘Dere’) for the singular (‘De’) in polite address. In other cases the earlier translation is better, for instance of Eliot’s irony regarding female public opinion bearing down on Maggie after her elopement as ‘not the world, but the world’s wife’ (Book Seven, Chapter 2). Where Bugge, like Eliot, repeats ‘the world’s wife’ five times, Ramberg rewrites to ‘the female part of society’ and ‘it’ in three cases, and only ‘one’ or ‘others’ elsewhere.25 The same is seen in the four-times mention of the ‘feather’ that breaks the camel’s back, which is kept in 1895, while the 2002 translator uses two different words (Book Two, Chapter 2).26 There are, inevitably, mistakes of translation, perhaps more interesting when they alter Eliot’s narrative tone, as in the comment on Philip’s behaviour

23

The same choice is made in MF, where ‘rich as a Jew’ in the mouth of Bob the pedlar is changed to ‘rich as a Croesus’ (‘rik som en krøsus’) (Eliot 2002, 385). The 1896 translation keeps the original expression. 24 Such as ‘ment’n sku’ bli’ for ‘mente han skulle bli’ (‘meant him to be’) (Eliot 2002, 14). 25 ‘Verdens Hustru’ (Eliot 1895–96, II, 335–38); ‘den kvinnelige delen av det’, ‘samfunnets kvinnelige del’, ‘man’, ‘andre’ (Eliot 2002, 590–92). 26 ‘halmstrå’ and ‘fjær’ (Eliot 2002, 187–88).

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George Eliot in Norway: The Enthusiasm that Petered Out   147 towards Maggie in book five, Chapter 1: ‘You can hardly help blaming him severely’, she assumes of the reader, while she herself clearly does not blame him. In 2002, it is the narrator who blames him, not the reader: ‘There can hardly be any doubt that he had behaved reprehensibly.’27 There is an example that translation may indeed sometimes ‘improve on’ the original, or find phrases that are more felicitous. When Eliot writes ironically of the lack of connection between ‘intellect’ and ‘income’, the Norwegian version is ‘intellekt og inntekt’, the same meaning, but more similar words, thus sharpening the satire (200). Since 1873, four of George Eliot’s novels have had Norwegian translations (two or three each), and three of her stories. Three novels have, however, never been translated: R, FH and DD. Particularly interested readers may have read these in the nineteenth-century Danish or Swedish translations, or, indeed, in English, since a handful of copies of such editions still exist in Norwegian libraries.28 Nor has SG ever been translated, but this work also exists in four different nineteenth-century English/American editions in Norwegian libraries. The lack of translations is, however, a sign that George Eliot’s immediate popularity in Norway did not last far into the twentieth century and did not encompass all her work. Literary Histories In literary histories Eliot’s reputation is more stable. Although given different scope and attention over the years, she is always seen as important. Just Bing published a European literary history in Copenhagen in 1905 (reissued in Oslo in 1906) and a world literary history in 1928–34, and the respective chapters on the English novel are tailored to the same pattern. There are, however, some intriguing adjustments in his presentation of Eliot that testify to changing tastes, his own or those of the literary world. In both versions, Eliot is placed alongside Dickens and Thackeray. The 1905 version starts with the claim that she is the ‘most important’ of the three, and ends with the statement that she was ‘one of England’s greatest minds of this century’.29 This ranking has disappeared by 1934, as has his earlier focus on her intellectuality and great learning. In the first version she is first presented as a ‘country child raised to great learning’,30 while in the last version the observations that she was ‘a moralist [...] by nature a spiritual guide’ are foregrounded.31 Her knowledge of

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‘Det kan vel ikke herske tvil om at han hadde oppført seg forkastelig’ (Eliot 2002, 366). 28 Ivar Aasen had a copy of the 1867 Tauchnitz edition of FH in his book collection. 29 ‘den betydeligste’; ‘en af Englands første Aander i dette Aarhundredet’ (Just Bing, Europas Litteraturhistorie i det 19de Aarhundrede: Grundlinier og Hovedværker (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag, 1905), pp. 241 and 248). 30 ‘George Eliot er Landbarn, hun er endvidere lærd opdraget’ (Bing 1905, 241). 31 ‘er moralist […] av natur sjelesørger’ (Just Bing, Verdens-litteraturhistorie: grunnlinjer og hovedverker (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1928–34), III, 183).

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148   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe foreign languages and theology is now seen to ‘lead to revolt against society’.32 There was no such cause and effect between her learning and her rebelliousness in 1905. Bing still admires her, and both versions demonstrate his thorough knowledge of her work. He writes several pages on SCL (particularly JR), AB and his favourite, SM, but thinks her learning has obscured her art in M, FH, DD and R, which are dismissed with a few words. Strangely, a few appreciative lines about MF have disappeared in the later version. Norway’s most famous literary historian in the mid-twentieth century, Francis Bull, whose work was translated into all Scandinavian languages, has far less to say about Eliot than Just Bing had. He writes only a paragraph, mentioning her unconventional religious and personal life, finding MF a classic but her later works ‘often unfresh’.33 In his third edition two decades later, he adds that Eliot’s reputation has dwindled while that of Austen and the Brontës has grown, but he still sees her as a major ethical voice. Eliot gets a much more thorough, 10-page presentation in the 12-volume, pan-Scandinavian Verdens Litteraturhistorie (World literary history). When the Dane Henning Krabbe writes his chapter on English realism, Eliot is said to be the second most important Victorian writer for ‘our time’, after Dickens.34 Like Bing before him, Krabbe is fascinated by Eliot’s stories and characters, and dots his narrative with quotations from novels and letters. An account of her life introduces a detailed appreciation of her books. Throughout, Eliot is seen as ‘a surprising woman’ of great learning and ability, at her best when she is closest to her own life.35 Krabbe’s surprise, recorded before the onset of second-wave feminism, is gallantly – and no doubt genuinely – explained to imply no condescension; it is just that she makes him realize how ‘male dominated most of literature has been’.36 Again, Eliot’s female qualities are perceived to be essential. A similar multi-volume work published between 1985 and 1994 is more superficial. Although given only a page and a half, Eliot is the only woman singled out where others are lumped together as ‘female story tellers’. The passage consists mainly of very brief summaries of MF and M as stories of female sexuality juxtaposed with intellect. Eliot remains an important Victorian moralist despite her rebellious features (Hertel 1989, 148–49). The three professors behind the newest Norwegian world literary history concentrate on cross-national tendencies, and Eliot balances between Balzac, 32

‘Og det førte til at hun kom på kant med samfunnet’ (Bing 1928–34, III, 183). ‘ofte ufrisk’ (Francis Bull, Verdens litteraturhistorie (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1940), p. 269). 34 ‘Nest etter Dickens er det ingen av de viktorianske forfattere som har opptatt vår tid sterkere enn George Eliot’ (Edvard Beyer et al., Verdens litteraturhistorie (Oslo: J. W. Cappelens Forlag, 1972), VIII, 312). 35 ‘George Eliot er en forbausende kvinne. Med sin innsikt [...]’ (Beyer et al. 1972, VIII, 322). 36 ‘Når man sier at hun gir en høyt begavet kvinnes bidrag til litteraturen, ligger det intet forbehold i det. Tvert om. For når vi i hennes bøker opplever hennes sansefornemmelser, hennes varme og instinktive sympati, forstår man hvor mannfolkpreget det meste av litteraturen har vært’ (Beyer et al. 1972, VIII, 322). 33

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George Eliot in Norway: The Enthusiasm that Petered Out   149 Stendhal, Dickens and Flaubert. Tone Selboe presents Eliot as ‘the ethical voice of the Victorian Age’, a role attributed to her by all aforementioned literary historians. Several of these also record her fluctuating reception over the twentieth century and her still-enduring position. Selboe has a similar approach to Bing and Krabbe in focusing on selected work(s), but with opposite preferences: while Bing did not appreciate M, the two more recent historians label it her ‘main work’. Eliot’s lasting legacy is here and elsewhere her insight into the complexity of human relations (Haarberg, Selboe and Aarset 2007, 385–86). Partly due to the different formats, only Bing (1905) and Krabbe (in Beyer et al. 1972) give extensive evaluations of Eliot’s work. We also notice that although she invariably appears as an ethical voice, and a voice of common human experience, she is hardly ever presented as the voice of women, or the voice of country folk. Academic and Critical Reception With her stable reputation as a serious classic author, it is perhaps a little surprising to find that there is no Norwegian doctoral dissertation on Eliot, and very few articles in Norwegian journals. Moreover, some of the most interesting articles appeared a century ago. There has been a steady trickle of Masters’ theses, an indication that she has always been a candidate for academic reading lists. The period which saw the highest interest was the 1970s, when nine of the 34 theses written on her during the century since 1910 were produced. This is no doubt due to the women’s literature courses that cropped up at the time, and which also established Jane Austen’s academic reputation in Norway. At this particular point in time, and in this field, the two authors had an equal standing. Before 1970, Eliot dominates with 15 against Austen’s six theses. Since then, Austen has benefitted from the enormous success of the screen adaptations, while interest in Eliot seems to have waned. Since 2000, Austen has had 19 theses (of a total of 41) and Eliot only two. The scholars dominate the Norwegian reception of Eliot. It was a conspicuous feature of early reception: her first translators and commentators include two professors, three pastors/ministers, a linguist and a BA, as well as two important editors and a Shakespeare translator. Some of the recent contributions are also from the universities: an introduction to her life and work for M (Langholm 1996); a comparison of her narrative techniques with those of screen adaptations (Lothe 2006); as well as a newspaper article explaining the novel to the Middlemarch television audience (Tysdahl 1995). There were, however, also (more or less untitled) women among her early receivers. Amalie Skram, today one of Norway’s most famous novelists, seems to have been the first critic to respond to Eliot in Norway. When she wrote her brief review of LV and BJ in 1879 she was a newly divorced woman writing literary reviews for a regional newspaper, six years before the publication of her first novel. The review was evidently of a Danish translation of the 1878 Tauchnitz edition of the two stories, not of the Norwegian

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150   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe translation of LV of the same year (Skram 1987).37 Skram’s preferences are clear: she is very dismissive of the melodrama of LV while she enjoys the country-life realism and humour of BJ. The direction she herself would take later was a Naturalism that veers towards dark pessimism. Skram’s brief review, in the limited newspaper format, does not include any information about the author, but she clearly knows her, since she refers to Eliot as ‘the authoress’. Genius and Housewife The predominantly male view of Eliot in turn-of-the-century commentary was one of admiration, even adoration, but often for two distinctly different reasons. Her commentators invariably admired her mind, but sometimes almost equally her values, or morality. They repeatedly called her a genius, but we are also often informed that she was a housewife. Already Skram had pointed out that the story was ‘written with intelligence’, and then explained the moral perspective.38 The first of these qualities is implicitly a male attribute, the second a female one. Later critics made this point explicit, and Eliot was perceived to transcend gender patterns and unite both worlds. At this point, as well as in the tone of adoration, she approaches the status of a deity. Who else is genderless? One commentary stands out among the others as the longest, most thorough and best informed of all the early responses: a vast article printed in seven instalments in the internationally oriented cultural journal Kringsjaa (Panorama) in 1894. If not a deity, Eliot is here a prophet for a new, rational form of religion. Significantly, the first Eliot piece the editor gave the public was a (prose) translation of the poem ‘O May I Join the Choir Invisible’, only called ‘Salme’ (Hymn) in Norwegian (Tambs-Lyche 1893, 410).39 In both languages, the use of religious genre and idiom provides Eliot with a prophetic voice that she employs to proclaim her alternative to traditional Christianity. This rationally based scepticism evidently found an echo in the thinking of the editor and founder of the journal, Hans Tambs-Lyche, a railway engineer turned Unitarian minister who had returned home after some years in the United States. His interest in contemporary philosophy informs the entire article, quite frequently blurring any distinction between critic and author. He describes Eliot’s moral and philosophical outlook with such conviction and passion that it could have come from the pulpit (Tambs-Lyche 1894). The same journal and editor also published a Norwegian translation of an American article on Eliot by James Parton four years later. Here Eliot is not

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Published in Smaalenenes Amtstidende, 2 March 1879. ‘Fortællingen er skreven med intelligents’ (Amalie Skram, ‘Et løftet slør og Broder Jakob: To Fortællinger Af George Eliot’, in Irene Engelstad (ed.), Optimistisk Læsemaade (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1987), p. 25). 39 The same hymn (this time only the first stanza) also appeared at the end of the last Eliot article in this journal, in a new translation, and thus frames its presentation of the author (James Parton, ‘George Eliot’, Kringsjaa, Kristiania, 1898, p. 212). 38

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George Eliot in Norway: The Enthusiasm that Petered Out   151 only genius and housewife, but the saviour of small, destitute children suddenly left alone by their wicked mother: ‘Who would put the young ones to bed and look after them in the night?’ (Parton 1898, 210). Mary Ann stepped in and brought order to a house in chaos. He is harder on (the first) Mrs Lewes than modern biographers are, and also tries to pass off Eliot as the angel of the house. The story is based on neighbourly gossip (‘As one of her neighbours has told me’, 209). Parton also declares his personal satisfaction to be told by her biographer (Mrs Blind) that ‘her education was not only of the brains’ but equally of ‘the hands’, and that she ‘had early on learnt the admirable art of performing her housewifely duties with patient joy’ (208). In this version, even her appearance fits the established dichotomy: her coarse features are said to form a striking contrast to the feminine mildness of her face (208). The dichotomy had been established 17 years earlier in her obituary; the first biographical sketch about her in Norway. Taking as its point of departure her outstanding literary qualities, which set her apart from the numerous ‘novel-manufacturers’ of both sexes, she is said to be one of the five or six English nineteenth-century women writers who will survive. Her school years are said to have revealed her ‘energetic, and as for mental gifts, sometimes rather masculine nature’. Now why would she be described as masculine? It is specified as a nature ‘which learnt easily and showed great interest in acquiring knowledge’. However, the writer immediately assures us that this just means that her education was all the greater, because she also studied ‘music etc’ as well as the masculine disciplines of language and science, and thus ‘combined female and male mental endowments’ (Winter-Hjelm 1881). Similar acts of balance are performed in other early commentaries. Knut Liestøl’s preface to and Olav Midttun’s review of the 1919 translation both declare Eliot’s name to be ‘one of the brightest in world literature’,40 and both seem to weigh her artistic against her moral qualities: ‘George Eliot was a woman of unusually rich endowments. She was a great human being; those who knew her best, said she was greater as a human being than as an author.’ What Liestøl calls her human qualities are her feminine ones: ‘She had a mild, soft and sensitive soul’, and at the same time she was a ‘learned and clever woman’.41 Liestøl first praises Eliot for being ‘an unusually gifted housekeeper’ for her father, and only secondly for having ‘an intense yearning for knowledge’.42 Her foremost champion in Norway, Hans Tambs-Lyche, seems less interested in her housewifely talents than the others. His reiterated words

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‘Namnet hennar er eit av dei bjartaste i heimslitteraturen’ (Knut Liestøl, ‘George Eliot’ (preface), in George Eliot, Amos Barton og vanlagnaden hans (Oslo: Det norske samlaget, 1919)). 41 ‘George Eliot var ei kvinne med ein uvanleg rik givnad. Ho var stor som menneskje; dei som kjende henne best, sa at ho var større som menneskje enn som forfattar. Ho aatte ei mild, mjuk og kjenslerik sjæl. Ho var den lærde og klaartenkte kvinna’ (Liestøl 1919). 42 ‘styrde ho huset for far sin, og ho synte seg aa vera ei uvanleg dugande husmor. Ho hadde ein brennande kunnskapstrong’ (Liestøl 1919).

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152   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe are ‘geni’ (‘genius’) and ‘aand’ (which means both ‘spirit’ and ‘mind’), both conventionally male attributes. He begins his long series of articles stating that she is ‘one of the greatest minds in the entire modern world literature’. Still, this is again implicitly a male quality, to which she adds ‘a woman’s fine instinct and light touch’. When he gets to the seventh part in his series, he comments on her private life, and finds that her portrait demonstrates the same ‘aand’ (‘mind’, ‘spirit’) that is found in her books, as well as a ‘motherly physiognomy’.43 One of the few who does not really bother much with her hands and her housewifeliness is the editor of the very early textbook version of Amos Barton (1885), H. Wesenberg, ‘adjunkt’ (BA), who writes a preface focusing solely on her professional sides. Her chosen pseudonym is associated with that of George Sand, which is a different sort of company from that which she usually keeps in Norway, and she is declared to be ‘unanimously thought of as the most important modern English writer of fiction’. This does not mean that this view was unanimous among Norwegian upper-secondary schoolteachers. On the contrary, his edition of AmB is motivated by the omission of Eliot from Jakob Løkke’s much-used textbook, Engelske Forfattere (English authors) (1875). Wesenberg made up for the omission by providing young Norwegian students with the complete English text of the story, with notes. The few recent commentators also confirm Eliot’s ethical perspective and solid status. The occasion for a 2007 book review is rather odd – an American pirate print-on-demand publication of Eliot’s essays in Nathan Sheppard’s 1883 selection – but still, the critic argues well for Eliot’s relevance to modern literary debates on the role of realism (Mollerin 2007). In a longer feature article of the same year, the writer reminds his readers that Eliot was ‘the best, the clearest head of all England’s novelists, regardless of gender, regardless of period’.44 A left-wing newspaper presents her as a female thinker who chose fiction as a medium of expression (Kulås 2005). Still, critics and scholars now write about Eliot with less enthusiasm than they did a century ago. There are two observations to be made about Norwegian patterns of Eliot reception. First, the timeline shows a concentration of activity in the early period, and great holes for large parts of the twentieth century, when most decades have no translations or significant criticism. Only in literary histories and in university curricula (represented by Masters’ theses) does she make her presence felt throughout the century. Norwegian Eliot reception is enthusiastic, but fickle. Second, the Norwegian image of Eliot was more multifaceted in earlier phases. She has not been a country voice since Aasen’s 1861 translation (1912) and Rytter’s Amos Barton (1919); she has not been a feminist voice

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‘største aander i hele den moderne verdenslitteratur’; ‘kvindens fine instinkt og lette haand’; ‘et moderligt fysiognomi’ (Hans Tambs-Lyche, ‘George Eliot’, Kringsjaa, Kristiania, 1894, pp. 337 and 843). 44 ‘Det beste, det klareste hodet blant alle Englands romanforfattere, uansett kjønn, uansett tidsepoke’ (Knut Narvesen, ‘Highgate kirkegård, London: en fortelling om vennskap og kjærlighet i George Eliots 184. år’, Bokvennen, Oslo, 9.1 (2007): 45).

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George Eliot in Norway: The Enthusiasm that Petered Out   153 since Storm’s Janets Anger (1896); she has not been ‘modern’ since Wesenberg (1885). Norwegian scholars, critics and translators mostly agree that she is a moral pillar, a voice of wisdom and even faith. As such, she is an enduring paradox.

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Part 2 Southern Europe

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7



The Reception of George Eliot in France Alain Jumeau

The story of the reception of George Eliot in France seems to have been already told by the American scholar John Philip Couch, whose book George Eliot in France was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1967. Considering that his book is well researched and well documented, it is tempting simply to refer to it. It is supposed to cover about a century of criticism – the subtitle being ‘A French Appraisal of George Eliot’s Writings, 1858–1960’ – but in fact it ends much earlier than 1960, before World War II, around 1939. Many years have elapsed since then, and we may reasonably suppose that, although many of Couch’s remarks are still valid and relevant today, the reception of George Eliot has changed as significantly in France as in English-speaking countries in recent decades. Therefore, this chapter will be divided chronologically, the first part (1860– 1939) being derived from Couch’s research, and the second part (1945 to the present) being based on more recent research. Part I: From 1860 to 1939 First reactions It is important to remember the historical context of the publication of George Eliot’s first novels. They were introduced to the French reading public at a very awkward moment, when the tastes of the Second Empire were particularly conservative, not to say philistine, to use the critical concept of Matthew Arnold. And, to begin with, there were few perceptive critics to point out their qualities and their modernity. The famous French critic Hippolyte Taine started writing his Notes sur l’Angleterre (Notes on England) in the early 1860s, although the book did not come out until 1872. There he declared that Eliot had ‘genius’1 (1872, 97) and made many references to her characters, ‘but his main interest in her work is apparently for the documentation which her 1 ‘génie’.

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158   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe novels give him for his insights into the Anglo-Saxon temperament’ (Couch 1967, 3). One of the early commentators, Léo Quesnel, suggested in a review article published in 1873 in the Revue Bleue (Blue Review) that Eliot was a novelist for philosophers and scientists: ‘In her novels, George Eliot would be the proper novelist for philosophers and learned men, if learned men and philosophers formed the ordinary reading public of the novelist’2 (20). This pronouncement permanently affected her reputation. If a novelist like Dickens was undoubtedly popular, Eliot was long regarded in France as a novelist for the intellectual elite (Couch 1967, 35). Montégut and Schérer Among the early critics, two deserve special attention because of their perceptive and sympathetic articles: Émile Montégut, who wrote for the conservative Revue des Deux Mondes (Review of the Two Worlds), and Edmond Schérer, who wrote for Le Temps (Time), an extremely liberal newspaper, whose articles were reproduced in volume form. Montégut welcomes Eliot’s realism after the publication of SCL and AB, and in 1883 he publishes a general study of her novels in two parts, ‘Esquisses littéraires: George Eliot: I. L’Âme et le talent; II. Les Œuvres et la doctrine morale’ (‘Literary sketches: George Eliot: 1. Her mind and talent; 2. Her works and moral doctrine’), which Couch considers ‘the finest study on the novelist to be published in France in the nineteenth century’ (1967, 57). There Montégut praises the novelist for ‘maintaining an almost perfect equilibrium between art and ideas’ (Couch 1967, 57). He is particularly receptive to her doctrine of sympathy and what he calls her ‘intelligent heart’.3 Noting the influence of Walter Scott on Eliot, he describes her novels as historical novels (Couch 1967, 63). Like most English critics of the time, he prefers the early novels to the later ones and he is baffled by the complex structure of M: ‘Of all George Eliot’s novels, M is, according to us, the most faulty and the most confused. We confess that we do not grasp its meaning clearly.’4 As for Edmond Schérer, he is indignant that his countrymen should be ignorant of the existence of the leading English novelist of the time: ‘Yet George Eliot is the first novelist of England, his publications being regarded as important literary events, and his talent, far from exhausting itself, seems

2

‘George Eliot, dans ses romans, serait le digne romancier des philosophes et des savants, si savants et philosophes formaient le public ordinaire du romancier.’ 3 ‘Le cœur intelligent’ (Émile Montégut, ‘Esquisses littéraires: George Eliot; I. L’Âme et le talent’, Revue des Deux Mondes, Paris, 3.16 (1 March 1883): 92). 4 ‘De tous les romans de George Eliot, M est à notre avis le plus défectueux et le plus confus. Nous déclarons ne pas en saisir nettement le sens’ (Émile Montégut, ‘Esquisses littéraires: George Eliot; II. Les Œuvres et la doctrine morale’, Revue des Deux Mondes, Paris, 3.16 (15 March 1883): 337).

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The Reception of George Eliot in France   159 in each new production to become more varied and more vigorous.’5 Schérer has a great admiration for AB, MF, SM and, contrary to Montégut, even for M. Yet he is less happy with DD, where he detects a tendency to obscurity, and his comments on the character of Daniel, whom he calls ‘an unbearable Grandison’,6 show that he dislikes his excessively moral tendency. Schérer is remarkably perceptive, however, when he notices in Eliot’s work generally a rare combination of intellectual boldness and religious sensibility (Couch 1967, 81). Yet, Couch comes to a rather sad conclusion about these first two distinguished critics of George Eliot in France: ‘Unfortunately neither Montégut nor Schérer had much influence or success in creating a large and enthusiastic body of readers for their favourite novelist’ (51). Brunetière and the anti-Zola campaign The critic who successfully introduced Eliot’s novels to the French public was certainly Ferdinand Brunetière, thanks to his first seminal study in the Revue Bleue in 1881, ‘Le Naturalisme anglais: Étude sur George Eliot’ (‘English Naturalism: A study on George Eliot’), and, to a lesser extent, his articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes in the 1880s. Dissatisfied with the ugly, depressing realism of Zola, he considered Eliot’s novels ‘as a model of what the French novel could and should be by setting up the doctrine of sympathy as a prime element in the process of literary creation’ (Couch 1967, 86). Eliot was not merely useful to him in his anti-Zola campaign; indeed, he became her champion, for in her ‘he was able to find a novelist who both used some of the methods of the Naturalists and yet remained safely within the moralist camp’ (88), because of her sympathetic attitude towards the characters and the reader. Thanks to Brunetière, the sales of the French translations increased markedly and Eliot’s prestige reached a peak at the end of the century and up until World War I, although it shrank a little after 1900. The early twentieth century In the early years of the twentieth century, Eliot’s admirers, although they were still few in number, included writers and critics who would soon achieve international prominence. First came the thinkers, like Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

5

‘Cependant George Eliot est le premier romancier de l’Angleterre, ses ouvrages y sont regardés comme autant d’événements littéraires, et son talent, bien loin de s’épuiser, semble, dans chaque production nouvelle, se montrer plus varié et plus vigoureux’ (Edmond Schérer, ‘George Eliot’, in Études critiques sur la littérature contemporaine (Paris: Michel Levy, 1863), p. 17). 6 ‘[Un] insupportable Grandisson [sic]’ (Edmond Schérer, ‘Daniel Deronda par George Eliot’, in Études sur la littérature contemporaine (Paris: Michel Levy, 1878), p. 299).

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160   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe (1857–1939), the philosopher and sociologist, and Henri Bergson (1859– 1941), the philosopher. Lévy-Bruhl was first drawn to the novelist because of her connections with Comte and Spencer. In an article published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1892, ‘Le Roman contemporain et le Naturalisme en Allemagne’ (‘The contemporary novel and Naturalism in Germany’), he showed his personal interest in the thinkers who helped to shape Eliot’s mind before she became a novelist. In Bergson’s published works there is no direct reference to Eliot’s novels, but we may suppose that he had read them, for English was a kind of mother tongue to him and the French writer and critic Jean Paulhan (1941, 67) is positive that he was acquainted with them. This might explain why his meditation on time has close affinities with Eliot’s. Then, among the Victorian novelist’s admirers, we find a variety of critics: Henri Bremond, a Roman Catholic priest writing on Eliot’s religion in the Revue des Deux Mondes (1906); Louis Chaffurin publishing articles in 1910 and 1920;7 and also Émile Hovelaque, who annotated Pages Choisies (Selected) from Eliot (Eliot 1909), focusing more on the novelist’s moral inspiration than on her art. That was at the time when Silas Marner was often chosen, among other English texts, for study in secondary schools in France, together with extracts from the first books of MF.8 George Eliot was seen as a ‘safe’ novelist; a dubious recommendation for an artist. Father Bremond insisted on Eliot’s doctrine of sympathy as a bright remnant of Christianity in her work. He was then one of the few admirers in France of M, an unduly neglected novel, according to him. Chaffurin does not deserve much attention, for he focuses on the novelist’s sentimental life, which he sees as ‘a series of frustrated attempts to find a lover’ (Couch 1967, 146). A third category of admirers consisted of writers and critics linked with Gallimard’s newly founded review, the Nouvelle Revue Française (New French Review): Gide, Proust, Thibaudet, du Bos, and so on. Gide was much more interested in Dickens than in Eliot, but there is an entry in his journal, written in 1894 at Neuchâtel, where he feels that her works, as well as Dickens’s, are worth re-reading: ‘Each autumn, I would read Dickens, Turgenev or Eliot.’9 For his part, Proust knew at least five of her novels, in translation – SCL, AB, MF, SM and M – and had a marked preference for MF (Couch 1967, 150). In a letter of 1910 to his friend Robert de Billy, he says, ‘No literature has the same power on me as English or American literature. Germany, Italy, and very often France leave me indifferent. But two pages of MF make me cry.’10 Proust shared Eliot’s sense of the charm of nature, of social structure, of

7

‘Les Idées morales et religieuses de George Eliot’ (‘George Eliot’s Moral and Religious Ideas’) (1910); ‘Les Amours de George Eliot’ (‘George Eliot’s Loves’) (1920). 8 See bibliography for a full list of French language editions of Eliot’s works. 9  ‘Chaque automne aussi je lisais Dickens, Tourgéneff ou Eliot’ (André Gide, Journal 1889–1939 (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), p. 51). 10 ‘[I]l n’y a pas de littérature qui ait sur moi un pouvoir comparable à la littérature

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The Reception of George Eliot in France   161 the mystery surrounding human life and, above all, of the importance of time and memory. ‘George Eliot undoubtedly supplied some of the raw material for À la Recherche du temps perdu, but whatever Proust took from her he made his own, fitting it into his radically different conception of art’ (Couch 1967, 156–57). Albert Thibaudet, one of the best French critics of the 1920s and 1930s, who wrote on Eliot in the Nouvelle Revue Française,11 perceived in Eliot’s novels typically Bergsonian patterns of time and memory that must have attracted Proust. ‘What most distinguishes Thibaudet’s method is his emphasis on George Eliot’s capacities as an artist always in control of her technique’ (Couch 1967, 160). A last admirer of Eliot during this period was Charles du Bos, who, long before his return to the Catholic faith in 1927, regarded her as a kind of moral or spiritual director, celebrating her doctrine of sympathy. Eliot’s reputation before World War II In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Eliot was the subject of three full-length studies. E. J. Pond’s 1927 book, Les idées morales et religieuses de George Eliot (George Eliot’s moral and religious ideas), is the work of a fervent admirer of the novelist who indulges too often in enthusiastic exclamations relating to the sentimental scenes in the novels. Émilie and Georges Romieu’s biography, La Vie de George Eliot (The life of George Eliot) (1930), is a peculiar interpretation of the novelist’s life, where she appears as ‘a sad, persecuted creature who finds herself irretrievably caught up in a tortuous liaison with the scamp George Henry Lewes’ (Couch 1967, 165). Pierre Bourl’honne’s 1933 biography, George Eliot: Essai de biographie intellectuelle et morale (George Eliot: An essay in intellectual and moral biography) is even worse, its main idea being that ‘George Eliot remained both immature and unstable, and then that her creative activity began as a form of expiation for the sinfulness of her attachment to Lewes’ (Couch 1967, 165). These three studies are superficial and they did not contribute much to improve the reputation of Eliot in France. Fortunately, a few years before them, in 1923, Madeleine Cazamian published her brilliant thesis, Le Roman et les idées en Angleterre (The novel and ideas in England), which contained a very interesting section of about 80 pages on George Eliot. This was the first scholarly work published in France to deal with the novelist, covering her theories as well as her art. Cazamian shows her enthusiasm for M, which she

anglaise ou américaine. L’Allemagne, l’Italie, bien souvent la France, me laissent indifférent. Mais deux pages du Moulin sur la Floss me font pleurer’ (Robert de Billy, ‘Une amitié de trente-deux ans’, in ‘Hommage à Marcel Proust’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, Paris (January 1923): 38). 11 ‘Le Centenaire de George Eliot’ (‘The centenary of George Eliot’) (1920); ‘Réflexions sur la littérature : Du roman anglais’ (‘Reflections on literature: On the English novel’) (1921).

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162   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe sees as the novelist’s triumph as both artist and thinker, and she is confident that the novelist’s reputation, then at its lowest in England, would soon increase (Couch 1967, 164). Still, Couch’s general study on George Eliot’s early reception in France (until the 1960s) comes to a rather sad conclusion: ‘In many respects George Eliot since 1900 has lost rather than gained ground in France’ (168). Fortunately, things have changed much in the intervening decades. Part II: From 1945 to the Present Couch gives us just one example of post-1945 reactions to George Eliot, which might serve here as a transition. He notices that the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre discusses MF in L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism and humanism), first published in French in 1946 though written earlier, during the war. However, as Couch very sensibly comments, ‘this in no way classifies him as an avid champion or admirer of her works’ (1967, 164). Simone de Beauvoir Even within his own chronological limits, Couch might have made a fuller investigation into this strange reference, which seems to be unique in the work of the French philosopher. How did Sartre come to read Eliot, and why this particular novel? We do not know for sure, but we may guess that he was introduced to the novelist by his companion, Simone de Beauvoir, who felt that George Eliot was a sister-spirit and regarded MF as a major literary inspiration in her life. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter,12 she recounts the story of her first contact with Eliot’s fiction. While she was still at school, her mother bought her a copy of AB, regarding it as ‘safe reading’ for the holidays. At first, the young girl found it a rather dull story, and she was plodding through it, when ‘Suddenly, after a walk through a wood, the heroine – who was not married – found herself with child. My heart began to pound: heaven forbid that Mama should read this book!’ (1973, 111).13 Once she had tasted the forbidden fruit, in her adolescent crisis, she went on to read MF, an experience that was a real epiphany for her: About this time I read a novel which seemed to me to translate my spiritual exile into words: George Eliot’s MF […] I read it in English […] Maggie Tulliver, like myself, was torn between others and herself: I recognized myself in her […] It was

12

13

First published in French as Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (1958). ‘Soudain, à la suite d’une promenade dans un bois, l’héroïne – qui n’était pas mariée – se trouvait enceinte. Mon cœur se mit à battre à grands coups: pourvu que maman ne lise pas ce livre!’ (Simone de Beauvoir, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1958), p. 153).

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The Reception of George Eliot in France   163 when she went back to the old mill, when she was misunderstood, calumniated, and abandoned by everyone that I felt my heart blaze with sympathy for her […] I resembled her and henceforth I saw my isolation not as proof of infamy but as a sign of my uniqueness. I couldn’t see myself dying of solitude. Through the heroine, I identified myself with the author: one day other adolescents would bathe with their tears a novel in which I would tell my own sad story. (1973, 140).14

Even if we detect a touch of self-irony in the last sentence, which probably reflects the mature opinion of the adult writer looking back upon her teenage years, it is quite clear that Eliot was a decisive influence on Beauvoir, because she made her aware of the isolation and harassment of the heroine in a man-made world, of the double standard prevailing in the patriarchal system and, quite simply, of the difficulty of being a woman. Thus Beauvoir, highly regarded in France as one of the major influences in the field of women’s studies, opened up a new critical path and helped readers to realize the originality of Eliot’s feminist inspiration. This, coinciding with a reappraisal of her work in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century (due to the critical studies of Barbara Hardy, Gillian Beer and many others), was enough to win Eliot new French readers, who were attracted by her feminism. Scholars’ studies Later on, this feminist approach had an influence on scholarly research in France, particularly on a general study by Françoise Basch on women in the Victorian novel, which includes a long section on George Eliot.15 Not all scholarly research on the novelist had a specifically feminist inspiration, but it was more or less perceptible in the doctoral theses which came next: Françoise Bolton (1978) on Eliot’s notebooks;16 Colette Caraës (1979) 14

‘Je lus à cette époque un roman qui me renvoya l’image de mon exil: Le Moulin sur la Floss de George Eliot […] Je le lus en anglais […] Maggie Tulliver était comme moi divisée entre les autres et elle-même: je me reconnus en elle […] C’est au moment où elle se retirait dans le vieux moulin, méconnue, calomniée, abondonnée de tous que je brûlai de tendresse pour elle […] Je lui ressemblais, et je vis désormais dans mon isolement non une marque d’infamie mais un signe d’élection. Je n’envisageai pas d’en mourir. À travers son héroïne, je m’identifiai à l’auteur: un jour une adolescente, une autre moi-même, tremperait de ses larmes un roman où j’aurais raconté ma propre histoire’ (1958, 196–97). 15 Originally a doctoral thesis, entitled ‘La Femme victorienne, roman et société, 1837–1867’ (‘The Victorian woman, novel and society, 1837–1867’) (1971); subsequently translated into English by Anthony Rudolf as Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel 1837–67 (1974) and also published in French as Les Femmes victoriennes: Roman et société (1837–1867) (Victorian Women: Novel and society (1837–1867) (1979). 16 ‘Les Romans de George Eliot et ses Carnets: étude du développement conjoint d’un art et d’une pensée’ (‘The novels of George Eliot: A study of the parallel development of her art and thought’), University of Paris-Sorbonne.

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164   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe on women in Eliot’s novels;17 Alain Jumeau (1987) on the relationship between author, narrator, characters and the implied reader.18 The same holds true for younger scholars who have more recently addressed various aspects of her novels: Stéphanie Drouet-Richet (2001), who worked on the gaze; Sylvie Jougan (1999) on the strategy of indirection; Marielle Seichepine (1997) on time; Maria Tang (1996) on text and texture; and Benjamine Toussaint (2002) on humanism and religion, to name a few. Eliot is now very popular among French academics and is often chosen as a topic for papers at the conference of French Victorianists, held twice a year. Many of these papers are selected for publication in Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens, published in Montpellier by the Université Paul Valéry. There is another indication of the high regard in which George Eliot is held in French universities. Every year, French academics anxiously wait to learn which works have been selected for the syllabus of the Agrégation, a national competitive examination for future teachers of English at high school and university level. And in the last 40 years, half of Eliot’s novels have been selected as set texts, alongside other great classics of English, American and Commonwealth literature, from Shakespeare to the present. AB was a set text in 1973, DD in 1985, M in 1992 and MF in both 2003 and 2004. This choice has often had an impact on the selection of several BA programmes and has spread the word that Eliot is a major writer, quite worth reading. A new response from the reading public That is probably not enough to change the attitude of the reading public generally, for the reading public relies on French translations and the early ones have not always been attractive enough to make French people rush to George Eliot’s novels. The importance of translations seems to have been underestimated by Couch (1967). Apart from M, which was translated for the first time in Paris in 1890 by someone who signed with the initials ‘M.J.M.’, and DD, which was translated a few years earlier, in 1881, by Ernest David, a Jew, the first translations of her novels were produced by Eliot’s friend in Geneva, François D’Albert-Durade (1804–1886). His AB came out in 1861, MF and SM in 1863, R in 1878 and SCL in 1884. Couch notices that the arrangement for distributing these books in Paris through agents of the Geneva publishers was inadequate, yet he claims that ‘If in the very beginning Hachette in Paris had assumed full responsibility for translating and marketing the novels, as they proposed to do in 1859, it is questionable that George Eliot would have gained 17

‘La Femme et les femmes dans les romans de George Eliot’ (‘Woman and women in the novels of George Eliot), University of Rennes. 18 ‘George Eliot, ses personnages et son lecteur: genèse d’une fiction (1857–1861)’ (‘George Eliot, her characters and her reader: The genesis of a fiction (1857– 1861)’), University of Paris-Sorbonne.

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The Reception of George Eliot in France   165 many more readers’ (1967, 181). This question, which he reserves for an appendix, is indeed essential, but he does not seem to give it the appropriate treatment. English novels translated and published by Hachette were very popular, as Dickens’s example shows quite clearly. Eliot probably made an unfortunate choice when she asked D’Albert-Durade to be her translator. He was a good friend, with a good command of English, but that was not enough. There are mistakes in his translations, which was fairly common at the time. Some of these do indeed prevent much real enjoyment of the novels, but there is worse: his dialogues are stiff, clumsy and unnatural, and they do not reflect the colloquial expressions used by Eliot’s low-class characters. It was perhaps to remedy these problems that, a century later, the French publisher Christian Bourgois asked Jean Gattégno to revise the early translation of Scenes, in 1981, and Julliard produced a similar revision of AB, done by Dominique Jean, in 1991. In 1981, Bourgois also published a better version of Albine Loisy’s translation of M, originally issued by Plon in 1951. Today, the best selection of modern translations of Eliot’s novels is to be found in the Gallimard catalogue. Four novels are currently available: SM, translated by Pierre Leyris (1966); MF (Le Moulin sur la Floss), translated by Alain Jumeau (2003); M, translated by Sylvère Monod (2005); and DD, also translated by Alain Jumeau (2010). These titles now belong to the ‘Folio Classique’ series, a paperback collection which enjoys the same popularity in France as the Oxford World’s Classics series in English-speaking countries. There is room for a new translation of Romola, to improve on D’AlbertDurade’s, which has been out of print for decades, and also for a first translation of FH, which has been undeservedly neglected, so far. The real consecration of George Eliot as a great writer would be an edition of her novels in the Gallimard Pléiade series, for to be published in this series is the supreme accolade for a writer in France. For 20 years, attempts have been made to persuade the publishers at Gallimard that, now they have published many nineteenth-century British novelists (Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, De Quincey, James, Kipling, Conrad) in the Pléiade series, it is time to think of George Eliot. Yet they do not seem ready to make the decision, mainly for commercial reasons, apparently. Conclusion Thus, we are in a paradoxical situation. Compared with her status in Englishspeaking countries, where Eliot is seen as a literary star, in France she remains a luminary of second magnitude. When Couch (1967) tries to find reasons for this situation, he suggests that her point of view remains too basically Protestant to appeal to French readers influenced by the Catholic tradition. Perhaps her reputation was affected by the anti-Zola campaign of Brunetière, who insisted on her ‘morally safe’ aspect. But Couch is right to think that these explanations do not lead us very far, apart from the fact that for a long time Eliot has had the reputation of being serious and dull. Perhaps the poor quality of the early translations is to blame.

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166   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Yet Eliot’s reputation is now changing. University teaching focuses on her great craftsmanship, on her feminist point of view, and also on her sense of comedy and humour. The most recent translations of her novels have been well received both by the critics and the reading public. Now French readers seem to receive her more warmly, and we can always hope that, one day, there will be room for her in the Pléiade series.

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8



The Reception of George Eliot in Italy: 1868 to the Present Marialuisa Bignami

There is no published study, neither complete nor partial, on the reception of George Eliot in Italy: yet we know she was read in this country from very early on, during her own lifetime. The record begins in 1868, when the first translation of one of her works was published: not surprisingly, it was R with its Italian Renaissance setting, complete with 23 etchings. Although this translation was not immediately followed by a regular publication of translations of Eliot’s works in Italian, which rather dates from the third decade of the following century (the next R was published in 1920), this early publication makes her reception in Italy a long one. The present chapter will look at both the more highbrow work conducted on her novels by critics (who will mainly prove to be academic ones) and at the more popular dissemination of her works by means of translations addressed to the general public. On this topic we shall only make one preliminary remark, that one substantial work, FH, has never been translated. We shall be using the name ‘George Eliot’ all the way through this chapter, as there is no specific trace to be found in Italy, either in translations or in criticism, of the work published early in her life, when she still used her own name of Mary Ann Evans. Going on to consider Eliot’s Italian reception in general terms, we also find that little attention has been paid by Italian scholars – nor more predictably by the general public – to her philosophical knowledge and frame of mind; the only Italian scholar to have looked at that field is Giorgio Lanaro (1990), a professor of philosophy who, in his study, rightly sees her as a presence, albeit marginal, in the reception of Auguste Comte’s philosophy in England. Lanaro’s study centres on John Stuart Mill and George Henry Lewes (of whom further below), but also mentions Eliot. The present writer also wrote briefly on George Eliot and Iris Murdoch (Bignami 2011), contributing to a conference and to the volume which is the outcome of it, a book that discusses the figure of the woman novelist-philosopher. The hundred years that lie between the two writers have changed the recognition that society accords to an intellectual woman, especially in the abstract field of philosophy: Murdoch was a professional philosopher officially associated with Oxford University (although she left this post as her career as a novelist flourished); Eliot, who had been a

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168   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe correspondent of the French positivist philosopher Auguste Comte, could go no further than the deputy-editorship of the Westminster Review, and this was sufficiently unusual as to bring her considerable notice and respect. There is no doubt about her rich encounters with books; as for personal meetings, she had encounters with Italian intellectuals when in Italy through her friendship with the family of Trollope, brother of the well-known novelist Anthony Trollope. We also know that she met Giuseppe Mazzini in London (Thompson 1998, 37, 40, 174–75) during the time she was working for the Westminster Review, where she published one of his articles. For a more detailed account of the relations of Eliot and Lewes with Italians both in England and in Italy, see the chapter in the present book by Francesca Bugliani. Further on in the present chapter, when discussing the recent monograph on Eliot by Miriam Sette, we shall come back to the issue of positivism, this time in a narrative perspective and to narrative purposes. To conclude our general remarks, we would like to add that not only do most Italian critics and translators show little interest in Eliot’s philosophy and literary criticism, but her poetry receives no attention at all. ‘George Eliot in Italy’ in the present chapter therefore coincides with the response to her creative writing in prose. In Italy the story of George Eliot the novelist began in 1868, with the publication of the first translation of R: this translated novel is included in the series ‘Il romanziere contemporaneo illustrato’ (‘Contemporary illustrated novels’) by the publishing house of Treves in Milan, and it is the work of the eclectic Gustavo Strafforello. He also translated other works for the same publisher; his competence in the English language was, up to World War II, unusual in Italy even for well-educated people. In 1891, Treves also published the first Italian book-length study on our novelist, George Eliot: la sua vita e i suoi romanzi by Gaetano Negri (George Eliot: Her Life and her Novels, reprinted by Baldini & Castoldi in Milan in 1903): thus the critical fortune of George Eliot in Italy began. This book was immediately reviewed in Britain at length, anonymously as was the custom, by Blackwood’s Magazine. This book we would like to comment on at a little length, not because it is the first one, but because it is a very intelligent work. Its author came from an upper-class Milanese family and was a leisured and well-educated man; he also became mayor of Milan and later a senator in the recently established Italian national parliament. He was obviously not a professional literary critic, although displaying a manifest sensibility for literature. He wrote on various subjects, apparently following his own intellectual taste. The most unusual of his choices was, in our view, his translation into Italian verse of the German classic of children’s literature Struwwelpeter (Slovenly Peter) under the Italian title of Pierino Porcospino, on which generations of Italian children were brought up. His range of competence in foreign languages was uncommon, at a time when the educated Italian would have known only French. Negri therefore saw it as his duty (also in view of the absence of published translations) to take up the task of translating into Italian long passages (approaching one third of the total of over 400 pages of his monograph) from George Eliot’s novels, to be interspersed with his critical analysis, because

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The Reception of George Eliot in Italy: 1868 to the Present   169 ‘sarebbe peccato non riprodurre con le sue stesse parole’ (‘it would be a pity not to reproduce her own words’) in relation to her statements about realism. His book will therefore be considered both as criticism and as translation. The Italian prose of his translations has aged, of course, if compared to the Italian language in use today, but this simply means that his language is closer to George Eliot’s English. In any case, Negri’s understanding of the original text still appears remarkably keen, especially since he insists on giving his readers not merely examples of realism, but, in particular, the positivistic philosophic foundations of her realism (as we shall soon have reason to report in his own words), as well as the outcome of her acute moral sensibility. According to Negri, Eliot was non è popolare fuori d’Inghilterra ed è quasi sconosciuta in Italia. Eppure il pensiero moderno non ha mai avuto un rappresentante più completo e più degno di lei. Nella sua mente lucida e vasta, la critica tedesca, il positivismo francese e il razionalismo inglese, a cui s’era successivamente educata, furono dominati e diretti da una feconda ispirazione di tolleranza, d’amore, di pietà, e ne è venuto fuori un’individualità profondamente originale. (Gaetano Negri, George Eliot: la sua vita e i suoi romanzi, 2 vols (Milan: Treves, 1891), p. XIX (repr. 1903, Milan: Baldini e Castoldi )) (is not popular outside Britain and next to unknown in Italy. Yet modern thought has never had a more complete and more worthy representative than herself. In her vast and resplendent mind German criticism, French positivism and English rationalism, in which she had in turn educated herself, were dominated and directed by a fruitful inspiration to tolerance, love and piety, whose outcome was a deeply original personality.)

All this comes in his Preface, which is followed in its turn by a detailed biographical chapter. Here Negri, when he reaches the year 1859 in telling Eliot’s life story, appropriately remarks that ‘Dopo la pubblicazione dell’Adam Bede, la vita di Miss Evans perde gran parte del suo interesse’ (‘After the publication of AB, Miss Evans’s life loses most of its interest’) (Negri 1891, 62), since it seems clear to him that, from that point on, Eliot’s work will draw its main inspiration from her private life, indeed her inner life and memories, rather than from what was taking place in the world around her. The chapter that comes after the biography is very simply entitled ‘L’arte’ (75, ‘The Art’). It is surprising that he should deem it appropriate to place the chapter at this point in the book, before the actual consideration and close reading of the novels themselves, which immediately follow, one chapter devoted to each. As is to be expected, the general critical chapter relies heavily on the argument of Chapter 17 in AB and it is also Negri’s first chance to offer us a long sample of his art of translation and this in view of a rather difficult abstract text. His long quotation is appropriately centred on Eliot’s statement on falsehood and truth: ‘Falsehood is so easy; truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin – the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius, is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion’ (222–23). In Negri’s words this becomes:

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170   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe è tanto facile la falsità, tanto difficile la verità. La matita è conscia di una dilettevole facilità se disegna un griffone: quanto più lunghe le unghie, più larghe le ali, tanto meglio. Ma quella meravigliosa facilità, che forse ci siamo indotti a prendere per genio, può anche abbandonarci se ci accingiamo a disegnare un vero leone, quale è in natura. (Negri 1891, 79)

Keeping in mind the fact that the Italian language is rich in polysyllables and the English in monosyllables, this essay in translation shows a remarkable facility with the choice of words since it proves only marginally longer than the original, while it does not curtail or in any way at all alter its meaning. It should also be remarked that Negri, similarly to all early translators into Italian, gives his English characters translated names. Strafforello, in his early R, goes so far as to give the author an Italian name too, ‘Giorgio Eliot’. To conclude on the above, it is worth noting that Negri goes on to praise George Eliot for having defined ‘realism’: ‘E’ questa la prima professione del realismo nell’arte che sia stata fatta, ed è ancor rimasta la più giusta, la più persuasive’ (81) (‘This is the first profession of realism in art ever made and it still remains the most correct and most persuasive’). He goes on to say, ‘Il realismo in questi ultimi trent’anni ha stranamente deviato dai suoi principi fondamentali […] è diventato un idealismo a rovescio, l’idealismo del brutto, del vizio e del delitto’ (81) (‘In the past thirty years realism has strangely deviated from its fundamental principles, it has turned into an idealism upsidedown, an idealism of the brute, of vice, and of crime’). He is here clearly alluding to French Naturalism as a stylistic category, issued, like Eliot’s artistic devices, from positivism: this is, however, an artistic movement of a kind that would not be mentioned openly by a conservative critic like Negri because of the sinful associations it evoked, with its crude and depressing narrative language, However, in Italy it gave rise to verism, whose milder realism, albeit interspersed itself with pessimism, would recall George Eliot for Negri: Se mi si chiedesse di qualificare, con una parola, l’arte di George Eliot, io dovrei servirmi di un epiteto di cui tanto oggi si abusa e risponderei che è un’arte essenzialmente verista. (77). (If I am asked to describe in one word the art of George Eliot, I would choose an epithet much abused today and reply that it is an art essentially ‘verist’.)

In order to recognize the correct critical tracks along which we are moving between English and Italian literature, it is at this point appropriate, indeed necessary, to clarify three words which we have been using which have similar, but not identical, meanings: realism, Naturalism and verism (as well as the corresponding adjectives: realistic, naturalistic and verist). On the slight differences between them the shades of literary criticism play. The first and least specific applies in general to the novel (as a narrative subgenre opposed to romance). The second belongs mainly to French literature and applies to the crudest and most outspoken texts such as works by Emile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, which could hardly be mentioned, let alone employed as paragons, outside France. The realistic narrative genre of Italy is verism, and applies to writers

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The Reception of George Eliot in Italy: 1868 to the Present   171 such as Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana and Federico De Roberto. Negri thought fit to explain to Italians Eliot’s peculiar brand of realism by the term verismo. In all cases the philosophical origin of these three modes is by general consent attributed to positivism, which school of thought Negri duly mentions: Quest’arte supremamente impersonale ed oggettiva, che non si distacca dalla verità, ma vi si afferra e vi si sprofonda con tutte le sue forze, si accompagna, in George Eliot, ad una filosofia della vita, e del mondo che ne è, anzi, l’origine prima. Noi abbiamo veduto, narrando le vicende della nostra scrittrice, come essa fosse passata dall’ascetismo, alla critica ed al positivismo. Essa fu per tutta la sua carriera intellettuale una positivista incrollabile. (84) (This supremely impersonal and objective art, that does not sever itself from truth, but rather hangs on to it and dives deep into it with all its strength, in George Eliot walks next to a philosophy of life and of the world that is rather its first origin. We have been seeing, while telling the life of our writer, how she had moved from asceticism, to criticism and to positivism. She was an unfailing positivist all through her intellectual career.)

To round up this general chapter on George Eliot’s art, Negri finishes by asking himself and his readers one final question: why is such a remarkable (‘insigne’) writer not popular outside England? He answers to his own satisfaction by invoking her Englishness, a point to which we shall return when discussing Eliot’s presence on the Italian literary scene in the late twentieth century. Negri writes: I suoi romanzi sono la riproduzione del mondo inglese […] e la riproduzione è tanto vera […] è così specifica la pittura […] che l’intero godimento dei prodotti più squisiti della sua arte non è dato che a coloro i quali vivono in quel mondo. (97) (Her novels reproduce the English world […] and the reproduction is so true-tolife […] and the picture so pertinent […] that the complete enjoyment of the most exquisite products of her art is only given to those that live in that world.)

At the same time as he separates her from modern European literary milieus, he places her next to classical authors, such as Sophocles and Virgil, who cannot themselves be completely popular, he asserts, except with those readers who can reach a complete understanding of their texts. Having brought the classics into the picture and in order to make Eliot’s worth even clearer, he then moves to connect her with two celebrated Milanese authors of the previous generation that his readers knew well: the poet Carlo Porta (1775–1821), who wrote in a sophisticated kind of Milanese dialect, and the novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873), whose choice of a Tuscan vernacular to be employed for the dialogues in his realistic novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1840) Negri compares with Eliot’s own choice of dialect. Having followed Negri through his presentation of the general issues of Eliot’s art, we shall not now dwell with him on single novels, except to remark that a short chapter is also devoted to SG, which, though written in verse, is

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172   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe nevertheless a narrative work. In addition, he wrote extensively on the difficulties engendered by the double plot of DD, which he sees as completely divided in two: ‘Daniele Deronda, – questo è il titolo del romanzo, – è il libro più strano, più bizzarro che tu possa leggere, perché consta di due racconti assolutamente distinti’ (385) (‘Daniel Deronda, – this is the title of the novel – is the strangest, most bizarre book one can read, because it is made up of two separate tales, completely asunder from one another’). He appears to be satisfied with the English plot: il romanzo di Guendalina e di Grandcourt è una meraviglia d’ispirazione, d’originalità, di finezza, d’interesse per la profondità dell’osservazione, la genialità dell’esecuzione, la poesia del sentimento. (385) (the story of Gwendolen and Grandcourt is a marvel of inspiration, of originality, of finesse, of interest and, for its depth of observation, geniality of execution, poetry of feeling.)

He is less satisfied with the Jewish plot: ‘Il poeta è stato tradito dall’utopista’ (394) (‘The poet has been misled by the utopianist’). By summing up the issue in these words, Negri means that the Jewish part of the novel is less successful in his eyes because it is ideologically loaded, indeed burdened, with an intentional and declared defence against anti-Semitism. He perceives this ideological element as a burden on the novel, whose narrative reasons seem to come second to an ideological battle which would better suit an essay. Altogether, no such deep-reaching study on Eliot is to be found in Italy before the 1980s and subsequently (when English studies in Italy – and George Eliot studies within them – reached international standing). The only exception is Mario Praz’s well-known La crisi dell’eroe nel romanzo vittoriano (1952), of which a published English edition exists (The Hero in Eclipse in the Victorian Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956). Gaetano Negri was praised by Praz in these words: ‘In his fine essay “G. Eliot, la sua vita e i suoi romanzi” he had stressed: The contrast between man’s mediocrity and the grandeur of sorrow is, to her mind, more tragic than any heroic catastrophe’ (Praz 1956, 379, n. 168). This book is considered a landmark in Victorian studies in Italy and is well known internationally. It will mark the next step in our critical history of Eliot’s presence in the Italian literary world. Negri’s own work on Eliot was concluded by a translation, published in the new century, of Eliot’s AmB. A third publication completes the picture of the reception of George Eliot in Italy in the nineteenth century: a translation published in 1882 of DD by a lawyer from Turin and a member of its Jewish community, Cesare Olivetti; he also wrote a brief introduction to it, celebrating friendship between Jews and Christians. The Jewish element of this novel was a topic of interest to Italian Jewish milieus at a time when a Jewish homeland was being planned in the Middle East for European Jews, the future hope on which the Jewish element in the novel focuses. Another very early (1907) publication, and a peculiar one, is an English edition of R carrying an introduction in English (the only one in this language

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The Reception of George Eliot in Italy: 1868 to the Present   173 of all those my researches discovered) by a Florentine librarian, Guido Biagi (1855–1925). It is unsurprising that the piece does not tackle critical issues proper, but mainly deals with library matters. Biagi does not take into consideration the finished literary quality of R, but goes so far as to say that for this ‘edition of the most classical romance of modern English literature’ he will try ‘an investigation […] of the historical foundation […] the hidden scaffolding […] the application, in short, of the Roentgen rays [X-rays]’ (Biagi 1907, 15). Using this very recently discovered scientific technique, he identifies the results of the visits that the Eliot–Lewes couple paid to the Biblioteca Magliabecchiana in Florence: their purpose had been to research Florentine history with a view to the writing of a historical novel. He even reproduces in his essay their library tickets, which could still be traced at the time of his writing. Moving now to the twentieth century, we reach the first significant sequence of translations in the 1920s and 1930s, whereas interesting critical studies arrive only much later on. The general attitude of the Italian publishers towards literature in translation during these years, which correspond to those of the Fascist regime, is caught particularly well in a recent book by Francesca Billiani (2007), whose conclusions could be usefully extended also to our author, although Billiani herself does not deal specifically with Eliot. It is to be observed, furthermore, that numerous as the Eliot translations are – the latest, of AB, was published in July 2011 – the Italian publishing industry has never thought fit to produce a complete Italian edition of Eliot’s works, while such editions of other major foreign authors are to be found on the Italian bookmarket. Nor is she included in prestigious series such as, for instance, Mondadori’s I Meridiani – a surprising omission given her international standing. Continuing with our overview, next to some 15 competent translations published in the first half of the twentieth century, it should be observed that, spread over some 140 years (thus long has Eliot been known in Italy), there are only five or six significant critical monographs on her, plus a mere handful of significant essays. Moreover, in accordance with the Italian tradition of studies on men and women of letters, there are no biographies proper, but biographical material is rather included by authors in critical monographs, where it is usually supplied simply as a tool, either for readers’ information, or as a support for critical analysis. Another possible topic of investigation, which is often found fruitful in reception surveys, proves in this case disappointing. Hardly any Italian writer has shown any creative interest in Eliot’s narrations as models and sources of inspiration – again, unlike the interest that has been shown towards other foreign authors such as Dickens. In short, there are no rewrites or imitations, or even obvious echoes of Eliot’s novels to be found in Italy. A peculiar publication from the period between the two world wars deserves separate mention: it is an expurgated rewriting of MF, which nonetheless keeps the original title – for marketing reasons, it is to be supposed. It is stripped of all possible ‘sinful’ hints, as well as of anything which may bring the reader to suspect Maggie Tulliver of intellectual activity: gone are the books read by the child Maggie and mentioned in Chapter 3, together with those that marked

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174   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe her relation as a young woman with Philip Wakem, and of course the boat trip with Stephen Guest. The novel is ‘narrato’ (‘told’) in his own words by the very minor man of letters Francesco Perri, and was published in 1935 by UTET of Turin in its youthful series, now discontinued, ‘La scala d’oro’ (‘The Golden Steps’). This series, next to original Italian books, contained many works in translation; it consisted of eight ‘steps’, each offering books fit for a specific age. Young readers from 8 to 13 could therefore move from one step to the next, which in the accompanying illustration combine to make an elegant sweeping staircase of reading matter as they grew up. MF is understandably included in the most adult – the 13-year-old – bracket, and it is gracefully told, although the original text is lost, so there is no point in comparing the two languages. The book, abundantly illustrated, is clearly addressed to young ladies, for whose consumption those episodes that define Maggie as a mature being even when very young get brutally cut out. The result is the only case of an Eliot publication shortened for reasons of censorship, although in the past, translations in general were often ‘clipped’ to make them reach the market at a lower price. Over the years, the same publisher UTET also produced a number of full-text Eliot translations, but none of MF, clearly considered fit only for the youthful market. The fact that it is included in a very popular series addressed to the vast youthful market has made this novel by far the best known by the general public in Italy. Eliot’s novels have also been a regular presence in university courses in English and one of them has occasionally been a set text for secondary school students. Besides marking the beginning of serious translation work, the 1920s and 1930s also witnessed a change in the attitude of the Italian cultural class to British authors, a deeper one than the mere issue of translation. This is due to the establishment of professional English studies in Italy at university level, mainly under the influence of Mario Praz, the first to hold a chair in English Literature (in the University of Rome). The first edition of his Storia della letteratura inglese (History of English Literature) was published by Sansoni in Florence as early as 1936; it had much enlarged further editions in 1960 and 1979, and proved a textbook on which generations of Italian Anglicists were formed – the present writer not excluded. As far as Eliot is concerned, the pertinent study from Praz’s pen is La crisi dell’eroe (Praz 1952; Praz 1956), whose merit it is to have tackled the literature of the central part of the nineteenth century, with the author’s suggestion that the term ‘Victorian’ be employed as English for what in the rest of Europe would be termed ‘Biedermeier’; this appears to be perfectly in agreement with Gaetano Negri’s ideology, hence the praise for his book on Praz’s part: Gaetano Negri, in his fine essay ‘G. Eliot, la sua vita e i suoi romanzi’, Milan 1903, vol. I, p. 143, had stressed: ‘The general assumption of the book is that after the Romantic period and before the decadent years, a season of novels characterized by a middle-class ideological attitude develops in Britain, which can appropriately be called “Biedermeier”, or “Victorian”’.

Given these premises, that is to say the unheroic quality of narrations by the foursome Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and Eliot, Praz’s opinion of George

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The Reception of George Eliot in Italy: 1868 to the Present   175 Eliot would inevitably be of a novelist with limited creative abilities: ‘La Eliot, come Thackeray, non cerca i suoi personaggi tra le creature d’eccezione, gli eroi’ (Praz 1952, 298) (‘George Eliot, like Thackeray, does not seek her characters amongst exceptional beings, among heroes’, Praz 1956, 319). ‘Amos Barton […] è un vicario di Wakefield tradotto in termini di un’età più borghese e più grigia che non fosse il Settecento’ (Praz 1952, 300) (‘Amos Barton […] is a Vicar of Wakefield translated into the terms of a more bourgeois, a duller age than the eighteenth century was’, Praz 1956, 321); and, summing up his thought, ‘si trova d’accordo col Thackeray e col Trollope, in breve con la concezione Biedermeier delle umane possibilità’ (Praz 1952, 313) (‘She finds herself in agreement with Thackeray and Trollope, with – in short – the Biedermeier conception of human possibilities’, Praz 1956, 335). Yet, whether one does or does not share Praz’s critical assumptions, this book proves to be in any case an original study. Much less original was the monograph by the academic critic Pietro de Logu, La narrativa di George Eliot (George Eliot’s fiction, 1969): it turns out to be what it was evidently meant for, that is to say a handbook for the use of students rather than a work of original research. Considering when it was written, it is a competent and up-to-date presentation of existing Englishlanguage criticism, with a very useful and well-considered initial chapter on Eliot’s intellectual biography. Nor is anything new on Eliot added to general knowledge by the Sicilian novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (otherwise a far more sensitive critic) in that peculiar sort of English literary history which he wrote, but never published, for the private benefit of the young men who were his pupil-friends in Palermo in the 1950s. The piece was much later published by Mondadori in the volume of the series which Meridiani dedicated to him (Tomasi 1990). Moving closer to our own time, Francesco Marroni’s Una verità difficile (A Difficult Truth, 1980) is interesting in its perceptive attention to British criticism, but, at the same time, is rather personal in outlook, coming as it does from a scholar who over the years has been working on Eliot and the texture of her language, aiming to find the exact location of her narrations on the cultural-historical map of Victorian literature. In his more general research on the Victorians, Marroni has since 1996 been editor of the journal that founded something of a school at the University of Pescara, as well as editing since 1996 the Rivista di Studi Vittoriani (Review of Victorian studies). He personally produced both this book and a number of essays on George Eliot and is also one of the few Italian scholars – together with Clotilde de Stasio (1982, 62–64) – to have written on FH, a novel that has generally raised little interest on the Italian scene, to the point of never being translated into Italian. This work did not reap consideration even in the years – the 1960s and 1970s – in which, taking their lead from Raymond Williams, Italian critics of a Marxist hue working in the field of English literature were writing on Dickens’s social issues. Going back to the general opinion expressed by Gaetano Negri on Eliot’s novels with which we began the present review, our suggestion is that FH, more than any of Eliot’s other novels, is too specifically English in its radicalism to appeal to even sociallyconscious foreign critics.

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176   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Another book originating from the same Pescara group that works with Francesco Marroni in the field of Victorian studies is George Eliot: il corpo della passione. Aspetti della corporeità nella narrative dell’ultima fase (George Eliot: The Body of Passions. Aspects of Corporeality in her Later Novels) by Miriam Sette (2004), which begins to set its critical climate by positing ‘tutta la realtà umana entro un orizzonte naturale e terreno […] [con] quel lento processo scientifico-filosofico di laicizzazione e naturalizzazione delle funzioni naturali umane’ (19) (‘the whole of human reality within a natural and earthly perspective’). The book deals with the notions of ‘nature’ and ‘body’ as derived from Comte’s positivistic philosophy, hinging on the fact that ‘l’uomo non è pura essenza spirituale, incarnazione dell’Idea, razionalità astratta, è anzitutto un essere che vive, che soffre e gioisce, che avverte bisogni e soddisfazioni’ (Sette 2004, 40) (‘a human being is not a pure spiritual essence, an incarnation of the Idea, abstract rationality; it is first of all a living being, suffering and rejoicing, perceiving needs and the satisfaction thereof ’). These philosophical premises, from Plato to Erasmus to the vitalists, make up the ground in which Eliot’s way of thinking sinks its roots. This is in the introductory, theoretical chapter which is followed by one chapter dedicated to M and one to DD, in an attempt at specifying the above-mentioned philosophical premises by close reading of the texts, with reference in particular to the characters of Lydgate, Dorothea and Ladislaw in M. In the meantime, in 1994, Luisa Villa had written and published the volume Riscrivendo il conflitto. Indagine sull’incidenza del genere nella narrativa di George Eliot (Rewriting the Conflict. An Inquiry into the Importance and Function of Gender in George Eliot’s Fiction). This study is intended as an enquiry into the possibilities that a ‘feminist’ reading might yield new meanings to the general critical opinion on Eliot’s fiction. Villa states in her Preface that she will follow specific feminist thinkers and critics: the Italian ‘Diotima’ group (NOMI) as well as French and American psychoanalysts, such as Maria Torok, Janine Chasseguet, Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin. Under their guidance, but also taking her lead from the best Eliot criticism available internationally, Villa lines up the pairs that act out the various plots (but are not sexual couples), such as Lydgate and Dorothea as well as Deronda and Gwendolen, to show Eliot’s fundamental ideology in which differences, both of gender and of class, are preserved. This is due to ‘the impotence of women towards modifying the world (that is to say the typically Victorian absence of a public vocation for women) to turn themselves into a paradigm of individual destinies’ (‘l’impotenza del femminile a modificare il mondo (cioè la vittoriana assenza di vocazione pubblica per la donna) a farsi paradigma del destino individuale’) (Villa 1994, 208). One may or may not share the tenets of such an exclusively feminist approach, but there is no doubt that this book offers an original reading. What remain to be discussed are Franco Marucci’s works, as well as a few major essays by various critics – both essays that give a general view of Eliot issues (such as Pisapia’s 1967 essay on George Eliot and Henry James), and essays regarding particular works (such as Bugliani on R). Although some of the latter essays are in themselves excellent, their concern is not always with the Italian theme: they rather belong to an international critical scene. For

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The Reception of George Eliot in Italy: 1868 to the Present   177 instance, the essay by Ady Mineo (1995) on Dorothea Brooke’s stay in Rome in M gives a very good idea of the heroine’s predicament: she is on her own, away from home and friends, in the company of a very cold husband, but all this, as far as the critic is concerned, could take place in any city in the world – it just happens to be Rome. As for Marucci, in his very ample literary history he gives us a text which combines exhaustiveness about the Victorian literary scene with in-depth analysis of particular authors and works: to Eliot he dedicates some 170 pages (the length of a monograph in itself), almost 20 of which concern R. Eleven pages are devoted to LV, to which he declares himself very partial, it being the only one among Eliot’s narratives written in the first person. He went on to write two more essays on this story (Marucci 2002), which is currently receiving much attention in English criticism for its investigation of the novella’s medical and psychological dimensions. The present book continues the contributions of both Marucci and Bugliani, as well as my own, now in a fully international context.

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9



Romola on Home Ground: Then and Now Franco Marucci

R outdistances any other historical novel written in English and entirely set in Italy in any period. I am equally sure that no other historical novel was the result of such thorough and painstaking preparation. It is estimated that Eliot read or consulted nearly 60 books, and that another 30 left an imprint of a variable extent on the novel. In recent decades, R has acquired the international status of a major Eliot novel, as is witnessed by a few lengthy books exclusively devoted to it; but it found very few convinced supporters and estimators among its contemporaries, and rapidly fell into critical decline. And Italy was no exception. The first book on George Eliot to be published in Italy was written in 1903 by Gaetano Negri, a Milanese intellectual: George Eliot la sua Vita e i suoi romanzi. This book, with its 436 thickly printed pages, is at least remarkable for its size. It is even more remarkable because Eliot was at the time almost unknown in Italy. Negri’s premise is that Eliot’s art is primarily ‘verista’, a term normally applied to the Italian literature of the mid- and late nineteenth century, with Giuseppe Verga as the most prominent and representative fin-de-siècle Italian writer of this literary genre. Verismo may be defined as a cruder or intensified form of realism and Naturalism. It may be thought inappropriate to Eliot’s and indeed Victorian literary art; Negri, however, states that Eliot’s verismo must be intended as, mainly, a psychological technique. Incidentally (99–100), he compares the linguistic strategies of George Eliot and Alessandro Manzoni. Manzoni insisted, like Wordsworth, that dialogue should reproduce the language really spoken by men, and that it should be, as it were, an echo of ‘the lips of the people’ (99); but he finally gave his characters, people from Lombardy, improbable Florentine vocabulary and pronunciation. Eliot went one better, Negri says, and had Adam Bede’s mother speak in Staffordshire dialect. References to Manzoni, the greatest Italian Romantic, punctuate Negri’s book, which was written too early to take note of another parallel. Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po), is a much later (1975) historical novel by the outstanding Italian writer Riccardo Bacchelli. I do not think, however, that Bacchelli was aware of The Mill on the Floss; nor is there any similarity of plot between the two novels. Negri was the first to implant in Italy a widespread outlook and an interpretative cliché, as it was becoming – that is, that in Eliot’s career SM ends

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Romola on Home Ground: Then and Now   179 a cycle of undisputed masterpieces, while after that short novel the ‘strong spur’ of inspiration – as Hopkins described it – wanes. R, obviously, has a whole chapter in Negri’s book, but unlike other novels it receives short shrift. The space devoted to commentary is further shortened by the number of extensive quotations given in translation. R, he says, opens Eliot’s second phase, that of novels which did not come out of her pen ‘spontaneously’, but rather were ‘laboriously planned and executed’. He defines R as an ‘archaeological museum’ rather than the ‘truth of life’.1 It is a ‘heavy book’ (‘un libro pesante’, 235). As we read on, Negri becomes frankly dismissive. It contradicts, for Negri, the verismo he finds in her other fiction; dialogue is artificial rather than natural, and we get tired hearing the Florentine characters speak for hours of things everyone knew in those days – and this is done by Eliot for the sheer love of erudition. Her ‘sense of wonder’ (‘il senso dell’incanto’, 236) has irremediably gone, a judgement which will be echoed by subsequent critics. For such failings Negri blames George Lewes: he should have advised his partner to desist. Negri cites the strange case of Alessandro Manzoni, the author of The Betrothed, who, in a ‘dissertation’ on the historical novel (1830), as Negri calls it, dissuaded other writers from writing historical novels. In Manzoni’s pregnant and yet self-contradictory argument, the historical novelist often finds himself reduced ‘to throw into a single composition both the original and the portrait’ (238).2 He judged negatively all literary works that were not based on ‘truth’, thus condemning his own novel and attributing moral legitimacy only to historiography. In his treatment of characters in R, Negri unpredictably spares Tito Melema as real and living, unlike Savonarola and Romola herself, who is defined as a ‘most beautiful statue’ (‘una bellissima statua’, 240). Eliot successfully showed Tito’s moral disintegration and the gradual silencing of his conscience. A decade later, Eliot received half this space in a book by Emilia Bassi entitled Medaglioni letterari: La vita e le opere di Jane Austen e George Eliot; Studî inglesi di Emilia Bassi (Literary portraits: the life and works of Jane Austen and George Eliot: English essays by Emilia Bassi) (1914). Each part, accurately balanced, opens with a biographical chapter followed by sketchy, impressionistic and rhapsodic readings of the novels of the two authoresses. In the introduction, Bassi remembers Signor Brezzi’s lessons of Italian, Eliot’s love of the Italian language for its nuances and emphases and her infatuation for Tasso and Pellico. Bassi does not refrain from a veiled reservation about the ‘ethic value of her conduct’ and the ‘free liaison’ (‘libera unione’, 111) with Lewes. In the wake of Gaetano Negri, Bassi posits, after AB and SM, a new theoretical and didactic orientation in Eliot’s fiction; she repeats Negri’s diagnosis almost verbatim, that ‘all the sense of wonder’ (‘tutto l’incanto’, 138) is lost. Only four pages concern R (138–42). Bassi merely registers the strong, and sometimes pedantic reservations of eminent Victorians about the novel. Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf ’s father, disliked for example the frequency with which Eliot mentions the archaic Italian word ‘scarsella’ (scrip). Romola 1 2

‘Un museo d’archeologia piu’ assai che la verita’ della vita’. ‘di mettere in una sola composizione l’originale e il ritratto’.

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180   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe is found statuesque – echoing Negri – and majestic, but less appealing than Maggie Tulliver. The erudite, pedantic and academic element, she says (141), takes the upper hand. No survey of the Italian reception of George Eliot, and therefore of R, could afford to bypass the wide-ranging Eliot chapter in Mario Praz’s epochmaking La crisi dell’eroe nel romanzo vittoriano. This book, originally published in Italian in 1952 and reprinted several times, was translated into English by Angus Davidson in 1956 and published by Oxford University Press as The Hero in Eclipse. For this reason it is, or was, well known to many Victorian scholars, although it already appeared slightly old-fashioned at the time of publication. All quotations in this chapter are taken from the 1969 reprint of the 1956 edition. Praz’s chapter is highly typical, since it highlights the critic’s proverbial relish for subtracting specificity from the texts he studies and for making them resemble someone else’s work: an idiosyncrasy which frustrates indefinitely the reader’s search for fixed points of reference. Maybe we have rather forgotten this critical procedure which renders Praz unique: a constant effort to find ‘affinities’ between writers, and also of course differences, and to read literary works in terms of ‘things they have in common’ (see for instance 371). This has something to do with Mallarmé’s idea of literature as a great Book, and with his dictum that in literature nothing after all is really new. Praz has no rival when it comes to making parallels between literature and painting; his impressionism is convincing in many cases, debatable or preposterous in others. Yet no other twentieth-century critic had such fine and sophisticated sensibility. The Eliot chapter in Praz’s The Hero in Eclipse is thematic rather than chronological. Praz elects a few motifs or human types and discusses their occurrences and recurrences in Eliot’s œuvre. His general thesis – that Victorian literature belongs to Wordsworth’s democratic tradition and to the European Biedermeier – includes George Eliot as well. And R? Detailed analyses are devoted, in this chapter, to Eliot’s established masterpieces, but there are only scattered references to this novel, no more than four or five, seldom longer than a sentence or a paragraph. I mention three: 1) Romola, like other female roles, is a stylized character, Praz maintains, and corresponds to ‘the cliché of the Victorian angel-woman’ (339). I find this debatable and unconvincing. It is an assertion that rests on the scene of the mountain village decimated by the plague (Chapter 61, part 3 of the novel), where Romola is taken by the villagers for an actual apparition of the Virgin. 2) Tito Melema is, with others, an example of the stifling of the ‘germ of goodness’, and as such of ‘the gradual debasement of the soul’ (346). Melema receives a page-long treatment, which is, however, a mere paraphrase of parts of the novel where he appears, though the parallels with similar cases of ‘moral transformation’ (349), such as those in Hawthorne’s Ethan Brand and The Marble Faun, undoubtedly hit the mark. 3) The failings of R as a story serve to bring home Praz’s thesis that on the whole the nature of Eliot’s ‘inventive imagination’ was ‘limited’ (365). R, as I said, is by far the least treated Eliot novel in Praz’s book; and because of this fragmentary and rhapsodic treatment, and the lack of any organized and

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Romola on Home Ground: Then and Now   181 comprehensive presentation, it is impossible to say what Praz really thought about it. I now come to, perhaps, the most outstanding book ever devoted to George Eliot by an Italian critic: Maria Tosello’s Le fonti italiane della ‘Romola’ di George Eliot (The Italian sources of George Eliot’s R) (1956). It obviously deserves pride of place here because it is, as far as I know, the first book in any language, English included, to have been devoted to, and to be focused exclusively on, R. The novel was evidently starting to become a cult book as it is nowadays; yet this merit is partly weakened by the fact that Tosello’s approach is mainly, if not altogether, concerned with sources, and deliberately avoids aesthetic commentary and interpretation. Tosello’s book is divided into four chapters, and the first investigates the indirect sources of the novel. She cites letters and other documents that prove Eliot’s love for Italy and her hate of the Austrians; how fondly she studied the language and how she became moderately proficient; and that she read Tasso and Pellico and adored Dante. Eliot’s letters are also useful for the reconstruction of her trip to Italy in 1860. Like many other previous British visitors, she was disappointed by Rome but she loved Florence. Her first impressions of the city were transplanted to the prologue, which Tosello, however, dislikes because the internal narrator is given the disguise of the times, and because of Eliot’s decision to have him speak with the airs of ‘an old cicerone’ (original: ‘vecchio cicerone’, 10). Tosello dwells then on the visual memories Eliot annotated in her diary, and on her readings on the history of painting in Florence. Some data she played down and extenuated in the novel owing to Victorian prudery, an example being where Piero di Cosimo is described by Vasari as one gazing at a wall where sick people were wont to spit (17); in the novel, Piero paints a sketch after ‘long looking at a mouldy wall’. Chapter 2 deals with books about Florence and its history which Eliot read during her second stay in Florence in preparation for the novel. I was surprised to learn that the first critical appreciation of this novel by an Italian was the work of Guido Biagi, the librarian of the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence in the final decades of the century. Biagi was in fact the editor of an English edition or reprint of R, illustrated with no fewer than 160 engravings and photographs. Tosello credits Biagi with surmising and proving for the first time that Eliot had visited and browsed in the Biblioteca Magliabecchiana in 1861. Biagi found out, and reproduced in his edition of R, the library slips of the books read by Eliot, but signed by George Lewes (28). Tosello however disagrees with Biagi’s opinion that Eliot drew her information indiscriminately from all the books on Florence she read at the Magliabecchiana. Tosello hierarchizes the sources. Many volumes, she says (28–29), were so dusty, yellowed and badly kept that it is improbable that Eliot could have taken much from them. The Victorian authoress, Tosello adds, showed particular sensitivity in her omission of risqué details: Eliot, for instance, read in Marietta de’ Ricci, a prolix narrative poem about love and death of two lovers, that Bernardo Rucellai found out that a certain herb became purple by pouring urine on it; this detail became ‘a little lichen growing on the Greek rocks, which having drunk a great deal of light will give it out again as a reddish purple dye’ (34). Nello the barber, she notices, is a descendant of the famous Italian sonneteer

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182   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Il Burchiello. And the Bardis were a family of erudite and turbulent aristocrats often remembered in the memoirs of those days. Yet Eliot, somewhat pedantically, and too mechanically, transferred to Nello the garrulous barber the vast knowledge she had acquired about matters Florentine. It is very seldom or perhaps never noticed that two English masterpieces of the 1860s, that is R and The Ring and the Book, drew in the process of their conception and creation on a number of sources, all of them Italian. Browning’s subject belongs to the final decade of the seventeenth century; Eliot set her novel earlier, in the final decade of the fifteenth. For both works critics have laboured to establish the main, or, as we say for Browning, the ‘primary source’. Tosello’s Chapter 3 takes a stand on whether Eliot relied more on Iacopo Nardi or Pasquale Villari. My own position inclined to Villari until I read Tosello, who puts Nardi first. Biagi, mentioned above, opted for Villari. ‘There is hardly a single page in Nardi which has not an echo in R’ (55).3 Just to give an example of this critic’s sophistication, she proves that the ‘hoof-shaped shoes’ of the French soldiers, who vainly pursue the prisoner in one of the initial scenes of the novel, come from Nardi, who explains their name and the origin of their fashion (such shoes were worn by the king of France, who had a podal deformity, indeed a club foot). Passages by Nardi that Tosello compares with Eliot’s show, in fact, that in many cases Eliot used both historians, Nardi however prevailing over Villari in the vast majority of cases. One may agree that Nardi is agile, quick, linear, easy; Villari analytical, learned, erudite. After Chapter 5, on ‘the other sources’, Tosello’s conclusion is particularly useful because it deals with the critical reception of R in Italy, and with the first Italian translations, until the date of her book’s publication (1956). The Italians ‘seemed at first to be immensely interested in the novel’ (139),4 which public personalities like Mazzini praised and admired. A certain Count Arrivabene was minded to translate it very soon after publication, as was Bartolommeo Aquarone, a Sienese, in 1876. An anonymous, incomplete translation, purged of the ‘heaviest parts’ (140),5 Tosello says (whatever it may mean), had appeared in 1906, published by Treves. The first ‘unabridged translation’ of the novel, by Emilia Franceschini, came out in 1919. It was overrich in ‘toscanismi’ (140), that is typically Tuscan, vernacular expressions, according to Tosello. After 1919 and Franceschini’s translation literary taste had changed and the novel was found to be ‘boring, artificial, edgeless’ (140).6 In 1956, Tosello admits, few educated people could read R without snorting, or wished to read it a second time. It is not surprising that the 1906 anonymous translation should reduce Romola to the status of a detective story – for Romola has after all the ingredients of that genre, and that it should be accompanied by 23 sombre

3

‘Non c’è’ quasi pagina del Nardi che non abbia un’eco in R.’ ‘Anche gli italiani parvero in un primo tempo interessarsi grandemente al romanzo.’ 5 ‘delle parti più’ pesanti’. 6 ‘lo si trovò’ pesante, sofisticato, privo di mordente’. 4

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Romola on Home Ground: Then and Now   183 engravings. The other translation was no less misleading: it came out in a series called ‘novels for young ladies’, with the innuendo reference of ‘spinsters’. Summing up, one can impute to Tosello’s excellent and accurate book two signal omissions. We know why Eliot decided to give her female protagonist the surname Bardi, but we are not given the source and the implications of the name Romola; nor does she tell us what after all the surname Melema signifies or implies, and from where she took it. Romola is the feminine of Romulus, the founder of Rome, and it is a highly symbolical name for such a stoical heroine. This name brings us back to the Rome of Lucrece, rather than to the Rome of the early Christians. Romola was in fact, until recently, a well represented Christian name in the Florence area. But Romola or La Romola is also a place name. Anyone who consults a Florence guidebook will be surprised to read of paintings by the minor sixteenth-century artist Santi di Tito in the villas one finds on the road leading to this village. Might then Eliot have visited in 1861 this area south of the city, and by a kind of sudden inspiration found and joined the two names? Two books, far from early, remain to be mentioned. De Logu’s La narrativa di George Eliot (George Eliot’s Novels) (1969) informs us that, at the date of its publication, a new translation of R had appeared in two volumes in 1957. R is presented as a typical product of mid-Victorian literature and an outcome of Victorian historiography, which frequently tended to find parallels between distant epochs. Incidentally, De Logu adds sources unmentioned by other scholars. He also proves that R was destined to keep on indefinitely playing second fiddle to most of the other Eliot novels. He judges it ‘muddled’, marred by an ‘oppressive intellectual tension’ (155)7, a tale ‘intrinsically mechanical’, ‘needlessly complicated and sensational’ (170, 171).8 He undoubtedly underlines once again how difficult it is for any writer, even be he or she Shakespeare in Henry V, to create and maintain this kind of suspension of disbelief, in other words to sound natural while having non-English characters speak English, like the French Katharine in that play. De Logu excepts Melema, once again, as one of the best of Eliot’s portraits of the egoist. (Unfortunately, throughout the chapter he misspells the name Melema as Melena). In his final survey on George Eliot and criticism, De Logu enlarges on French critics on Eliot, but has almost nothing to say on Italian contributions. Surprisingly, he devotes only a paragraph to Praz’s The Hero in Eclipse. Finally, Marroni (1980) believes that R is a transitional novel, but thinks it wrong to consider it a failure. His chapter is a brilliant commentary on the storyline of the novel, and it aims to prove the function of coincidence, Tito’s moral degeneration and Romola’s religious awakening.

7 8

‘il farraginoso romanzo’; ‘opprimente tensione intellettuale’. ‘intrinseca meccanicità’; ‘racconto macchinoso e sensazionale’.

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10

Romola in England and Italy (1868–1924) Francesca Bugliani

Italian literary and academic criticism of George Eliot’s works and the translation of her novels into the Italian language fall into four historical periods. Each mirrors specific aspects of Italy’s intellectual climate and culture. As Maria Luisa Bignami’s contribution to this book shows, in the early period (1868–1918) Eliot’s works were favourably received by Gaetano Negri (1891) and Emilia Bassi (1914), and translations were made of R (1868), DD (1882–84) and AB (1914). In the next period (1918–45) SM (1926, 1935, 1938, 1939), MG (Il matrimonio di mr Gilfil, 1922), AB (Adamo Beda, 1931, 1932) and MF (Il mulino sulla Floss, 1931, 1934, 1935, 1940, 1950) became the most popular of Eliot’s works for translators and publishers. Their moral intent corresponded well with the contemporary political tendency of stressing the importance of literature in the classroom. No critical or literary study of Eliot’s novels, however, was published during this second period of Italian intellectual history, which was dominated by Croce’s aesthetic idealism. Scholarly reception resumed when Mario Praz published La crisi dell’eroe nel romanzo vittoriano (The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction) (1952). Thereafter Eliot’s works became increasingly the object of scholarly study. Scholars were inspired initially by ideologies or ‘schools’ of thought, such as Marxism and structuralism within academia (1952–78) and later became more engaged with the international debate on Eliot’s works (1978–). These circumstances inevitably influenced the way critics and scholars approached her works. On the whole, then, we can say that, as Bignami points out, whereas scholarly appreciation fluctuated, Eliot’s works were in constant demand by the reading public, with the exception of FH and SG. The fortunes of R in academic circles mirror the pattern of the wider reception of George Eliot’s works, as Franco Marucci makes clear in his contribution to this book. There were translations made in each of the four periods (1868, 1920, 1957, 2009) but literary and academic discussion of the novel was scant. After the publication of Negri’s (1891) and Bassi’s (1914) monographs, R excited little interest among Italian academics. Only with the revival of interest in Victorian fiction following the publication of the volume by Praz mentioned above (1952) and Maria Tosello’s study of Eliot’s sources (1956) did the fortunes of R gain a new lease of life. Since then, studies of R, as Marucci explains, have, like those of Eliot’s other works, become more specialized and scholarly.

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Romola in England and Italy (1868–1924)   185 Independently of its scholarly reception, however, R enjoyed great success in Italy for the 60 or so years following its first publication. For many years, Tosello’s view (139–41) that R failed to interest Italians at the time of its publication was the accepted wisdom. The first abridged translation of R by, in her words, an ‘unknown’ translator, was published, she wrote, only in 1906, accompanied by 23 ‘bleak engravings’. In its country of origin, she added, the novel was treated first as a detective story and then as a novel for young girls when translated for the second time in 1920. This information is, as we shall see, for the most part inaccurate. What is more, the circulation of R in contemporary periodicals, its popularity among Italian and foreign readers in Italy, as well as the role played by the illustrations and the films inspired by it, are evidence that R remained popular for quite some time. Evidence of this kind also suggests, despite Praz’s views to the contrary (1950), that between the proclamation of Italian unity and the beginning of World War I, Italians were fascinated by contemporary English culture. Why did R catch the attention of many Italians in this period? The purpose of the present chapter is, first, to draw attention to some hitherto overlooked details about the circulation of R and of adaptations of the book in film and, second, to explain why the novel was so popular during the 50 years after 1863, when Eliot completed it, more so perhaps than in any other European country. R and Italy: 1863–1924 To R, Eliot dedicated more than a year of thought (May 1860 to July 1861), six months of research (July 1861 to January 1862) and 18 months of writing (New Year’s Day 1862 to July 1863). Those were indeed three years of hard work. The novel appeared in monthly instalments between July 1862 and August 1863 in the Cornhill Magazine, of which George Henry Lewes was at the time first consultant editor and then literary advisor from 1862 to 1864.1 Eliot’s historical novel set in late fifteenth-century Florence aroused immediate interest among Italians. Before the instalments were even completed, the patriot and scholar Carlo Arrivabene (1820–1874), an Italian exile friend of Eliot and Lewes, discussed with Lewes the possibility of translating R. Eliot’s diary notes for 18 April 1863 show that she was elated by Arrivabene’s comment that Italians ‘were indebted to her’ for writing R (Cross 1886, vol. 2, 301). In 1864 the Italian politician, journalist and activist of the unification of Italy, Giuseppe Mazzini, nicknamed the ‘beating heart of Italy’, also an old acquaintance of Lewes and Eliot in London from at least the early 1850s, suggested that R should be translated. The journal L’Unità d’Italia, whose first 1

Lewes and Frederick Greenwood took up the editing task after Thackeray left in April 1862. By then sales had decreased from the initial 100,000 to 70,000 copies. Eliot was paid £538 per monthly instalment of R. By December 1862, sales had plummeted to 50,000 copies (Sutherland 1986, 106–07).

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186   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe number appeared in April 1860, was planning to publish novels as appendices. On 28 November 1864, Mazzini wrote to Maurizio Quadrio, a patriot and the editor of the journal, recommending that he publish a translation of R: ‘among these novels (serious ones) you should publish, I believe, R, which deals with Savonarola and is about a woman [of that name]. Have you got it? Shall I send it to you? […] I could get permission from the author herself.’2 Someone else, however, had already secured or was about to secure permission to translate R. His name appears in the preface, dated 1882, that Cesare Olivetti, a lawyer from Turin, familiar with English periodicals such as Fortnightly Review, Contemporary Review and Nineteenth Century, wrote for his translation of Eliot’s DD (1882–84). The preface, quite apart from the reference to the translator of R, is interesting in its own right. Olivetti explains that he had obtained permission to translate DD from Eliot and that the novel – now appearing in a slightly more ‘correct form’, that is, as a book – had first circulated in instalments in La Riforma, the journal of the parliamentary left, which the Italian patriot and statesman Francesco Crispi had helped found. Olivetti praised Eliot’s nobility of intentions, her faithful descriptions, her painstaking characterization and subtle psychological analyses. Her stature as a novelist should be compared, Olivetti commented, to that of Dickens and Thackeray. While noticing the affinity of her ideas with those of Spencer, Mill and Lewes, and the influence on her of Strauss and Feuerbach, Olivetti highlighted how respectful she was towards religion. ‘More than any other author,’ Olivetti wrote, ‘she appreciated the goodness of Jews and understood them well.’3 Olivetti hoped that his translation would do justice to the Jews and encourage tolerance towards them ‘in the hope that one day the name “Jew” would resound with honour’.4 At this point Olivetti mentioned a certain Gustavo Strafforello (1820–1904), who, he adds, had made an abridged translation of R. Strafforello’s translation had been published in instalments in the first yearly run (5 December 1867–26 November 1868) of Il romanziere contemporaneo illustrato (The contemporary illustrated novelist) (1867–70), a weekly magazine published by Treves (Milan) in a series called ‘Biblioteca Utile’, which was aimed at a well educated audience. The series included novels by Dumas, Hoffmann and Dickens.5 Il romanziere contemporaneo illustrato came out every Thursday, each issue 2

‘Tra questi romanzi [seri] dovresti tradurre, parmi, Romola che tratta di Savonarola ed è una donna. L’avete? Devo mandarlo? [...] Dall’autrice potrei avere il permesso’ (Giuseppe Mazzini, Scritti editi ed inediti, 106 vols (Imola: Tipografia Galeati (SEI), 1906–90), vol. 79, p. 228). 3 ‘Meglio di ogni altro scrittore seppe apprezzare quanto vi è di buono negli ebrei e li conobbe a fondo’ (George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, trans., pref. and annot. Cesare Olivetti, 2 vols (Rome: Stabilimento Tipografico Italiano, 1882–84), vol.1, p. xxiii). 4 ‘sia circondato di quell’onore, di quel rispetto, che sono dovuti all’operosità della vita, alla costanza dei propositi’ (Eliot 1882–84, vol. 1, p. xxiii). 5 Il romanziere contemporaneo illustrato, published by Treves, must not be confused with Il romanziere illustrato, published by Sonzogno in Milan and Florence (1865–68). On Italian publishing houses, see Alberto Cadioli and Giuliano Vigini (eds), Storia dell’editoria Italiana dall’unitá ad oggi (Milan: Editrice Bibliografica, 2004) and

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Romola in England and Italy (1868–1924)   187 containing a biography of a famous contemporary Italian or foreign novelist – the first being Alessandro Manzoni – and four-page supplements of serialized novels that subscribers could bind into volumes. Once a complete novel had appeared in instalments, Treves also published it as a complete volume. The publishers aimed at 12 bound volumes and 52 biographies a year. Strafforello’s abridged translation of R ran from 12 March to 8 October 1868. It came out as a volume by the end of the same year.6 The artist, hitherto unidentified, who designed the 23 wood engravings accompanying the translation – dismissed by Tosello as ‘bleak’ – was none other than Frederic Leighton, who had produced them for the Cornhill.7 Leighton had spent a long time in Italy, was a friend of the Brownings and knew Florence well. He owed his first fame to his medievalizing painting of Cimabue’s procession in 1855. Later he was to become a prosperous artist and influential President of the Royal Academy.8 On 27 February 1868, Il romanziere contemporaneo illustrato announced the publication of R in instalments as follows: Eliot is the pseudonym for Maria Anna Evans, famous English novelist, author of AB, MF, SM, SCL, etc. We shall publish in due course the biography of this illustrious woman. For the moment, suffice it to say that a wealthy editor of an English periodical paid Evans 7,000 pounds sterling, i.e. 245,000 Italian lire. This novel, for which such an extravagant fee was paid, had a great success in England. It deals with the times of Father Girolamo Savonarola and has some similarity with Niccolò de’Lapi (1841) by our d’Azeglio. The precise historical delineation of characters is extraordinary but more extraordinary still is the care that she has taken in describing the topography exactly, her depiction of contemporary customs and her evocation of contemporary Florence, to the extent that it feels as if one is reading a contemporary chronicle as much as a novel. Many of our great historical figures – Poliziano, Machiavelli, Savonarola – live again in these pages, rich in many historical and literary details unknown even to Italian scholars. The ancient history of Florence was never so well researched and so faithfully reproduced as in this beautiful historical novel, which we recommend warmly to all Italians.9

6

7

8

9

Massimo Giandebiaggi, Bibliografia ed iconografia del romanzo popolare illustrato in Italia 1840–1899 (Viterbo: Agnesotti, 1987). Strafforello had already contributed to Il romanziere contemporaneo illustrato with a translation of Halifax’s A Noble Life. The name of the translator of Romola escaped Tosello, but was included in Giandebiaggi (1987, 46). Not the brothers Dalziel, as Giandebiaggi suggests (1987, 46). The Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence has a copy of the first number of the Romanziere contemporaneo illustrato (December 1867). It does not have a copy of the first bound volume (1868) of Romola but has a copy of the 1906 reprint with the 23 illustrations by Leighton. ‘Celebre romanziere inglese, autrice di Adamo Bede, del Molino del Floss, di Silas Marner, delle Scene della Vita Clericale, ecc. Daremo a suo tempo la biografia di quella illustre donna e solo fin d’ora diremo che un ricco editore di una rivista inglese sborsò alla Evans pel manoscritto 7000 lire sterline, vale a dire 245,000 lire italiane. Questo romanzo, pagato ad un prezzo così esorbitante e che fece tanto chiasso in Inghilterra, tratta dei tempi di Fra Girolamo Savonarola ed ha qualche somiglianza con Nicolò dei Lapi del nostro d’Azeglio. Mirabile è la pittura rigorosamente storica de’ caratteri e più mirabile ancora l’esattezza topografica, la

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188   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe The following issue of the Romanziere contemporaneo illustrato, dated 5 March 1868, announced further news about R. ‘In the next number,’ wrote the editor, ‘we shall begin the new English novel by G. Eliot. For the moment there is no need to say more than that it has been translated by that excellent author, Gustavo Strafforello.’10 Strafforello (1820–1903), man of letters, a patriot of the Risorgimento, one of the most productive and versatile writers of the nineteenth century, was also an able translator from French and English.11 He had already translated and adapted Self-Help (1859) by Samuel Smiles for Treves’s ‘Biblioteca Utile’; Strafforello’s translation was to prove very successful, going through 73 editions under the title Chi s’aiuta Dio l’aiuta (God helps those who help themselves) (1865). Strafforello’s R is an abridged translation of Eliot’s novel. The publication by instalments for a weekly readership of an illustrated magazine required cuts and adaptation. Strafforello accommodated Eliot’s original to the format of the Romanziere contemporaneo illustrato. Each new four-page supplement had to be coherent and sustain the readers’ interest. He tended to exclude reflective or philosophical passages, the more obscure or learned references and the long conversations. For example, he omitted the proem, reduced Tito’s long conversation with Nello in Chapter 3 as well as Romola’s long conversation with her father in Chapter 5. He merged Chapters 3 and 4 into one chapter. Strafforello’s version had 66 chapters whereas Eliot’s original had 72. Treves or Strafforello must have had permission to translate R from the Cornhill Magazine since the latter retained the copyright of the novel until 1869. Lewes, who was an editor of the Cornhill until 1864, very likely had an important say in the decision.12 Treves or Strafforello had acquired the rights to the Italian translation; other translations were initially prohibited. Eight years after the publication of Strafforello’s translation, in early December 1876, Bartolommeo Aquarone (1815–1896), also a patriot, professor of constitutional law at the University of Siena and an active participant in the unification of Italy, wrote to Eliot with a request to translate Eliot’s novel. Aquarone, a

delineazione dei costume, il cosiddetto color locale per guise che par leggere un cronista del tempo, più la parte romanzesca. Molti dei nostri grandi, Poliziano, Machiavelli, Savonarola, rivivono in queste pagine ridondanti di molte particolarità storiche e letterarie ignote persino agli eruditi fra gli italiani. Mai la storia antica di Firenze fu così sviscerata e così fedelmente riprodotta come in quel bel romanzo storico che si raccomanda caldamente a tutti gli italiani’ (52). 10 ‘Nel prossimo numero daremo principio al nuovo romanzo inglese Romola di E. [sic] Eliot, aggiungeremo soltanto che è tradotto da quel valente scrittore che è G. Strafforello’ (56). 11 Strafforello collaborated on encyclopedias, dictionaries and works of wide culture, especially the geographical collection La Patria. He was a patriot and supported the fight for Italian unification. 12 In the front page of the 1906 reprint of Strafforello’s 1868 translation, we read: ‘la presente opera di cui gli editori Fratelli Treves hanno acquistato regolarmente il diritto di traduzione in lingua italiana é messa sotto la tutela delle vigenti leggi’ (George Eliot, Romola, trans. Gustavo Strafforello, Il romanziere contemporaneo illustrato (Milan: Treves, 1906).

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Romola in England and Italy (1868–1924)   189 friend of Pasquale Villari, was the author of Vita di Fra Jeronimo Savonarola, published in 1857–58.13 He was probably enquiring about the possibility of translating the novel in an unabridged form. ‘I have also had a request from Signor B. Aquarone, of Siena,’ Eliot wrote, ‘for leave to translate R and declaring that, as one who has given special study to the history of San Marco, and has written a life of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, he cares that R should be known to his countrymen for their good. He afterwards found that a previously existing translation was a hindrance, though out of print. Magnificat anima mea’ (Cross 1886, vol. 3, 267). Some four to five years later, R was reprinted again in Strafforello’s abridged version. This time it was published in the strenna (appendix) of the Lega della democrazia, some time between 1880 and 1883. The previous serialized novel had been The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne – which had started running on 5 January 1880. The Lega della democrazia was the journal of an association of the same name that aimed to bring together Italian democrats, republicans and radicals, who, inspired by Garibaldi, advocated universal suffrage, a lay state and democracy. The journal was directed by the republican and radical Mario Alberto, a close friend of Mazzini, Garibaldi and Villari and the husband of Jessie White, an English Italophile and supporter of Italian independence who stayed at Bellosguardo when Eliot was in Florence. Strafforello himself mentioned this reprint, which has remained unknown to modern scholars. Reviewing the role of the Cornhill Magazine in 1888 for the ‘Rassegna della letteratura inglese’ (‘Review of English literature’), a monthly series published in La rivista contemporanea directed by Angelo De Gubernatis, Strafforello wrote: ‘Founded in January 1860 by Thackeray, who had a very high salary, the illustrated Cornhill Magazine had an immense success, so much so that it could pay well 7,000 pounds to the novelist Evans for her serial novel R. I translated R for Il romanziere illustrato. The translation was then reprinted by Alberto Mario in the appendices to his journal.’14 Eliot attracted the attention not only of literary and political periodicals but also of journals for women. The Giornale delle donne, founded in Turin in 1869 13

In the introduction to his life of Savonarola, Villari wrote, ‘[A]mong more recent works, we must mention the Vita di Fra Jeronimo Savonarola by Bartolommeo Aquarone. As the work of a friend, and published almost simultaneously with my own, I refrain from passing any judgement upon it’ (Pasquale Villari, The History of Girolamo Savonarola and of His Times, trans. Leonard Horner with the cooperation of the author, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1863), n. 3). Aquarone translated from English into Italian (1856) the patriotic novel Doctor Antonio: A Tale of Italy (1855) by Giovanni Ruffini, an Italian exile in London and follower of Mazzini. Eliot reviewed Ruffini’s novel. 14 ‘Fondato nel gennaio 1860 da Thackeray, che toccava uno stipendio lautissimo, il Cornhill Magazine illustrato ebbe una voga immensa e tale che potè sborsare la bellezza di 7,000 sterline alla prefata romanziera Evans pel suo romanzo seriale Romola da me tradotto nel Romanziere illustrato del Treves, e ristampato poi da Alberto Mario nelle appendici del suo giornale’ (Gustavo Strafforello (trans.), ‘Rassegna della letteratura inglese’, Rivista contemporanea: Rassegna mensile di letteratura italiana e straniera, Florence (January–May 1888): 318).

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190   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe and directed by Amerigo Vespucci, represented women in a variety of roles, offering nineteenth-century Italian women an identity beyond that of wife and mother. Views that the journal expressed about women writers, however, were inconsistent. Some were belittled. Neera, the pseudonym of the writer and journalist Anna Zuccari, afterwards Anna Radius (1848–1918), delivered one of the harshest criticisms. She considered literary women an ‘exception, a real phenomenon, something out of the ordinary’, especially because the majority of female writers did not succeed, and those who did were usually tedious, pedantic or plagiarizers (1877, 200). Others, Eliot among them, were praised. In ‘Conversazioni in famiglia’ (‘Family conversations’), Vespucci (1885, 144) expresses his admiration for George Eliot, applauding her literary accomplishments and describing her as a ‘most noble person’ (‘nobilissima figura’). Here he was following the example of the author of an earlier article who had paid homage to George Sand. The descriptions used to illustrate these authors express immense respect, approval and veneration. On 19 April 1885 Giorgio Palma (1846–1920), pseudonym of the writer Emilia Luzzato, also championed Eliot’s work in ‘Giorgio Eliot, la sua vita e l’opera sua’ (‘George Eliot, her life and her works’).15 After the publication of Negri’s study of Eliot (1891) – discussed by Bignami and Marucci in their contributions to this book – Strafforello’s R was reprinted in instalments and as a single volume, both with the 23 illustrations by Leighton. This 1906 reprint in the Romanziere contemporaneo illustrato marked the beginning of a new phase in the reception of Eliot’s R.16 It is also worth noting, perhaps, that Lewes’s reputation had grown during these years, for two reasons: first, the translation of his psychological work into Italian and, second, Giambattista Bertazzi’s book on Lewes’s scientific and philosophical ideas showing, among other things, how Lewes had, like Eliot, been inspired by Italian intellectuals. In Lewes’s case, Antonio Rosmini, Roberto Felice Ardigò and Angelo Secchi were important authors (Bertazzi, 1906). The 1906 reprint by Treves was followed by a scholarly edition of R by Guido Biagi (1855–1925), a Florentine man of letters and philologist, who worked at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence and was director of the Marucelliana (1886–1889) and of the Laurenziana (1890–1923). Biagi had written on the history of Florence and on Savonarola. He was interested in English literature, particularly Shelley and Browning, and was a conspicuous promoter of cultural exchanges. Whether because he could not acquire the translation rights, which still belonged to Treves,17 or because he had an exclusively English audience in mind, Biagi published the original version of

15

On Emilia Luzzato (alias Nevers), see Rachele Farina, (ed.), Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1995), p. 655. 16 ‘I nuovi associati pel 1906, ‘affinché’ abbiano completo il romanzo cominciato nel 1905 (Romola di G. Eliot) riceveranno in dono i 5 fascicoli già comparsi (da pag. 1 a 72) aggiungendo cent. 10 per le spese postali’ (Eliot, 1906). 17 ‘La presente opera di cui gli editori Fratelli Treves hanno acquistato regolarmente il diritto di traduzione in lingua italiana messa sotto la tutela delle vigenti leggi’ (Romanziere contemporaneo illustrato, Treves, Milano 1906). See above, n. 12.

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Romola in England and Italy (1868–1924)   191 R with an introduction and notes, both written by him, in English. His was a very different enterprise from Strafforello’s. It was a contribution by someone who thought that R – in his words, ‘the most classical novel of modern English literature’ (Eliot 1907, xv) – could best be introduced to an English-speaking audience by a Florentine librarian and historian, especially, perhaps, to AngloFlorentines, among whom, as we shall see, R was particularly popular. Biagi agreed with Villari, the scholar of Savonarola, that R was, in Villari’s words, an ‘admirable work of art’ and disagreed with Negri who found it too ‘archaeological’ (Eliot 1907, xxxv). Biagi argued that R appeared less real not because Eliot was, as Negri suggested, overly concerned with historical reconstruction, but because Romola was ‘an English girl, a Puritan, to whom even the ardent mysticism of Savonarola is repugnant and whose whole soul rises up in rebellion against him when he declares “The cause of my party is the cause of God’s Kingdom,” to which she replies, “God’s kingdom is something wider, else let me stand outside it with the beings that I love”.’ Romola was, in Biagi’s view, not real because she was a Puritan and a symbol of Charity. She ‘stands out as a symbol’, he wrote, ‘immaculate and strong, a symbol of the woman who, after having hoped, suffered and loved […] turns the stream of her unsatisfied feelings towards those in misery and who have offended her; she is a figure sublime and statuesque, and her name is Charity’ (Eliot 1907, lxi). Biagi’s interpretation and, we may add, the praise that George Eliot received in the Giornale delle donne, are reflected in the first black-and-white silent film of R produced by Cines (1911), an Italian firm which soon became international.18 Cines was from the beginning interested in historical subjects and had anti-clerical tendencies. La presa di Roma was its first great success. The 1911 Cines version of R was directed by Mario Caserini (1874–1920), the doyen of Italian film directors and one of the pioneers of Italian ‘film d’art’. Caserini, who was also interested in period pieces, would acquire a worldwide reputation with his 1913  The Last Days of Pompeii, which had a huge impact in Great Britain. By 1911 the ‘long film’ was becoming fashionable. Many producers had resisted it. The public, they felt, wanted brevity and variety. R is an example of how complex and famous narratives were still reduced to one reel. This would change with The Last Days of Pompei and Quo Vadis? The Cines R runs for about 15 minutes. It is articulated in several scenes, each of which is organized like a scene on a theatre stage. At this time short films were usually presented as part of a programme of eight to ten films shown in one city and presumably this was true of R too, although we have no record of which films it was presented with. Producers assumed that audiences already knew the story, which helped the work of adaptation. The film was released in Spain, Great Britain and Germany in January 1911, on the 50th anniversary of the first feast of the unification of Italy. Maria Caserini (1884–1969), the wife of Mario 18

The founders of Cines (1906–58) in Rome were Filoteo Alberini (1867–1937), who worked at the Istituto Geo Militare in Florence, and Dante Santoni, from Florence. Alberini was in Florence when Biagi was also in Florence and had just edited Romola.

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192   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Caserini, played the part of Romola. One of the most renowned intellectual actresses of Italian early cinema, she had made it her ambition to introduce cinema as an art to Italian society. Fernanda Negri Pouget, who would later star in The Last Days of Pompei (1913), played the part of Tessa. Amleto Novelli played the role of Tito. He would later star in Quo Vadis? (1913). The short film of R is focused exclusively on the relationship between Tessa, Romola and Tito. There is little concern with the historical setting, and none at all with the story of Savonarola. The psychological complexity of Tito is missing. He is the villain from the start. The first scene shows him already in a relationship with Tessa, from whom he had a child. Tito assaults a man, robs him of his jewels and then sells them to Bardo. Tito then marries Romola for her wealth. Tessa tries to bring him back. Meanwhile the people want justice: Tessa shows the child and Tito is identified as the father. At the end, Romola offers protection to Tessa and the little girl whom Tito had mistreated. The last scene sums up the point of view of the Caserinis, which, I would argue, is very similar to Biagi’s comments on Romola as a symbol of ‘Charity’. Three women are together in one room. Romola sits in the foreground. In the background appear Tessa and her little girl. Tessa pushes the little girl forward to the side of Romola and remains in the background. When Romola looks at Tessa and summons her, Tessa is on the point of kneeling as if feeling guilt and shame. Romola with a masterly theatrical imperative gesture invites Tessa to stand and recognize her own dignity. All the focus here is on Romola’s lack of prejudice, her virtue, sense of justice and charity. The little girl holds the hands of Tessa and Romola, the two cheated women who look forward with hope to the little girl of the next generation. The Caserinis’ interpretation is quite modern, feminist and not too far from Eliot’s intentions at the end of R. The silent gesture of Romola in the film also sums up Eliot’s attitude towards the cause of women. This does not come as a surprise. Maria Caserini as actress had played sympathetically the role of an adulteress and was a supporter of women’s creativity. Three years later, Bassi, in her essay on Eliot contained in Medaglioni letterari (Literary medallions) (1914), was less sympathetic than Maria Caserini but recognized Eliot’s purity of intention. ‘Leaving aside her mistake of not taking into consideration the rules of religion and human customs,’ Bassi wrote, she ‘was pure in life, pure in love and honest in conception of humanity’.19 In his 1907 edition, Biagi had praised R especially for its evocation of Renaissance Florence. A historian by training, he traced the books that Eliot and Lewes consulted in the Magliabecchian Library. Reacting, no doubt, to the idealized illustrations of Tadema and Leighton, he stressed the historical aspect of the novel by including 160 historical and topographical illustrations.20 R was 19

‘prescindendo dal suo errore di non tener conto delle prescrizioni delle religioni e dei costume umani, fu pura nella vita, pura nell’amore e sincera nella concezione dell’umanità’(Emilia Bassi, Medaglioni letterari: la vita e le opere di Jane Austen e George Eliot (Naples: La Nuova Riforma, 1914), p. 117). 20 Examples of important illustrations: a plan of Florence dated 1490 (Berlin); the

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Romola in England and Italy (1868–1924)   193 then translated in an unabridged version in 1920 – probably when copyright for translation had expired – by Emilia Franceschini for Salani and illustrated by Jacopo Olivotto. Because it was included in the series entitled ‘Biblioteca Signorine Salani’ (‘Library for young ladies’), Tosello concluded that R was treated as a ‘romanzo rosa’ (‘romantic novel’). This is incorrect. Following the precedent of French book series for women, the Salani series included important novelists, as well as other more fashionable and less intellectual writers. Eliot was included among the important novelists, together with Manzoni, D’Annunzio, Fogazzaro and Dumas. That R remained popular both in Italian and English until 1924 is evident from the records of books loaned by the library, now held in the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence. The library, to which most of the Italian patriots and literary figures mentioned above belonged (Arrivabene, Aquarone, Villari, Jessie Mario, Thomas Trollope, De Gubernatis), bought 38 copies of R in English. Dott. Laura Desideri, the current Librarian of the Gabinetto Vieusseux, kindly examined the library records on my behalf and confirmed that the English version of R was the book most frequently borrowed by the Anglo-Florentine community in Florence. The Italian translation (1906) also enjoyed a good circulation. R’s popularity and Biagi’s edition of 1907 brought it to the attention of American film producers who, in the 1920s, were promoting films with a strong cultural bent. In 1924, Henry King (1886–1982), one of the most important and successful film directors in Hollywood, decided to make a film of R. Biagi, with his historical expertise and his familiarity with the novel, was hired as a consultant to assure the film’s historical authenticity. This was the first feature-length silent film of any of Eliot’s works. Other novels and short stories by Eliot had previously been made into short films of about ten minutes long in the USA. Examples are SM (1909, 1911, 1913, 1916, 1922), AB (1918), MG (1920) and also DD (1921) and MF (1915). King’s R, by contrast, was one hour and 45 minutes in duration. R appeared just five years before the demise of the silent movie. Appropriately for a film based on a novel by Eliot, the most important persons in the making of the film – more important than the actors William Powell, Ronald Colman and Charles Lane, all of whom were shortly to become famous – were the actresses Lillian Gish and her sister Dorothy. R was not the first film in which they featured together but it was to be the last. Both were popular actresses but Lillian was wildly popular in the early years of

towers of medieval Florence (from a MS in the Magliabecchian Library); Florence at the time of siege by Vasari; Florence by Allori (from the Uffizi); view of Florence in mid-1700; examples of Florentine Renaissance costumes; the ‘borse’ of the ‘squittini’; the voting urn (Palazzo Vecchio); the Homer by Bartolomeo di Libri, revised by Calcondila (from the Laurentiana); a view of the ‘old market’ (unpublished drawing) by Vasari (1570); portrait of Bernardo Rucellai; portraits of Ficino, Colombo, Poliziano and Calcondila; colophon of first book printed in Florence; portrait of Piero di Cosimo by Vasari; autograph of Cosimo; portrait of Bernardo del Nero; a cassone of the ancient gallery; Porta al Prato; Florence in 1684 as studied by Eliot (from Firenze illustrata, kept in the Magliabecchian Library).

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194   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe cinema. In R she not only took the lead role but also edited the film, cutting it from 20,000 to 12,000 feet. She also decided what pictures and tapestries should hang in the interiors. King and Lillian Gish have left us several interviews and reminiscences about R. Their comments reveal how the film was put together. Although the film itself was American, Italians contributed to it significantly, both to the setting and in terms of expertise. Lillian was enthusiastic about Renaissance Florence, about the culture that it represented and the works of art that she had seen all around her. The real Florence, however, plays only a minor role in the film. King, who found the Italians ‘tremendously serious in what they were doing’, says in one interview that ‘in Florence there was a studio that covered about forty acres. We rebuilt fifteenth-century Florence.’ ‘One building, the set for the Duomo was 274 feet high.’ ‘Our sets matched the real buildings perfectly, thanks to the Italian workmen’ he continued (Thompson 1995, 59). They matched so well that, he said, you could not tell the difference. For the galleys in the pirate episode, two full-scale reconstructions were ordered from the shipyards of Livorno. ‘We named them the Liliano and the Dorothea,’ said King (Thompson 1995, 60). In her reminiscences, Lillian Gish confirmed King’s account: ‘We had planned to film all of it against the background of Florence,’ she wrote, ‘but the telephone poles, the streetcar tracks and other signs of modernity made that impossible. So in our studio on the outskirts of the city we erected our own 15th century Florence’ (Gish 1969, 262–63). Thus they built a surrogate Piazza della Signoria with the façade of Palazzo Vecchio as well as a full-size plaster cast of the Davanzati Palace. They also made fifteenth-century shops selling cloths, hats and shoes. For the wedding feast sequence, the art director Haas had period glasses blown in Venice. They used robes that had been worn by fifteenth-century priests. People were brought from Rome to act in the street scenes; many Florentines joined in. The film was released on 1 December 1924 in New York and ran for 20 weeks. It was a great success: ‘The most beautiful picture ever made,’ some said. Biagi, then director of the Laurentian Library in Florence, said that R ‘had the authenticity and atmosphere of the golden age of the Renaissance of which the Florence of the Medici was the center’ (Gish 1973, 132). The Director of the Uffizi Gallery, the director of the Odeon national theatre in Paris and the Minister of Art of Spain were equally impressed (Gish 1969, 264). The Italian fortunes of R continued, then, unabated from 1868 until about 1924. During those 60 years, R was translated twice (1868, 1920) and of these two translations one was reprinted twice, while the other was also reprinted twice after 1924 (1926, 1930). It circulated widely and successfully in illustrated monthly instalments and separate editions: Strafforello and Treves imitated the cultural operation of foreign magazines like the Cornhill, which, with their illustrations, anticipated the role of television. R inspired two films, one produced by the Italian film industry in 1911 and the other by an American firm. Between 1868 and 1924 in Italy, Eliot’s novel appealed to patriots, literary men, the general public, women, historians and film directors.

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Romola in England and Italy (1868–1924)   195 Causes of R’s popularity in Italy What were the reasons for the popularity, especially among the AngloFlorentines, of Eliot’s novel in Italy between 1868 and 1924? R appealed to Italian sensibilities because the events described in it mirrored those of contemporary Italy. In republican Florence, dominated by the prophetic figure of Savonarola and the struggle for freedom from the powers of the Medici and the papacy, Eliot discerned an analogy with Italy’s contemporary struggle for independence combined with a spiritual reformation. As the proem implies, R was, in Eliot’s mind, a work of historical reconstruction as well as of philosophical reinterpretation of past events from the point of view of a contemporary nineteenth-century intellectual novelist. The characters of Romola and Piero di Cosimo are the vehicles of her interpretation. Contemporary Italians appreciated Eliot’s vivid evocation of the Italian past and her ability to invest it with their religious, philosophical and political concerns. Those Italians who read the novel in the original would have also appreciated the deeper meaning of the opening paragraph of the proem, in which Eliot describes the angel of the dawn travelling across the full extent of the continent of Europe. With this image she suggested the unity of European culture and linked Italian democratic aspirations to those of other European countries. This vision of Italy’s role in the reawakening of the human spirit was inspired by her love of Italy, which she visited no fewer than six times,21 her deep interest in all matters concerning the politics of the Italian peninsula and the appreciation of the Italian language, which she started learning in 1840 (Hamnett 2011, 191). These were, moreover, interests that she was able to develop and refine through, on the one hand, contacts with Italian intellectuals and patriots in London and, on the other, with English writers, supporters and activists of the independence in Italy, particularly in Florence. By supporting the Italian cause, English intelligentsia, especially expatriates, affirmed their own national identity and political disposition. Eliot and Italy before 24 March 1860 Eliot’s love for Italy and her staunch advocacy of Italian independence predated her meeting with Lewes and intensified during their courtship. She had read Le mie prigioni (1832) by Silvio Pellico in Italian (Cross 1886, vol. 1, 54) and already in 1848 she had voiced her hopes that the ‘odious’ Austrians would be expelled from ‘beautiful Lombardy’ (Cross 1886, vol. 1, 147). Lewes, for his part, had already written on Alfieri’s drama (1844, 357–90), on Leopardi’s poetry and world-view (1848, 659–69) and had become a strong supporter of the Italian cause. He promoted Italian independence in the Leader, the weekly journal that he had founded with Thornton Leigh Hunt in 1850. 21

Eliot visited Italy six times, Florence three times; in 1849 she had been in Genoa, Milan, Como and Lake Maggiore; she visited Italy again in 1860, 1861, 1864, 1869–70 and 1879.

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196   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Eliot read about the Italian cause in the Leader, of which Lewes was at the time an editor (1850–54), responsible for the section dedicated to literature and the arts. From the outset, she had been attracted to the journal on account of its political and religious radicalism and Christian liberal views. It was supported by republicans and Christian socialists and claimed ‘the right of every opinion to its own free utterance’ (the Leader, 30 March 1850, 1.1: 22). From her letters we learn that she was a reader of the journal in July 1850, only three months after the first number was published on 30 March 1850. The Westminster Review, of which Eliot became sub-editor in 1852, was also sympathetic to the Italian cause, but it was the Leader with its political ideas and connections, as promoted by Lewes, which nurtured Eliot’s interest in Italian independence and indeed international republicanism in general. Mazzini, who had returned to London by 27 May 1850, thought the Leader would act as the outlet for his views, especially his advocacy of European democracy. In November 1850 the Leader highlighted the European Democracy Movement of Mazzini, Louis Blanc and other refugees. The founders of the Leader, Lewes and Hunt, participated in the committees of the refugees. Throughout 1851, Lewes attended the meetings of political refugees. The Leader supported and relayed news of the Society of the Friends of Italy, whose object was, in the words of their declaration, ‘to promote a correct appreciation of the Italian question in this country; to use every available constitutional means of furthering the cause of Italian National Independence; to aid in this country the cause of independence and of the political and religious liberty of the Italian people’ (Monthly Record of the Society of the Friends of Italy, 1 (September 1851)). The treasurer of the society was Peter A. Taylor, and the secretary was David Masson. Lewes was a member of its council from 1851 onwards. On 6 October 1851, John Chapman, the publisher and friend of Eliot – he had published her translation of Strauss’s Life of Jesus and had just employed her as sub- editor for the Westminster Review – introduced her to Lewes in a bookshop in Piccadilly. Just over one year later, by early 1853, Eliot and Lewes were intimate. The time in between was important for their involvement with the Society of Friends of Italy and Italian refugees. On 20 December 1851, the Leader advertised the ‘Italian Refugee Fund’ for the financial relief of political exiles (vol. 2, n. 91, 1204). Chapman was a subscriber together with, among others, the Italian exiled patriots Salvatore Ferretti, Antonio Gallenga, Carlo Arrivabene, Alessandro Gavazzi and Giuseppe Mazzini. In the same number the Leader published Mazzini’s address to the Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth about the importance of the ‘moral unity of Europe’ and, through it, of the unity of the human race. Without that European vision, Mazzini commented further, ‘Italian “democracy” would be egotism disguised under a pompous title’ (1204). Mazzini was often a speaker at the meetings of the Society of the Friends of Italy in London. On Wednesday, 11 February 1852 he delivered a lecture (Mazzini 1852). Eliot was present, as we gather from the following report that she gave in March 1852 to Mrs Taylor – the wife of Peter Taylor and a lifelong friend: ‘I did go to the conversazione; but you have less to regret than you think. Mazzini’s speeches are better read than heard’ (Cross 1886, vol. 1, 223). As editor of the Westminster Review, Eliot had read and

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Romola in England and Italy (1868–1924)   197 published in April 1852 Mazzini’s ‘Europe: its Condition and Prospects’. On 13 November 1852 the Leader also drew attention to the meeting of Kossuth and Mazzini in Store Street, noting that it was attended by ‘numerous parties of ladies’ (1082). The second conversazione took place at the end of 1852 – as reported, again, by the Leader on 1 January 1853. On that occasion Mazzini was unable to speak, so pained did he feel about the critical situation in Italy. David Masson spoke in his place and expressed the conviction that ‘the Rome which had led and governed the world in arms and art would be the centre, for the third time, of a new civilization, the civilization of European liberty’ (6–7). Eliot would have agreed. Garibaldi and Mazzini, whom she admired, had also a vision of Rome as capital. Lewes, who was a versatile and well-known journalist, wrote three to four pieces each week for the Leader until the spring of 1854.22 From then onwards until at least when they left for Germany in July 1854, Eliot took over the task of writing the articles for Lewes. Her employment as sub-editor on the Westminster had come to an end that spring. She kept reading the Leader after her return from Germany eight months later. Apparently she also continued to contribute to it as well. Arrivabene is mentioned several times in the Leader.23 On 15 December 1855 a review appeared of Arrivabene’s Italian Poets (1855). ‘While the Austrian and French uniforms insult the eye of every Italian and every lover of Italy,’ the reviewer wrote, ‘it is well to remind men constantly of what a nation the Italian is – of what a noble part it has played in European culture and progress […] While the student is reading it, Count Arrivabene [i.e. Giovanni] will read it at Brussels and smile approvingly on his nephew’s patriotic effort’ (1206–07). These were words probably written by Eliot. The Leader also followed the activities of the Italian evangelicals who held regular meetings to discuss the Eco di Savonarola (Echo of Savonarola), a monthly journal published in London from 1847 to 1862. The journal had been founded by Camillo Mapei (1809–1853) and edited by him until 1856. The second series was edited by the Florentine Ferretti (1817–1874) from 1856 to 1862.24 First published in Italian, it later appeared in both Italian and 22

Lewes started writing reviews in 1837. In 1840 he was working for the Monthly Chronicle and in the early 1840s already for the Westminster Review. In 1844 he was writing for the Foreign Quarterly Review. In 1850 he met Herbert Spencer at Chapman’s house. 23 Arrivabene (1820–1874) was a teacher, journalist, activist in the independence movement, member of the Italian parliament and refugee in Paris and London. During his nine years in London he was instrumental in arousing English sympathies for Piedmont. He substituted for Gallenga in 1854–55 as Professor of Italian at University College London. In 1859 he got British citizenship and in the same year became correspondent of the Daily News and followed Garibaldi in 1860. His articles were published into a volume entitled Italy under Victor Emmanuel. Arrivabene knew Lewes from the early 1850s. He is not to be confused, as has been the case until now, with his uncle Giovanni Arrivabene. Carlo was appointed Professor of Italian Language and Literature at University College London on 20 March 1858. 24 Camillo Mapei was an Italian Catholic priest and theologian. He became an eminent Italian Protestant, patriot and political exile. He knew Mazzini. Salvatore

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198   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe English and circulated in Italy. The Italian evangelicals in London – among them the controversial Giacinto Achilli (1803–60) and the popular preacher Father Alessandro Gavazzi (1809–89)25 – were connected with followers of Mazzini, having fled to London in 1848 and 1855. They constituted, as it were, the religious soul of the patriotic Italian movement for independence, promoting Savonarola’s thought and action and his opposition to the papacy, which they saw as the major obstacle to Italian independence. They espoused a return to the primitive church, that is to say, a Pauline church, at a time when the Catholic Church had re-established its full hierarchy in England (1850). Mazzini too looked back to Savonarola for his principle of ‘pensiero e azione’ (‘thought and action‘) in politics. He saw Savonarola as an inspiration for European countries fighting for independence. The evangelicals held regular meetings from January 1851 in Oxford Street. Because of his popularity as a preacher, Father Gavazzi was called a ‘modern Savonarola’. In the issue of the Leader dated 18 January 1851, Lewes referred to Gavazzi as ‘the modern Savonarola, the ecclesiastical Mazzini, the religious leader of Young Italy’ who ‘roused the energy of the peninsula’ (51–52). Gavazzi, ‘a Savonarola gone madder’, frequently preached in London in the presence of aristocrats, among them Lord Palmerston, who was a vehement supporter of Italian independence (Garibaldi) and the Hungarian revolution (Kossuth). Gavazzi was probably the original of Sydney [Thompson] Dobell’s [or Yendys] ‘monk’ in his dramatic poem The Roman (1850), which celebrated the cause of Italian liberation. His Orations (1851) were praised by Lewes in his ‘Savonarola in London’, published in the Leader on 5 April 1851 where we learn that Gavazzi had preached in Piazza San Marco in the manner of Savonarola and that women had handed their jewels over to him (321–22). By contrast, Lewes was critical of Camillo Mapei. Savonarola inspired not only Italian exiles and patriots in London, but also the movement for independence in Tuscany. Patriots, politicians, independentists and writers such as Aquarone and Villari, based mostly in Florence, wrote about Savonarola. When, in 1859, Mazzini went to Florence to see Barone Ricasoli, he met Gavazzi. Italian democrats, republicans and evangelicals were interconnected in London and in Italy, especially Florence. There is no doubt, then, that throughout the 1850s, Eliot and Lewes were interested in, indeed committed to, the Italian cause. They were planning to go to Italy already in 1857, when Mazzini left for Genoa, but had to postpone their trip. Through the Leader they were informed about the struggle for independence in several European countries, particularly Italy. They were connected with Italian refugees, patriots, activists and correspondents working

Ferretti (1817–1874) was a Florentine whose mother was the cousin of Giovanni Mastai Ferretti, i.e. Pope Pius IX. He was connected to the Gabinetto Vieusseux. Back in Florence in 1860, Ferretti joined the Chiesa Cristiana Libera (Free Christian Church) of Father Gavazzi. 25 Father Alessandro Gavazzi, formerly a Barnabite monk, was an Italian preacher and patriot. Organizer of Italian Protestants in England, he returned to Italy in 1860 and founded the Free Christian Church.

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Romola in England and Italy (1868–1924)   199 for English newspapers. They understood the importance of Savonarola for Mazzini and for the whole movement for independence in Tuscany and elsewhere. The Leader drew attention to H. H. Milman’s review of several volumes on Savonarola by English, French and German authors published in June 1856 in the Quarterly Review (Milman 1856, 1–60). By the mid-1850s, Eliot was aware of, and perhaps reviewing, books that may have inspired her to write R. Four of them had been written by two English expatriates in Florence, both prominent writers active in support of the Italian cause, who reported Italian events for English journals: Thomas Adolphus Trollope, the older brother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, who was extremely knowledgeable on the history of Florence, and his wife Theodosia (née Garrow), herself a poet and journalist. The 22 November 1856 issue of the Leader (1120–21) carried a favourable review of Thomas Trollope’s The Girlhood of Catherine de’ Medici published by Chapman. The novel is set 27 years after Savonarola was burned at the stake, when ‘the perilous fire was not extinguished’ (Trollope 1856, 167) and the friar had left a legacy of political liberalism and the possibility of freedom among the Florentines.26 In the novel, Trollope described the sermon that Savonarola preached in the Cathedral of Florence in 1495. He also appended a commentary entitled ‘Florentine historians of the 16th century’, featuring Jacopo Nardi, Filippo de’ Nerli, Benedetto Varchi, Bernardo Segni and Scipione Ammirato, among others, some of whom would be sources for R. The reviewer, probably Eliot, given that she was a frequent contributor to the Leader, praised Trollope for his knowledge of Florentine history and the ability ‘to paint the character of those times’. As Florentine correspondent for the Athenaeum, Theodosia Trollope (1802–65) had covered Italian events of 1859–1860 in 22 letters, including her witnessing of the flight of Leopold II of Lorraine from Florence. The letters were later collected in a volume entitled Social Aspects of the Italian Revolution (1861). Eliot knew Theodosia’s work. Two other books by Trollope reviewed in the Leader (possibly by Eliot or Lewes) were A Decade of Italian Women (1859), reviewed on 16 April 1859, and Tuscany in 1849 and 1859 (1859), reviewed on 10 September 1859. The first contained a survey of several Renaissance women; the second reinforced Eliot’s and Lewes’s interest in contemporary Italian events. A letter dated 6 December 1859 by Eliot to François D’Albert-Durade elucidates what Lewes meant when he remarked that Eliot’s themes in R were ones that she had nurtured for some time: I think I hardly ever spoke to you of the strong hold evangelical Christianity had on me from the age of 15 to 22, and of the abundant intercourse I had had with earnest people of various religious sects […] Ten years [i.e. from 1850 to 1859] of experience have wrought great changes in that inward self. I have no longer

26

Andrew Thompson (Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 39) refers to Eliot’s review of Trollope’s novel in the Westminster (January 1857).

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200   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe any antagonism towards any faith in which human sorrow and human longing for purity have expressed themselves; on the contrary, I have a sympathy with it that predominates over all argumentative tendencies. I have not returned to dogmatic Christianity, to the acceptance of any set of doctrines as a creed – a superhuman revelation of the unseen – but I see in it the highest expression of the religious sentiment that has yet found place in the history of mankind, and I have the profoundest interest in the inward life of sincere Christians in all ages. On that question of our future existence to which you allude, I have undergone the sort of change I have just indicated, although my most rooted conviction is that the immediate object and the proper sphere of all our highest emotions are our struggling fellow-men in this earthly existence. (Cross 1886, vol. 2, 125)

In 1859, Eliot was reading Thomas à Kempis and John Bunyan. By now she was well prepared to compare the struggles in Savonarola’s times with those of the nineteenth century. Although she already knew much about Savonarola and contemporary Italian events, she wanted to know more. ‘It is time that I should go and absorb some new life, and gather fresh ideas,’ she wrote (Cross 1886, vol. 2, 136). By the time, in the spring of 1860, that Eliot and Lewes left for Italy, many patriots whom they knew had already left. Arrivabene, correspondent for the Daily News, was in Italy in 1859 fighting in the War of Independence against Austria, before following Garibaldi on the expedition of ‘the Thousand’. By that time Gavazzi was also in Italy, ready to join Garibaldi. Ferretti was in Florence in 1860. These were exciting times, especially for Tuscany. The Lorraine family had fled from Florence on 27 April 1859. The insurrection had been organized by the Società Nazionale, founded in 1857 by Garibaldi and other patriots, with the help of Bettino Ricasoli and other groups such as the democratic group of Mazzini. Trollope and his wife Theodosia had been in the thick of events. Piazza Maria Antonia (previously known as the Orto di Barbano) was renamed Piazza Indipendenza following the unification. It was in this piazza that the uprising which led to the expulsion of Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, took place; and it was in this piazza too that the Trollopes resided, in the ‘Villino Trollope’. Meanwhile Lewes, for his part, had been introduced, at a dinner party in London, to Anthony Trollope early in 1860 by the editor of the Cornhill, George Smith. Both Lewes and Trollope were contributors to the magazine from its first number in January 1860. Trollope contributed Framley Parsonage in instalments, while Lewes contributed Studies of Animal Life. No doubt Lewes and Anthony talked about Thomas Trollope, Florence, the cause of Italian independence and Lewes’s plan to visit Florence. Eliot and Lewis left for Italy on 24 March 1860. Two days earlier, on 22 March, Tuscany had been formally annexed to the kingdom of Sardinia and Piedmont. Even if we were to say that, at the time of their departure, Eliot had not yet decided to write an Italian romance, she was deeply concerned with democracy, liberalism and the role of Protestantism, especially Savonarola’s anticipation of it, in the formulation of these ideals. This explains why Lewes said to Oscar Browning that R grew out of an article on Savonarola, ‘probably a review’, Browning added, ‘of his life by Signor Villari’ (Browning 1890, 76). Before leaving, they had planned whom they would meet and hoped to meet in Florence.

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Romola in England and Italy (1868–1924)   201 Important contacts in Florence Eliot’s and Lewes’s journeys abroad, including the two visits to Florence before Eliot started to write R, are well documented in their letters and journals. We know the places they visited and the works of art they saw. What is perhaps less well known is, at least in the case of Italy, the people they met and how some of these acquaintances inspired Eliot to write R. The view that Eliot and Lewes did not have a social life in Italy, indeed no contacts at all with Italians or English people there, is contradicted by sources of various kinds.27 On their first visit to Florence, which occurred soon after the annexation of Tuscany to Piedmont and Sardinia and at the start of Garibaldi’s expedition of ‘the Thousand’, there was a well-established English-speaking literary colony of figures including Trollope, his wife Theodosia, Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Isabel Blagden, Frances Power Cobbe, Walter Savage Landor and Hiram Powers, to mention only the most illustrious. They all sympathized with the Risorgimento. Thomas Trollope in particular had been knighted by King Victor Emmanuel and awarded the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus for his efforts on Italy’s behalf (Field 1864, 661). These Anglo-Florentines met regularly at Casa Guidi in Via Maggio (home of the Brownings), Villa Brichieri at Bellosguardo (home of Isabel Blagden), Villino Trollope in Piazza dell’Indipendenza (home of the Trollopes) and the ‘salone’ in Via Larga, run by the Lady Margherita Mignaty, a native of Corfu, who had lived in Florence for many years. The Villino Trollope, organized by Thomas and Theodosia, was in those years the best known ‘salon’ in Florence, with weekly meetings in which six or so Italians, according to Kate Field,28 regularly participated. Among the habitués were Italian historians, politicians, poets and literary figures.29 Aquarone,30 who joined the Expedition of ‘the

27

See, for example, Thomas Adolphus Trollope, What I Remember, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1887); Kate Field, ‘English Writers in Florence’, Atlantic Monthly, Boston, 14 (December 1864): 660–71, and ‘Recollections by Kate Field’, New York Tribune, 24 December 1880, 5; and Gustavo Strafforello (trans.), ‘Rassegna della letteratura inglese’, Rivista contemporanea: Rassegna mensile di letteratura italiana e straniera, Florence (January–May 1888): 160, 317–19. 28 Kate Field, journalist contributor to the Boston Courier, arrived in Florence in April 1859. She left Florence in July 1861. A friend of Isabella Blagden of Bellosguardo who, in her turn, was very friendly with Thomas Trollope and the Brownings, she too sympathized with the Risorgimento. Field, who lived opposite the ‘Villino Trollope’ during Eliot’s first visit to Florence, left reminiscences of Eliot in the Atlantic Monthly (1864) and an obituary of Eliot in New York Tribune (1888). 29 Among many others: Villari, the author of La storia di Girolamo Savonarola e de’ suoi tempi (1859, 1861); Gino Capponi, the Italian statesman and historian who had gone completely blind by 1848; and the patriotic poet Francesco Dall’Ongaro, who settled in Florence in 1859 thanks to another Italian statesman, Bettino Ricasoli. Theodosia Trollope translated Dall’Ongaro’s poems. 30 Bartolommeo Aquarone (1815–1896), patriot, lawyer and journalist from Porto Maurizio, Liguria. He worked for Vieusseux and the Archivio Storico in the 1840s and kept in close contact with Thomas Trollope. In 1859, before he

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202   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Thousand’, was also in contact with Trollope and very active in the Gabinetto Vieusseux as were also literati such as De Gubernatis, who started to frequent the Villino Trollope from 1863 onwards. During their two weeks in Florence (17 May–1 June 1860), Eliot and Lewes stayed at the Pension Suisse (Swiss Pension) in Via Tornabuoni (Cross 1886, vol. 2, 180), now number 13, ‘the quietest hotel’, a favourite of famous musicians such as Verdi, Donizetti, Rossini and Gounod.31 The first day, as Eliot wrote in her journal, they went to Fiesole to see the panorama and the following day to San Miniato, from where one can see the ‘various buildings more completely’. The journal entry includes a description of the view from San Miniato very similar to that in the proem of R (Cross 1886, vol. 2, 181). On 18 May, Eliot wrote to Blackwood saying that Tuscany was ‘in the highest political spirits for the moment’. ‘Of course,’ she continued, ‘Victor Emanuel stares at us at every turn here, with the most loyal exaggeration of moustache and intelligent meaning’ (Cross 1886, vol. 2, 193). Towards the end of her stay, on 27 May, she wrote to Major William Blackwood that Florence ‘from its relation to the history of Modern art’ had ‘roused a keener interest’ in the two of them, Eliot and Lewes, than Rome. It ‘has stimulated me to entertain rather an ambitious project’, she added, ‘which I mean to be a secret from everyone but you and Mr John Blackwood’ (Cross 1886, vol. 2, 195). She was probably alluding to what would become R. Eliot’s and Lewes’s interest in the politics, religion and the history of Savonarola were well established before they arrived in Florence. How, though, did Eliot come to conceive of writing a romance rather than, say, a biographical study of Savonarola which, Villari commented, the English so much needed? It has been frequently suggested that Lewes was the prime mover. This may be true, but other factors were at play. ‘We know not whether George Eliot visited Florence con intenzione’, wrote Kate Field, ‘yet it almost seems as though R were the product of that fortnight’s sojourn. It could scarce have been written by one whose eye was unfamiliar with the tone of Florentine localities’ (1864, 666), nor, we might add, could it have been written without the contacts she made and conversations she had at the Villino. According to Strafforello, an acquaintance of Villari and Lady Mignaty, Eliot had come to Florence with the aim of finding reminiscences and documents about Savonarola (1888, 160). Eliot and Lewes did not need an introduction to the Trollopes.32

joined Garibaldi, Aquarone worked for the Italian unification in Florence. An expert in constitutional and international law, he directed the political journal Il Costituzionale (1859) in Tuscany. 31 The pension was at the corner of Via Vigna Nuova, opposite Palazzo Strozzi and the loggia of Palazzo Corsi. The English Pharmacy, Café Doney, the Gabinetto Vieusseux and the Church of Santa Trinità were all close by. 32 Very often English writers visiting Florence were introduced to Thomas Trollope. Those interested in the life of Savonarola would try to meet Villari, who had just published the first volume of his La storia di Girolamo Savonarola (1859). Laurence

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Romola in England and Italy (1868–1924)   203 They were on friendly terms in London with Thomas’s brother, Anthony. According to Kate Field, Eliot and Lewes had met the Trollopes during their first stay in Florence. On Sunday, 31 May 1860, Eliot and Lewes were at the Villino Trollope. It was a memorable event for Field, who on the following day (1 June 1860) wrote to her aunt: ‘Last night we went to the Trollopes and there met the authoress of “Adam Bede” and Mr Lewes, the Life-of-Goethe man. Miss Evans, or Mrs Lewes, is a woman whose whole face is of the horse make; but there is something interesting about her, and you feel impressed with her importance. They say she converses finely, she is very retiring and talked all the evening to Mr Trollope’ (Schahrnost 2008, 22). Field reported the presence of the publisher John Chapman too.33 She overheard that ‘the Leweses’ had intended to make Florence their home, ‘returning here in the autumn’ (Whiting 1899, 101). Field recalled the same event three years later in 1864: ‘She [i.e. George Eliot] is a woman of forty, perhaps, of large frame and fair Saxon coloring. In heaviness of jaws and height of cheek-bone she greatly resembles a German; nor are her features unlike those of Wordsworth, judging from his pictures. The expression of her face is gentle and amiable, while her manner is particularly timid and retiring’ (1864, 665). Writing a piece for the New York Tribune on the anniversary of Eliot’s death in 1880, Field repeated verbatim what she had written in 1864 about her first meeting with Eliot at the Villino Trollope, inviting her readers to join her in the visit: ‘Will you come with me there and meet George Eliot? It is a Sunday evening and she is expected with her husband […] It is late in spring. Soft winds kiss the budding foliage and warm it into bloom; the beautiful terrace of Villino Trollope is transformed into a reception room.’ Field then added further details, not present in the 1864 version: Dall’Ongaro, the poet, is reciting verses to my chaperone [i.e. Blagden] and I sit beside her wondering whether George Eliot will deign to notice me. There she stands quietly, speaking earnestly to Adolphus Trollope, while Lewes hovers near, calling her attention to the exquisite beauty of the lights and shades made by the moon. One by one the guests are presented to the author of AB who receives all with shrinking diffidence; more and more I wonder if Mr Trollope will remember the American girl in the corner – a nobody. There I sit growing very dejected when the host offers his arm to George Eliot and they walk towards a Madonna which is above my head. They stop to admire the work; the host discovers me. I am introduced and my heart beats quickly as George Eliot takes my hand and seats herself beside me, expressing interest in all young girls who aspire to lead wider lives than those carved out by society […] Her eyes are pale blue, her mouth large and sensitive, her teeth large and white. (Field 1880, 5)

Horner, the first translator of Villari’s work (1863), for example, was introduced to Villari by Gino Capponi in the autumn of 1861. Villari escorted Horner to San Marco in October 1861 to visit Savonarola’s convent. 33 John Chapman was a friend of Eliot and Lewes and publisher of the Trollopes, himself a supporter of Italy’s independence.

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204   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe From Field we know that Villari was an habitué in the Villino (1864, 666). Villari was a close friend of the Trollopes. He had just published his first volume of the Storia di Girolamo Savonarola (1859) and was about to publish the second (1861). To him, Field wrote, ‘we owe in great part the revival of Savonarola’s memory […] this history was published in 1859, and it may be that R is the flower of the sombre Southern plant [i.e. Villari]. Genius requires but a suggestion to create, though indeed Lewes may have anticipated Villari’ (1864, 666). Eliot and Lewes left Florence on 1 June 1860 with plans to come back to Florence in the autumn, probably with Anthony Trollope, who in fact visited Florence in October 1860.34 The plan, however, was not realized. Eliot and Lewes went back to Florence only the following year soon after the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy on 17 March 1861. They stayed for five weeks at the Hotel Vittoria on the Lungarno. For three weeks they remained in town, visiting galleries, museums and reading in libraries, looking for material for the ‘romance’ Eliot had decided to write. When Thomas Trollope returned from England, he persuaded the Leweses to accompany him on an expedition to two famous Tuscan monasteries: La Verna and Camaldoli. Their meeting the previous year had been a success. Both Eliot and Lewes liked Trollope and his wife very much. They appreciated the way they had been welcomed by the Anglo-Florentines. Only Frances Power Cobbe refused to be introduced to Eliot because she had, in her words, ‘a very strong old-fashioned prejudice in favour of lawful matrimony and against such unions as hers […] What infinite pity it was that her real genius allied itself in such base fashion’ (Cobbe 1894, 111). The company that Eliot and Lewes kept – the Trollopes, Kate Field, the Brownings, especially Villari who was in a liaison with a married woman – permitted them to present themselves socially as a couple. During the second half of their stay in Florence, Eliot and Lewes spent every evening at the Villino, sitting out on the loggia and talking to droppersin. On 2 June 1861, Eliot was at the Villino, this time for a special occasion. On 10 December 1861 she wrote to Trollope, ‘Say a kind word for me sometimes to the bright-eyed lady by whose side I sat in your balcony the evening of the National Fete. At the moment I cannot recall her name’ (Trollope 1887, vol. 2, 310). The ‘national fete’ was ‘la festa nazionale del Regno d’Italia’, the first feast of Italian unification, which in May 1861 the Senate had decreed should fall on the first Sunday of June each year – as it still does. Many Anglo-Florentines celebrated the feast of unification at the Villino Trollope, for which occasion Trollope had asked ‘the Leweses’ to remain one week longer in Florence. The lady by whose side Eliot sat on June 2, Trollope explains, was the attractive and interesting Margherita Mignaty. Wife of the Greek painter George Mignaty, who painted the Brownings’ sitting room at 34

Before leaving Florence on 1 June to visit Ferrara, the birthplace of Savonarola, they had gone on an expedition to Siena. On that occasion they passed La Romola, residence of Machiavelli and also the place where Tassi, the editor of Alfieri’s work, had been buried.

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Romola in England and Italy (1868–1924)   205 Casa Guidi, she was a very close friend of Theodosia Trollope and Villari’s mistress. While depicting the atmosphere of the Villino Trollope in 1863, De Gubernatis gives a portrait of the lady who caught Eliot’s eye. The mixture of love and pride captured by De Gubernatis makes us think of Romola: Margherita Mignaty-Albana from Corfu was a noble lady of supreme sentiment and intellect; she sat on her antique sofa as on a throne; she had a sort of circlet on her head, which gave her a royal appearance and made her dark hair and high forehead stand out; her large, very black eyes were aflame, her mouth had a certain disdainful expression, which might have led to think of her as proud; but although she had great self-esteem she also showed admirable goodness […] Her intellectual and moral qualities appeared to me so much greater than the physical.35

In later years, Eliot remained in contact with most of the Italian patriots she knew in London and the people she had met in Florence. Arrivabene visited her in 1861 and in 1863; they met again in Italy in 1864. Kate Field visited Eliot in 1872 in London, as did Blagden. Villari was in London in 1862. Thomas Trollope, however, was the person to whom she remained closest. He visited Eliot in London in 1862 and Eliot and Lewes spent one week in Trollope’s new Florentine home in Ricorboli in 1869, when Florence was the capital of Italy. Eliot continued to correspond with him and his second wife in the following years. The conversations with Trollope were particularly relevant to the composition of R. ‘I had much talk with Eliot when she was maturing her novel R,’ Trollope wrote (Trollope 1887, vol. 2, 283–84). While Eliot was in Florence, Trollope, as historian of Florence, was preparing A History of the Commonwealth of Florence to the Fall of the Republic in 1531 (1865). As a novelist he was about to publish La Beata. A Tuscan Romeo and Juliet (1862). What has not been noted is that A Tuscan Romeo and Juliet was not a subtitle for La Beata. A Tuscan Romeo and Juliet was a separate ‘romance’ written earlier and set in thirteenth-century Florence, in which the Bardi family features with Bardo Bardi as one of the main characters. The similarities between the passages about the history of the Bardi family in Trollope’s novel and the opening of Chapter 5 of R are striking. We know Eliot had discussed La Beata with Trollope. Trollope’s influence on the writing of R has passed unnoticed. His friendship with Eliot deserves closer attention. For present purposes, however,

35

‘Margherita Mignaty era una nobile Corfiotta, di cuore e d’ intelletto sovrano; sedeva sopra il suo canapè come sopra un trono; portava in capo una specie di diadema, che le dava un aspetto regale, anzi imperatorio, e faceva meglio risaltare la sua chioma corvina e l’ alta fronte ; gli occhi grandi e nerìssimi fiammeggiavano, la bocca aveva una certa piega disdegnosa, che poteva farla credere superba; ma, se essa avea grandi fierezze, rivelò pure squisite bontà […] In lei le qualità intellettuali e morali m’erano apparse tanto superiori alle fisiche e così predominanti’ (Angelo De Gubernatis, Fibra: Pagine di ricordi (Rome: Forzari e C. Tipografi del Senato, 1990), pp. 199–200).

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206   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe the following portrait that he painted of Eliot serves as an indication how close they were: The power of her [i.e. George Eliot’s] intelligence; the precision, the promptitude, the rapidity (though her manner was by no means rapid), the largeness of the field of knowledge, the compressed outcome of which she was at any moment ready to bring to bear on the topic in hand; the sureness and lucidity of her induction; the clearness of vision, to which muddle was as impossible and abhorrent as a vacuum is supposed to be to nature, and all this lighted up and gilded by an infinite sense of, and capacity for, humour, – this is what rendered her to me a marvel, and an object of inexhaustible study and admiration. (Trollope 1887, vol. 2, 286)

Conclusion The success of the early reception of R in Italy was due to Eliot’s concern with the Italian cause and her interest in the ideas which had led Aquarone in 1857–58 and Villari in 1859–61 to write their biographies of Savonarola.36 Through her contacts with Italian patriots in London and with the help of the Anglo-Florentines, and Thomas Trollope in particular, she had – to use a word she liked – ‘absorbed’ Italian aspirations, shared the revolutionary dream of independence and unity and had lovingly acquainted herself with Italy and the Florentine past. In writing R, Eliot engaged with what she had been interested in for many years: evangelism, spiritual reform, the role of women, the place of the artist in society, the struggle for independence and what was at the time conceived as the development of the European mind. The history of Savonarola provided the perfect setting for developing these themes in literary form. Strafforello appreciated this. Mazzini, Aquarone, Arrivabene and Alberto Mario also understood that R was written for the benefit of Italians and mankind. Aquarone’s introduction to his Vita di Jeronimo Savonarola (1857–58) gives us a further sense of how important Savonarola was for Italian patriots. The introduction, written in 1856 at the time in which the Lorraine were still in power, came under censure because Aquarone had presented Savonarola not only as a monk but as a politician and citizen. Savonarola embodied, in Aquarone’s view, a moment of crisis in the history of Florence. Either the family of Medici was going to expire, or the life and freedom of the Florentines would end. This became clear, he explained, at the death of Lorenzo il Magnifico and during the conflict that ended 40 years later. He [i.e. Savonarola] fell and was defeated […] because he happened to live during the Papacy of Alexander VI. With Gregory VII he would have triumphed […] He educated the generation which fought the last fight of the republic […] Now our era looks for Faith, Hope and Charity with the yearning of a thirsty man [...] The chain broken by negation three hundred years ago must be reconstructed and

36

Villari’s book was reviewed on 7 September 1861 in the Spectator. It had two translators and went into seven or eight editions.

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Romola in England and Italy (1868–1924)   207 human tradition reinstated. We must look back at the fifteenth century, which ended a world about to die while our century is close to a world about to ‘resuscitate’, to be born again: both troubled and troubling worlds, the former because of the convulsions of agony, the latter because of the sweats and pains of delivery.37

This preface was censured because Savonarola was presented as having fought the last battle for Florentine republicanism. Was it perhaps an inspiration or a starting point for the proem in R? Aquarone’s biography circulated in Florence during Eliot’s first and second visit,38 but we do not know whether George Eliot read it. However, she certainly knew Thomas Trollope’s enthusiasm for the Florentine republic, before papal and imperial despotism had killed all noble sentiment, and made virtue impossible […] the real spring-tide of modern Italian civilization, long anterior to that so-called Renaissance period which has so generally and so erroneously been considered such. That so celebrated sixteenthcentury epoch of Renaissance was unquestionably the birth-time of much in Italy; but it was the death-time of much more: and that which was being new born in art, in literature, in thought, became the heritage of transalpine Europe, the starting point of new civilizations, and thus made the renown and glory of ‘the renaissance’. Europe gathered the ripe fruits which dropped from the tree of Italian civilization on the eve of its own decay. (Trollope 1862, 260).39

R was successful in Italy because it echoed some of these ideas by Italians and Anglo-Florentines. It was popular also because, in Field’s words, ‘the deep research and knowledge of medieval life and manners displayed’ were ‘cause of wonderment to erudite Florentines, who have lived to learn from a foreigner’ (1864, 666). In due course, R was regarded as a text which kept alive the Florence ‘scomparsa’ (disappeared), that is, Florence as it had been before

37

‘Se miseramente cadde soppraffatto nell’opera tentata, gli è perchè vise pontificando Alessandro VI; mentre, di certo, nato nell’XI secolo – papa Gregorio VII– avrebbe trionfato […] Si era valso ad educare la generazione che combattè l’ultima battaglia della repubblica […] Ciò sente l’età nostra, la quale ricerca con la bramosia dell’assetato e la fede e la speranza e la carità […] La catena de’ secoli spezzata da trecent’anni di negazione, va riannestata; e si ha a continuare la tradizione umana. Ci è d’uopo pertanto risalire sinoal secoloXV: il quale conchiuse un mondo che aveva a spegnersi mentre il nostro invece sta al limitie di un mondo che risorge: ambedue travagliati e travagliosi – il primo per le convulsion dell’agonia, il secondo per i sudati spasimi del parto’ (5–6). 38 See the correspondence in Gabinetto Vieusseux. Giovan Pietro Vieusseux corresponded with Aquarone in 1858 about the latter’s life of Savonarola and the introduction which had been censured; Aquarone gave 100 copies of his book on Savonarola to Vieusseux to distribute (Copialettere Vieusseux XXX, 21 luglio 1858, 2360). 39 This passage is taken from A Tuscan Romeo and Juliet written by Trollope earlier than La Beata (1861) and first published together with the second edition of the latter (1862). Eliot took the idea of the Bardi family from A Tuscan Romeo and Juliet. See above.

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208   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe 1864, when it became the capital of Italy and for that reason had to undergo a savage transformation and the destruction of her ancient walls. Small wonder then, given the literary and historical context in which Eliot developed her ideas for the novel, that R proved a success in Italy between 1863 and 1924.

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11

George Eliot in Spain María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia

The reception of George Eliot in Spain can be traced following various interconnected paths.1 If chronological order is to be followed, one of the issues which may have determined Eliot’s influence in Spanish literature is her enduring curiosity regarding Spanish culture and history – a pervasive inquisitiveness that was shared with George Henry Lewes. Their intellectual interests motivated them to visit many European countries, and, in 1866, led them to learn more about Spanish heritage while journeying, for intellectual and health reasons, to Spain. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the reception the Leweses experienced when visiting the country, while bearing in mind that recognition of the couple was limited as they mostly travelled incognito. Subsequently in this chapter, due attention will be paid to the recognition of their respective works and influence in Spanish contemporary intellectual life, namely in journals and in the literary productions of eminent Spanish writers. Lastly, the reception of Eliot’s texts will be illustrated by an analysis of the various editions and translations of her texts into Spanish. George Eliot had an early interest in Spanish literature. At the age of 20 she had already mentioned her enthusiasm for ‘standard works whose contents are matter of constant reference’ (letter to Sarah Lewis, 16 March 1839, in Cross 1885, 1: 36), and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote was among the selection of books she owned at the time, which also included Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas, poetry by Lord Byron and Robert Southey, and Walter Scott’s novels and poems. Don Quixote, the character, was also a constant, influential element in her imagination, mentioned in conversations with Lewes and in her journal while in Germany in 1858 (Cross 1885, 2: 34). Furthermore, both Eliot and Lewes used the novel Don Quixote in order to improve their competence in the Spanish language while travelling in England in 1864 (Cross 1885, 2: 284), which no doubt indicates that preparations for their visit to Spain were made well in advance. Eliot’s letters and journals provide information about her keen interest in ‘Spanish subjects’ (Cross 1885, 2: 318), her ‘fits of Spanish history’

1

This research has been carried out within the funded project of the Spanish Government FFI-2012-35872 and ERDF, which is hereby gratefully acknowledged.

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210   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe (letter to Sarah Hennell, 2 October 1864, in Cross 1885, 2: 282), and the various sources she used for information before visiting Spain in 1866. Their reading matter is indicative of their serious preparation for the journey, and this prior knowledge, together with her subsequent first-hand experience of Spain, may have paved the way for Eliot’s drama SG or for DD. Some of their reading matter was by contemporary European and American scholars, such as George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature (1849) (Cross 1885, 2: 322), Friederich Bouterwek’s Geschichte der Spanischen Poesie und Beredsamkeit (History of Spanish Literature and Eloquence) (1804), Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi’s De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe (History of Spanish and Portuguese literature) (1813), George Bernard Depping’s Histoire générale de l’Espagne (A general history of Spain) (1811), or Juan Antonio Llorente’s History of the Inquisition in Spain (1826) (Cross 1885, 2: 322, 318; and 3: 68). Most of these texts were published in English, although some were translations from other languages. Additionally, Eliot may have read not only these well-known histories of Spanish literature and culture but also monographs or editions of particular texts by the same authors, for example, George Bernard Depping’s edition of Romancero castellano (Castillian romances) (1844) and his Les juifs dans le moyen âge (The Jews in the middle ages) (1834), or Bouterwek’s German translation of Cervantes’s short farce El juez de los divorcios (The judge of divorces) (1803). There is evidence that she read not only criticism on Spanish literature but also primary texts, including ‘Spanish ballads on Bernardo del Carpio’ (Cross 1885, 2: 322), a text depicting the different ethnic cultures living in Spain at the time, which were connected with both the gypsy ballad tradition and the Sephardic folk literature, since del Carpio fought against the Moors for King Alfonso II. Eliot must have been fully aware of Lewes’s reading and the expertise required in the preparation of his own book on Spanish golden age plays, The Spanish Drama: Lope de Vega and Calderón (1846), which might have proved fruitful when encouraging Eliot’s writing of SG. There is also evidence that both Eliot and Lewes had read travel books about Spain: they often used lodgings recommended in Richard Ford’s A Handbook for Travellers in Spain, and Readers at Home (1845), such as Parador Real in San Sebastián (Ford 1966, 3: 1406–07), Fonda de San Luis in Lérida (3: 1438), Fonda de las cuatro naciones in Barcelona (2: 717), Fonda del vapor in Alicante (2: 633) and Fonda Ortiz in Granada’s Alhambra (2: 538), and Lewes even quoted some of Ford’s words in his journal entry on 5 March 1867 (Clarke and Dadson 2012, 248; Ford 1966, 3: 1119). Additionally, in a letter to Frederick Harrison, Eliot rejects Henry George Harrington’s opinion regarding means of transport between Malaga and Granada, saying that what Henry Blackburn had published in Travelling in Spain in the Present Day (1866) was untrue (Haight 1954–56, 4: 343–45). After having visited France, Holland, Germany, Italy and other European countries on research trips, it was only natural for Eliot and Lewes to come to Spain for both intellectual and medical reasons: on the one hand in order to look for material and inspiration for the completion of SG, and on the other for medical reasons, so that Lewes could recover from his health problems. In late December 1866 they started their journey from the south of England, travelling via Paris, Bordeaux, Biarritz and Pau. The first city they visited

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George Eliot in Spain   211 in Spain was San Sebastian, and later they travelled to eastern and southern parts of the country including Zaragoza, Lérida, Barcelona, Alicante, Málaga, Granada, Seville, Cordova and Madrid, departing in 1867 having spent two and a half months in Spain. While travelling, on 21 February 1867, in a letter to John Blackwood, Eliot wrote: We are both heartily rejoiced that we came to Spain. It was a great longing of mine, for, three years ago, I began to interest myself in Spanish history and literature, and have had a work lying by me, the subject of which is connected with Spain. Whether I shall ever bring it to maturity so as to satisfy myself sufficiently to print it is a question not settled, but it is a work very near my heart. (Cross 1885, 3: 7–8; and Haight 1954–56, 4: 347–49)

As was customary with many important figures, they chose to travel incognito so that they could rest when they needed to and avoid unpleasant questions concerning their marital status, as well as the potential nuisance of fans – as had arisen in Granada, when Lewes decided to write his name legibly, for once, at the hotel registration, in order to make themselves known and for future reference. As a consequence they were recognized by American tourists, who returned the following day and asked Eliot for her autograph (Lewes’s letter to his son Charles, 18 February 1867, in Haight 1954–56, 4: 345–47). This detail indicates that they were famous as a couple, and that Eliot’s work was well known in North America. Nothing is mentioned regarding their literary reputation among Spanish readers. As far as Spanish cultural and literary life is concerned, the Leweses made the most of their journey, visiting historic sites and museums, attending plays and gypsy dances, when available, and reading aloud contemporary texts by reputable novelists. Regarding the possible influence of the paintings the couple admired in Spain, there is evidence that they enjoyed pictures shown in the Cathedral of Seville, particularly those by the baroque painter Juan de Valdés Leal, featuring a noble Virgin Mary and an energetic Isabel, and Bartolomé Murillo’s Saint Anthony’s Vision (Clarke and Dadson 2012, 242–45). While in Seville, accompanied by the Beckers – whom they had met earlier in their trip – they also visited the Academy, now the Museum of Bellas Artes, where many pictures by Murillo and Francisco de Zurbarán were hung around the walls. They noted Murillo’s Saint Thomas Giving Alms (1678) and Zurbarán’s Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Apotheosis (1631); one wonders if they were able to see Doménikos Theotokópoulos’s (El Greco’s) Portrait of Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli (1597–1603), formerly considered a self-portrait, though now believed to represent his son, which is also on display in this museum. The next visit in their Seville tour was to the Charity Hospital, in which they were able to appreciate Murillo’s Moses Striking the Rock (1666), and The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes (1670) as well as the sculptures by Pedro Roldán on the main altar. When in Madrid they went to the Museo del Prado every day. Eliot wrote to Barbara Bodichon that the paintings both at this gallery and in Seville were ‘enough to justify Western civilization, with all its faults’ (Haight 1955, 4: 351). The Prado paintings that Lewes pondered were by both Spanish and Italian artists. Regarding Spanish masterpieces, those mentioned

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212   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe by the visitors are Murillo’s The Holy Family with a Little Bird (c. 1650), The Virgin Appears to Saint Bernard (1655) and The Immaculate Conception (c. 1678), and various Velázquez paintings. It is unclear which of the four Madonnas by Murillo held in the Prado was seen by the couple, although Clarke suggests that it may be the one known as Escurial Immaculate Conception (Clarke and Dadson 2012, 248, n. 469). The Velázquez paintings most admired by the Leweses were The Triumph of Bacchus or The Drinkers (1628–29), The Surrender of Breda or the Lances (1635), Aesop (c. 1638), Philip IV (1654), Las Meninas (1656) and Menippus (c. 1638), and The Triton Fountain in the Garden of Aranjuez (1657) attributed to his collaborators. Concerning Italian paintings, Lewes emphasizes their interest for Veronese, for Titian’s Emperor Charles V on Horseback at Mühlberg (1548) and The Bacchanal of the Andrians (1523–26), and for The Virgin and Child between Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Roque (c. 1510), at the time attributed to Giorgione and now considered an early Titian (Clarke and Dadson 2012, 248). Lewes mentions that he is unable to take down everything or even half of what they have seen in Madrid and that the gallery is the best they have ever seen (Clarke and Dadson 2012, 249). Eliot herself also mentions their experience in the Prado in a letter to Mrs Richard Congreve (Haight 1954–56, 4: 349), and in another message to John Blackwood (351–52) confesses that, due to health reasons, they resisted the temptation of visiting Toledo and the north. Among many other things, she may have been conscious of the paintings by El Greco that they missed in that Castilian city, as well as the opportunity of perceiving the flavour of various cultures in Toledo. One of the first books that Eliot read aloud in order to polish her Spanish while travelling was La gaviota (The sea-gull) – a novel originally composed in French by the Swiss-born writer Cecilia Böhl de Faber (Fernán Caballero) – which had been translated into Spanish by José Joaquín de Mora and published in installments in the newspaper El Heraldo in 1849, although Eliot may have read the 1861 book edition revised by Caballero herself. It is quite significant that the English novelist wanted to become familiar with this cosmopolitan novelist based in Spain, and who had introduced realism in the novel to her adopted country. No wonder Eliot (1819–1880) perceived the parallels between her own career in England and those of George Sand (1804–1876) in France and Fernán Caballero (1786–1877) in Spain. As their respective working lives attest, these three female writers were writing almost in the same period, and might have suffered similar negative criticism regarding their literary professions to the extent that the three of them decided to use masculine pseudonyms. There are even indications that Eliot might have chosen her pen name based not only on Lewes’s first name but also on that used by George Sand (Ashton 1997, 166, 354), whose Lettres d’un voyageur (1837) she was already reading by 1848 (Cross 1885, 1: 122). Moreover, when travelling to Spain, Lewes bought a second novel by Fernán Caballero, La estrella de Vandalia (The star of Vandalia) (1855), which indicated a clear interest on their part in this particular writer, who had written a novel with a rural setting, which Eliot herself would depict in her future novels (Clarke and Dadson 2012, 204). Eliot and Lewes were also rereading Alain-René Lesage’s French picaresque novel Gil Blas de Santillana

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George Eliot in Spain   213 (1715–35), in Spanish, as it had a native theme and had been translated into Spanish by P. José Francisco de Isla in 1787–88, and – although unavailable in San Sebastián – they had been able to buy it in Zaragoza. In this city Eliot asked after Libro de la Vida (The life of Teresa de Jesús) (1562) by Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–82), whom she would eventually compare with Dorothea Brooke in M (1871–72). For a scholar such as Lewes, who had published on Spanish drama, it was only natural to seek out contemporary Spanish plays and theatrical audiences. Thus the first play they attended in Spain, on 26 January 1867, was the comedy Oros, copas, espadas y bastos (Pentacles, wands, cups and swords) by Luis Mariano de Larra (son of the famous Romantic essayist Mariano José de Larra), which they found enjoyable and bought a copy of some days later in Barcelona. They also attended a Spanish ‘zarzuela’ (opera) by the same author, La conquista de Madrid (The conquest of Madrid) (1863), and another by Luis Olona and Francisco Asenjo Barbieri, Mis dos mujeres (My two women), all presented while they were in the Catalonian capital – although they were devoted spectators of whatever play was announced in the cities they visited in Spain. Apart from all the aforementioned instances of Eliot and Lewes’s keen interest in the contemporary Spanish literary scene, by the time they decided to go south Eliot had already expressed her interest in Spanish literature and gypsy culture in MF (1860), and it is clear that she continued to read about Spain even after her visit to the country, while completing SG (1868). Some of the texts she was reading, or even rereading, in late 1867 were about history, the role of Jews in Spain and the history of knowledge – for example, William Hickling Prescott’s History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (1842) and Eliakim Carmoly’s Histoire des médecins juifs anciens et modernes (History of ancient and modern Jewish doctors) (1844) (Cross 1885, 3: 15), as well as Ernest Renan’s Averroès et l’averroïsm (Averroës and Averroism) (1866) (Cross 1885, 3: 15, 20). As a former translator of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), Eliot was familiar with his biography, and how – as a Jew – he had been persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition. She was also aware that when he fled to Holland, he was to suffer harsh criticism by Orthodox Jews there. M (1872), DD (1876) and SG (1868), which all appeared after her experience of travelling in Spain, include many references to this southern culture and literature, as was customary in other nineteenth-century novels by Charles Dickens and Walter Scott. Furthermore, Eliot had a thorough knowledge of gypsy heritage in Europe, Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen (1847) and George Borrow’s The Zincali (1841) included. These texts would be direct influences on her verse drama, but Cervantes’s La gitanilla (The Little Gypsy Girl) (1613), which she had read (Cross 1885, 1: 73) would find more direct parallels in SG, complemented by her direct observations in Spain. Eliot was so interested in gypsy culture that she deemed it ‘the genuine Spanish life’ (Haight 1954–56, 4: 341), and she was profoundly impressed by gypsy folklore in the Albaicín (Granada) (Haight 1954–56, 4: 346; Sierra 2007). Eliot’s interest in Spanish gypsies was in tune with that of other European writers and intellectuals who came to the south in order to explore their culture and the fascination elicited by their art and family life. Several authors have viewed this fascination as a European construct which proved fruitful

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214   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe in nineteenth-century French and English literature. The titles of the most recent pieces of criticism are self-explanatory in this sense: SG: The History of a European Obsession (Charnon-Deutsch 2004), The Gypsy as a Trope in Victorian and Modern Literature (Bardi 2008) and Gypsies and the British Imagination 1807–1930 (Nord 2013). Obviously, Eliot’s SG participates in this fashion and pays homage to the culture of this ethnic group, and it is surprising that the text has not so far – to the best of my knowledge – been issued in Spanish. This may be on account of the difficulty of translating poetry; however, it must also be recognized that some of Eliot’s novels have only been published in Spanish in the twenty-first century, and other fictional, poetic and essay-based texts remain untranslated. It has been claimed that DD has an unnoticed Spanish reference in its very title, as the family name of the protagonist may stand for a demonym or gentilic word reflecting his origin from the city of Ronda (i.e. ‘de Ronda’, from Ronda) (McMullen 1997, 125). However, other critics find this statement inconsistent for different reasons, namely that in the text there is no other reference to Ronda, and that the Leweses did not visit the city during their tour of Andalusia (Clarke and Dadson 2012, 186). Moreover, in the novel Daniel Deronda is said to belong to Portuguese Sefardi Jews, and his family name is specified as ‘Morteira’, which has a Portuguese or even Galician origin but which does not look like an Andalusian family or place name. All in all, Eliot and Lewes’s visit to Spain was to have important intellectual effects, as both writers were very attentive to the Spanish ethnographic, cultural and literary situation. Although SG is considered to be derived from Spanish sources, Eliot herself indicated that she found part of the inspiration for the theme of this drama in Italy, namely in the Tintoretto Annunciation fresco in the Scuola San Rocco at Venice in 1864 (Cross 1885, 1: 9–10). In it the novelist perceived a young woman – whose destiny in life would be changed by superior beings without her active intervention – and immediately connected it with the heroine in Euripides’s Iphigenia, in which a young maiden consents to being sacrificed in order to prevent more deaths among her people – dying heroically, rather than unwillingly. As Eliot herself indicates, it was in that very moment that she decided that this text had to be situated in ancient and difficult times in a southern country, and with a female Spaniard belonging to a minority ethnic community as the protagonist: I came home with this in my mind, meaning to give it motive and clothing in some suitable set of historical and local conditions – My reflections brought me nothing that would serve me except that moment in Spanish history when the struggle with the Moors was attaining its climax, & when there was the Gypsy race present under such conditions as would enable me to get my heroine and the hereditary claim on her amongst the gypsies. (Cross 1885, 2: 280)

The Influence of George Eliot on Spanish Writers The influence of Eliot and Lewes’s works on the Spanish literary readership may be seen not only in their effects on subsequent texts by peninsular writers

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George Eliot in Spain   215 but also in the analysis of these British authors in the Spanish literary press. Both are regularly referred to in journals in a laudatory manner due to their literary and intellectual achievements. Lewes had a reputation as a philosopher and a scientist. In an article signed ‘X.X.X.’, echoing the launching of the Fortnightly Review (1865), Lewes is considered a radical, although he is said to admit other positions (X.X.X. 1867, 299). In continental Spain the newspaper La época (‘[Untitled]’ 1875), quoting a recent essay by Leon Dumont,2 portrayed Lewes as a modern philosopher. Another review in La época (‘Goethe’ 1882, 4) includes a biographical article commemorating the 50th anniversary of J. Wolfgang Goethe’s death, reproducing newspaper features which appeared in the German Review of Arts, Literature and Science based in Leipzig. In this brief homage, Lewes’s words in his biography of the author of Werther and Faust are highlighted. In Revista de Andalucía he is also reviewed as a specialist in Goethe (González Serrano 1879, 87). Copies of Eliot and Lewes’s works in English were ordered in Madrid in 1876 by learned societies such as the Ateneo científico, literario y artístico de Madrid (Scientific, literary and artistic society of Madrid), which received a copy of Lewes’s On Actors and the Arts of Acting in the Leipzig edition of 1875 (González Burgos 1876, 60), and one of Eliot’s DD by the same German publisher (47). Distinguished members of the society in that year were José Echegaray, playwright and future Nobel laureate in literature (in 1904), and the intellectual and literary historian José Amador de los Ríos. Many other Spanish nineteenth-century writers and intellectuals read and commented upon works by Eliot and Lewes. As an example, an article by Francisco de Asís Pacheco which appeared in El imparcial on 28 August 1876 analyses the ongoing debate on metaphysics and experimentation that had arisen from Lewes’s ‘Spiritualism and Materialism’ (1876a; also published as ‘El espiritualismo y el materialismo’ (1876b)) in the Madrid Ateneo Society (González Burgos 1876, 37). Additionally, on 28 December 1880 the daily El imparcial published anonymously a short but highly praising obituary note on Eliot, comparing her with Balzac and George Sand, emphasizing the philosophical approach in her texts and highlighting that nobody would have imagined she was a female writer (‘[Obituary note]’ 1880). An interesting reference appears in the journal La época (22 October 1893), in an article by E. Gómez de Baquero, in which various essays by Sir John Lubbock are reviewed extensively, one of them being The Origin of Civilization. This Spanish journal reproduces the list of 100 good books recommended by Lubbock, in which both Lewes’s A Biographical History of Philosophy (1845–46) and Eliot’s AB are included and equated with Greek and Roman classics and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Likewise, the Spanish press echoes the different disciplines in which Lewes had produced relevant scientific treatises, such as his posthumously published Study of Psychology (1879), edited by Eliot, and analysed for Spanish journal readers (Pacheco 1879, 379). His work is studied in Théodule Ribot’s La psychologie anglaise contemporaine and reviewed in a 2

‘La metafísica positivista en Inglaterra’ (Positivist metaphysics in England), published in Revista Europea, Madrid, 5.71 (Leon Dumont 1875, 23).

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216   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe journal with a Spanish, Argentinian and Cuban readership in a positive way, privileging English psychologists over German specialists (Revilla, 118). In other Latin American publications, such as Revista de Cuba, his theories on the human nervous systems are also appraised (Verona 1881, 178). In the early twentieth century both Eliot and Lewes appear as singular figures in the Hispanic media. In 1932 the cultural section of the Madrid newspaper El sol printed an essay by the eminent Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, in which Lewes’s Biographical History of Philosophy is excerpted. In an article advocating the necessity of feminism, León Roch (Francisco Pérez Mateos’s nom de plume) mentions some of the women writers active in this area, and includes Madame de Stäel, George Eliot, George Sand and Pardo Bazán (Roch 1900, 1). Aside from this example, it is quite often unclear for the Spanish audience whether they are reading about a male or a female writer. In La época (23 August 1902), ‘AB, de Jorge Eliot’ is the only indication received by readers in an article by the novelist Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo in which provincial novelists are privileged as the ones who presented life in its real form. It is difficult to know whether journalists or intellectuals had a clear knowledge that her pen name represented a female writer who had revealed her authorship many decades earlier; in one instance she is referred to, with Dickens, using the masculine form of the article – ‘un Dickens o un Jorge Eliot’ (‘Actualidad extranjera’ 1914). However, two years later, in a review article on English contemporary literature, Ángel Guerra (1916, 3) states clearly that we are before a female writer who is characterized as austere.3 In 1919 another Madrid newspaper mentions Eliot’s name among those of outstanding British novelists (E.D.C. 1919, 5). She also appears alongside major British and American writers on the syllabus taught by an instructor from Smith College, USA of female students in Madrid who were registered at the active Junta de ampliación de estudios (Society for extra-mural studies) (‘Curso de conferencias’ 1919, 10). Eliot was not only present in the Spanish literary press but in periodicals published in Latin American countries, particularly in the leading cultural capitals of Argentina and Cuba. This may be due not only to their Spanish influences but also to the fact that they received information from both European and North American cultural elites regarding the importance of the author. Thus Eliot is mentioned as a major writer together with Lewes in the Buenos Aires journal Caras y Caretas (‘Algunos’ 1903, 60). In the same publication some years later, she is compared with Dickens and Scott, and a complete biography of the author of M is offered to the Argentinian public (‘Biblioteca internacional’ 1910, 69). Moreover, in Havana she was presented as an antecedent of the suffragettes, and her works reviewed in Cuba contemporánea together with those of Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand (L. de A. 1919, 440). Many more references to both Eliot and Lewes could be excerpted from Spanish and Latin American publications – especially to Lewes, who is often referred to as a 3

‘[Los personajes ingleses] llevan en si el sello espiritual de la Inglaterra verdaderamente inglesa, que cantaran poetas como Wordsworth o Tennyson y que estudiaran tan admirablemente desde Macaulay a Carlyle y que retratara de modo tan pictórico el chispeante Dickens y la austera George Eliot.’

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George Eliot in Spain   217 leading scientist. On the whole, although the presence of both is widespread, Eliot’s role is more often represented in the Spanish press as a subsidiary one – that of a wife – and not as that of a major writer. This confirms her own view that gender was a key issue in the reception of literary works by women, and this factor mediated at least her early presence in the Spanish cultural world. Another major issue to be tackled when dealing with the reception of a writer in another country is her influence on the writers of the target culture. In this respect, the influence of Eliot has been analysed in relation to several nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish writers. A case in point is Juan Valera Alcalá-Galiano (1824–1905), a writer, editor and diplomat who, due to his political activities in many European and American capitals, might have been aware of the literary relevance of both Eliot and Lewes. As the author of Pepita Jiménez (1874) and Doña Luz (1879) he is indirectly related to Lewes’s analytical philosophy by Leopoldo García-Alas Ureña in an article in the journal La Unión (Clarín 1878, 2). José María de Pereda (1833–1906), another distinguished Spanish novelist, followed the path trodden by Eliot in developing the rural novel, with his text Peñas arriba (Up the peaks) (1895) being representative of the characteristic realism of nineteenth-century regional novels. His masterpiece, Sotileza (Subtlety [female nickname]) (1884), together with La puchera (The stew pot) (1889), presents the values of lower-class life in marine environments. Another influence of Eliot’s can be perceived in the work of Leopoldo García-Alas Ureña (1852–1901), a highly distinguished novelist who wrote under the name of Clarín. He is the author of La regenta (The magistrate’s wife) (1884–85), which has been described as being somewhat indebted to Eliot’s M (Furst 2000; Valis 2000; Round 2002). Although there is no clear evidence that Clarín might have had direct access to Eliot’s text while writing, Nicholas G. Round notes the parallel structures of the heroines’ lives, both frustrated by their environments and by undesirable marriages, with indifferent old husbands in their respective conservative provincial towns (680). He compares the broken Bildungsroman of the female characters depicted by these two provincial writers with cosmopolitan European educations, who were able to integrate the local and the global in their respective narrations. Moreover, Round advocates that the story of an Englishman called Mr Brooke that appears in the Spanish novel (Clarín 1987, 1: 370) may be reminiscent of the Leweses’ visit to Granada, as the story is set in the Albaicín and the protagonist – who shares the surname with Dorothea Brooke – ultimately marries his gypsy partner (682). Finally, there is a possibility that this Spanish novelist had access to information about Eliot and/or M through London- or German-based Spanish intellectuals with whom Clarín was well connected, although no precise evidence has been found in this respect. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is another leading Spanish realist novelist who seems to have been in dialogue with Eliot’s novels, in Bakhtinian terms, particularly with DD, as he published several masterpieces in which he confronted anti-Semitism, namely Gloria (1877), Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–87) and Misericordia (Mercy) (1897). According to Margaret A. Ballantyne (1990, 335), Galdós was an Anglophile. In fact, he praised English culture and politics in La Revista de España, for which he was editor between 1862 and 1863. Two years later, after a trip to Paris, he translated Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers into

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218   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Spanish, presumably from French, and he travelled several times to the United Kingdom, his first trip being in 1883. Although his literary inspiration may have come from sources other than Eliot, it is possible that he had contact with her novels and her literary fame in his international life. The truth is that he shared some of her literary topics, namely the use of characters from the lower classes in realistic contexts, together with the defence of Jews, in some of his novels. Almudena, the heroine of Misericordia, is a female Jew who acts as a spokesperson for human rights, non-discrimination and universal understanding; in Fortunata y Jacinta, minor characters of a Marrano origin are depicted, and in Gloria the prosecution of Jews is criticized. Moreover, Spanish Jews and converts were praised in Galdos’s texts ‘as exponents of liberal ideas’ (Shepard 1993, 150). Another parallel between the two writers is suggested by Nicholas G. Round (2002, 608) regarding M’s heroine and that of Tristana (1892), both of whom are young ladies who live with old men but want to be independent and lead different lives, although their expectations are somewhat frustrating. Lastly, due attention has to be paid to Eliot’s influence on Spanish female writers, and particularly on Galician writers, as is the case with Emilia Pardo Bazán (1852–1921) and Rosalía de Castro (1837–1885). Pardo Bazán was an outstanding Spanish novelist and essayist who echoed some of Eliot’s texts in different literary genres. The first common feature is that Pardo Bazán uses characteristics of Eliot’s rural novel in MF (1860) for her work Los pazos de Ulloa (The House of Ulloa) (1886) (Melly 1990, 37). Pardo Bazán also presents a rural novel which has been deemed as following Émile Zola’s Naturalism in the representation of the moral decadence of Spanish rural customs, which affect women in particular, intermingled with political and sexual intrigue – issues also explored by Eliot in her narrative texts, especially in FH and M. Thus, The House of Ulloa explores the unequal relationship between a brother and a sister, particularly blatant if it is considered that the sister is the legitimate inheritor of the fortune. Moreover, Dorothea Brooke is presented as sexually active in line with some of the female characters in Pardo Bazán’s Los pazos. It has been suggested that Pardo Bazán’s two-part novel Una Cristiana: La prueba (A female Christian: the test) (1890) mimics Eliot’s M in that Carmen, the protagonist in the Spanish novel, is described as a modern, later-born saint full of ardour, a quality frequently attributed to Dorothea Brooke; although Carmen is more interested in propriety, and the issue of sanctity is not clearly a characteristic of Eliot’s text and only appears covertly in Una Cristiana: La prueba, Pardo Bazán may be emulating Eliot (Hemingway 1983, 85–86). Moreover, both writers were involved in the ongoing debate concerning Darwinism. While both Lewes and Eliot were in favour of this theory of evolution, Pardo Bazán rejected it, using more scientific criteria than other Spanish opponents. According to most critics, the connection between these two women is certain (Davies 1998; Wallhead 2001), but in the possible parallels between their respective female characters, the ones depicted by Pardo Bazán come out as more conventional, although for some this Galician writer had a feminist discourse (El-Saffar 1993; Alberdi 2013, 89). Furthermore, Carmen Bravo-Villasante states that Pardo Bazán had read MF and FH, and that she found them boring (1973, 95), but that does not imply that Pardo Bazán may not have used these texts as inspiration for her novels.

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George Eliot in Spain   219 As mentioned above, Rosalía de Castro, the poet Laureate of Galicia, is also indirectly connected to Eliot through Teresa of Ávila. In the prologue to her first novel, La hija del mar (Daughter of the sea) (1859), Castro acknowledges the strength derived from the female tradition of writing, and states that she dared to present her opera prima because she followed Sappho, St Theresa, Madame de Staël and George Sand. Obviously, Castro and Eliot were writing at the same time in different countries and published their first novels in the very same year, 1859. However, although direct influence seems far-fetched, common features in their texts can be traced. Translations of Eliot’s Works into Spanish Another aspect of the reception of Eliot in Spain is that of the distribution of her texts in translated versions into Spanish and the manner in which they reached their readers. As is well known, Mary Ann Evans was a Victorian English writer who used a male pseudonym in order to avoid possible negative criticism in her milieu. In England, however, her identity was soon known; she herself had revealed authorship to the Blackwood’s Magazine editors and to her brother in 1857, and to the public in 1860, although she preferred to keep her nom de plume for life. Proof of this can be provided by Mathilde Blind, an accomplished Victorian biographer, who published in her Eminent Women series a biography of George Eliot as early as 1867. This was not the case in Spain, where the readers often had no indications of female authorship. Additionally, although her works were translated into many different European languages during her lifetime, the reception of her literary output in Spanish was partially realized in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Eliot’s texts were generally presented in Castilian as authored by ‘Jorge Eliot’, although occasionally there is an oblique reference to the author ‘María Evans’, as made in the introduction to SM in 1919 (1919c, 5). However, notwithstanding the author being a woman, the unsigned preface is not consistent regarding either her publishing dates or gender, as it varies in the use of masculine and feminine forms when referring to Eliot: George Eliot – penname of Maria Evans – is one of the most valued and widely read male writers in England. She is part of that immense pleiad of women novelists who, in the first half of the nineteenth-century, situated the English novel in so high a position. After Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot (her pseudonym is respected here) wrote with a sincere, intimate and personal tone […] The novel published today seems to be the most perfect and well-balanced of the author.4 4

‘George Eliot – pseudónimo de María Evans – es uno de los escritores más leídos y apreciados en Inglaterra. Forma parte de esa pléyade de mujeres novelistas que, en la primera mitad del siglo XIX, elevaron a tanta altura a la novela inglesa. Después de Jane Austen, de Charlotte Brontë y de Elizabeth Gaskell, dió [sic] George Eliot –respetamos su pseudónimo – una nota personal, íntima, sincera. […] La novela que hoy publicamos es acaso la más ponderada y perfecta de su autor’ (5–6).

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220   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe In the editions of Eliot’s works issued by Calpe Press Publishers (Compañía Anónima de Librería, Publicaciones y Ediciones) as part of their Clásicos universales (World’s classics) series, the policy has been that of respecting the author’s decision to use a masculine nom de plume on the covers and title pages in order to be judged with more equity. However, her true identity is indirectly revealed in the various prefatory material. Thus, in the 1932 translation of MF, El Molino, by G[uillermo] Sans Huelin, the English introduction by W. Robertson Nicoll is reproduced in translation, after which the dedication by the author to her husband appears (Eliot 1932, 5). However, in an edition of AB issued by the Barcelona publishing house Bauzá, with no introduction, the text is simply said to be by ‘Jorge Eliot’, without any further indication of female authorship. Obviously by the 1940s the female identity of Eliot was clearly established in the public domain for the Anglo-American readership. This, however, was not the case for texts that were being introduced for the first time in the Hispanic world, for which an explication of authorship would have been welcome, since Spanish readers might not have been aware of a clue given by Isabel Oyarzábal 11 years earlier in an introduction to a different novel by another publisher (Eliot 1919c). The reception of Eliot in the Iberian Peninsula has been irregular regarding both the works translated and the periods in which they were published. Although it is known that FH was published in Spanish, in an abridged edition, soon after having been issued in England (Eliot 1867), the Spanish readership had to wait many years in order to enjoy the literary work of this English author, and some of her novels are still to be translated into Spanish. This was not so in other European countries, where there were early versions of her texts, such as the French translation of MF, commissioned by Eliot herself to her French-Swiss friend Alexandre Louis François d’Albert-Durade and published both in Paris and Geneva in 1863, only three years after its publication in England (Eliot 1863a). The reception of Eliot in Spain, therefore, occurred mainly during the twentieth century, and consequently it is directly influenced by the pervasive censorship system of the Franco period, which became strictly mandatory during the Spanish Civil War, between 1936 and 1939, and until 1975. One has to bear in mind that General Franco’s government was pro-Axis powers (Germany, Italy, Japan) and, at least until 1945, the government ruling the country was against the Allies, who were dismissed as Anglophiles and stigmatized for keeping the remains of their colonial empire on Spanish land (i.e. Gibraltar), and who were against the new Spanish national values. Literary censorship could not be criticized publicly and it was not so evident in many cases. Censors paid special attention to popular literature and culture, as it reached large audiences, and were somewhat more lenient with highbrow texts. However, the absence of complete intercultural communication in the case of a particular canonical woman writer is in itself significant if we compare her to other writers such as Charles Dickens or Jane Austen. The absence of some of Eliot’s texts in the Spanish cultural panorama may be due to the religious and philosophical topics dealt with in her writings, such as her alluding to theories of evolution or her depiction of Jewish characters. There

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George Eliot in Spain   221 is still another point that must be taken into account, referring to those texts that have been published in Spanish only recently. One cannot affirm that this delay was caused solely by the censorship system as the bad relationships that Spain had with the so-called ‘perfidious Albion’5 were no doubt also to blame. Significantly, Marta Rioja argues that American authors were privileged in translation on account of the new political position of the USA and its increasing relations with Spain after the visit of General Eisenhower to Spain on 21 December 1959 (2010, 181). Having established the general context of the absence of a fluent relationship between the English and Spanish cultural systems, particularly in the case of George Eliot, the works by Eliot that have been translated will be studied here in chronological order according to their appearance in Spanish. Felix Holt The case of FH (1866), of which a reduced version, entitled Felix Holt el radical, had appeared as early as 1867, may be considered an exception, since it is the first text by Eliot known in Spain in the nineteenth century, only a year after its publication in English (Pajares Infante 2006, 114). The appearance of a summary of the novel in a Spanish translation so early is probably due to its political subject matter – namely, the electioneering topic in the novel – so appealing in politically agitated nineteenth-century Spain. In fact, in England – more often than not – election agents would supply workers with free alcohol in order to obtain votes for their candidate, usually the landowner, and occasionally riots would ensue, often with dire consequences. In Eliot’s novel, conflicting principles can be seen: those of traditional society, based on inherited property, and the new principles of change brought about by capitalism. In between, other principles run contrary to the different versions of wealth, and love and strict moral values may arise only from poverty. The three-volume novel of about 400 pages printed in small type in English appears abridged to 60 pages in the Spanish version in approximately the same type size as in the original edition. It was edited by the printing house of a newspaper, Diario de Barcelona (Barcelona daily), as a supplement (second series, number 9) in various instalments of approximately eight to sixteen pages, which the readers could bind in book form afterwards (Botrel 2001, 47). Along with Eliot’s texts, this publishing house issued in this same period many foreign novels in instalments for middle-class audiences. Obviously, this version is full of reductions and omissions of details, and it lacks full descriptions or even complete chapters. Consequently, it only reflects the flavour and topics of the original. It is interesting to notice that the text is presented to the Spanish audience as ‘Novela escrita en inglés. Por Jorge Eliott [sic]’, that is, 5

This is a traditional slogan used as early as 1119 in various countries: ‘Anglican itaque perfidiam detestantes’, as in L. A. Muratori’s (1725) Rerum Italicarum Descriptores (VI, 893), cited in H. D. Schmidt, ‘The Idea and Slogan of ‘Perfidious Albion’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Philadelphia, PA, 14.4 (1953): 604.

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222   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe without any indication of a translator, with the inclusion of a genre definition (i.e. novel), which does not appear on the title page of the English version, and the addition of another ‘t’ to the pseudonym. Nothing is said about the nom de plume versus the real name of the author, although the English publication gave some clues of recognized authorship by reference to prior texts, such as ‘Author of AB’. Ironically enough, the English title page included the sentence, ‘The Right of Translation is reserved’, probably as a publishing house policy to keep control of the translations, but also as a possible reminder of the translation work carried out by Mary Ann Evans herself. It does not seem that the Spanish translator took any notice of the warning. As far as is known, there are no other versions or references to Eliot’s FH in Spain so far. The fact that this text has never undergone a full translation into Spanish may be connected to market difficulties nowadays, but no doubt it is also related to the novel’s political, religious and cultural differences with the English-speaking culture in nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first century Spain and to the Spanish political situation in the last century. Adam Bede Following the chronological order of publication in Spain, the second novel to be translated into Spanish, and the first in a complete version, is AB (1859), published in Castilian for the first time in 1884. The title is presented in its Spanish-like form, Adán Bede: Novela inglesa de Jorge Elliot. As in the previous case, there is no indication of female authorship and even the pen name is spelled incorrectly. No translator’s name is included in the book. This edition was printed in Barcelona, evidence of the fact that Catalonia had a flourishing publishing industry and active cultural life. The publication is quite peculiar in that it seems to be a carefully edited text from an artistic and graphic point of view, as it contains emblems and many illustrations, by different hands, both in the initial and final pages of every single chapter. Additionally, all chapters begin with luxuriously illustrated, ornamental, old capital letters. The book was issued by Domènech in Barcelona, a printing house which specialized in artistic printings and deluxe editions with special bindings. It was founded by Pere Domènech i Saló, who was followed in the business after his death in 1875 by his eldest son Eduard Domènech i Montaner (1854–1919) (Llanas 2004, 50–51). The illustrations in the novel anticipate Art Nouveau, Modernist aesthetics and are in line with the cultural renaissance which took place in Catalonia in the second half of the nineteenth century. According to Llanas (2004, 41), Lluís Domènech i Montaner – who would later become an eminent architect (author of the Palau de la Música Catalana, the Hospital Sant Pau, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and many other emblematic modernist buildings in Barcelona) – collaborated with his family printing company in the artistic direction of some series, particularly in the so-called ‘Arte y Letras’ (‘Arts and Letters’). This series published international works such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Goethe’s Faust, Scott’s Quintin Durward [sic] and Dickens’s La niña Dorrit (Little Dorrit) and El hijo de la parroquia (The Parish Son, i.e. Oliver Twist) (Cotoner 2002, 21–23). Although the 1884 edition of

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George Eliot in Spain   223 AB includes no reference to the ‘Arte y Letras’ series, its characteristics are similar, as it contains numerous illustrations and engravings, some of which are signed by ‘Domenech’ [sic], probably Lluís Domènech, and it is printed by Giró (Eliot, 1884, 1). However, Adán Bede: Novela inglesa de Jorge Elliot is not as carefully edited as those in the ‘Arte y Letras’ series, if attention is paid to the text itself. The translation was based on the first edition of the novel, although the author herself had introduced substantial changes in some chapters in the one-volume tenth edition of 1862, including the elimination of the represented female reader, ‘my fair reader’, which was used in the 1859 edition (Eliot 1859a, 193) and which disappears after 1862 (Eliot 2008a, 630). Although the translation exhibits a very elegant diction and in spite of it being potentially as artistic a production as the engravings it contains, it is not as carefully carried out, since it omits, for instance, most of the poetic and religious stanzas that appear interspersed with the narrative in the English version. It lacks, for example, the excerpt from William Wordsworth’s long philosophical poem The Excursion (1814) which appears at the beginning of the English version, and the first and third stanzas of the hymn by Bishop Thomas Ken, attached to the Book of Common Prayer (Eliot 1859a, 6, 10) or John Wesley’s hymns (1859a, 21). These and other hymns are intercalated in many chapters of the English version of AB and most of them are absent from this translation, probably in order to remove all Protestant references from a text addressed to a Catholic audience. The text is laid out in two columns, which gives it a magazine flavour, in line with the novels published in instalments in order to make them more popular. This page division influences the paragraph structure of the text, which differs from the English version, since new paragraphs are required more often in the Spanish translation as a result of the column design. All in all, the first translation into Spanish of a novel by Eliot sensu stricto corresponds to the original English novel and is a very interesting attempt to offer the contemporary production of the writer to educated Spanish readers, some 25 years after its publication in England. Thus, this translation may belong to a Catalan, Europeanist, ambitious, eclectic and progressive cultural project based on the prestige or novelty of the writers selected to be transferred to the target culture.6 The next edition of AB in Spanish appeared in Barcelona in the first half of the twentieth century, in 1930, and was translated by Manuel Vallvé as Adán Bede. The paratextual elements of this edition may shed light on the type of reception intended by this new version, probably female readers interested in romance novels (Genette 1984, 11). That is perhaps the reason why it appears in the series entitled ‘La novela interesante’ (‘Interesting novels’) (Baker and Ross 2002, 91), and particularly in a section denominated ‘Biblioteca para la mujer’ (‘Library for women’); the titles of the series and the section lead prospective readers to perceive undertones of romantic stories. The cover of the book, which appears in two separate volumes, is paperback, although this printing house also publishes works in other clothbound series. The explanation 6

For more on the Catalonian context of Eliot’s reception, see Hurtley and Ortega’s chapter in the present book.

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224   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe regarding the intended readership of this collection is given as follows: ‘Even if all the works in this series, on account of their interest, moral content or limpid language, are appropriate for women, an asterisk will mark those titles which – due to their “sui generis” plot or style – are especially recommended for young ladies, and may be put into the hands of female adolescents beyond any possible doubt’ (Eliot 1930, 1).7 This editorial policy does not recommend Adán Bede as an interesting novel for young ladies ‘entering the world’, as it does with Louisa M. Alcott’s novels, for instance, since it is not marked with an asterisk. The 1930 edition differs from the nineteenth-century edition, which lacked most of the original’s verse quotations. It is a new and neat edition which does not follow the previous one, although it contains minor mistakes such as ‘Hacia las seis y cuarto […]’ (‘At about a quarter past six’) (1930, 15) for ‘About a quarter to seven […]’ (1859a, 18). A second relevant piece of information on the part of the publisher announces that this series does not publish extracts but complete texts (1930, 1). Unfortunately, this is not so. Unlike the nineteenth-century version, which omitted the Protestant hymns and devotional verses from various prayer books, in this twentieth-century edition verse quotations are included but an entire chapter is missing, probably on account of its being a digression. The non-existent Chapter 17 is the first one in the second book in the English edition, entitled ‘In Which the Story Pauses a Little’. The digressive nature of the chapter does not make it a less interesting part of the novel, since by means of it George Eliot explicates her theory of the novel and how a writer should depict life in this literary genre. AB depicts the world of rural Victorian England, of farmers and workers, but in this Spanish edition the cover image seems to transpose the audience to a middle-class urban atmosphere in the 1920s or early 1930s, which would be that of the intended readers of the novel. In fact, the regional dialect used by some of the characters is not even attempted in this Spanish version, thus completing the transposition of a rural novel to a middle-class city atmosphere (Eliot 1859a, 315; 1930, 1: 251). The 2000 reprinting by Ediciones del Bronce reproduces Manuel Vallvé’s 1930 edition and in general does not depart from it, except for the reinclusion of the expurgated chapter. However, in this new edition the cover seems to echo the English country world by means of a reproduction of the 1785 painting Haymakers by George Stubbs, which is very apt, if somewhat anachronistic. In 1944 there was another translation of AB, by Agustín Esclasáns, published in Barcelona by Lauro and Casa Provincial de Caridad. This edition is part of the editorial project devised in Barcelona by Josep Janés i Olivé.8 At this stage his name did not appear in the book credits, probably

7

‘Aun cuando todas las obras de esta Colección, por su interés, su fondo moral y su limpieza de lenguaje, son a propósito para ser leídas por el gran público femenino, señalamos con un * aquellos títulos que por la índole “sui generis” de su argumento y de su estilo, son recomendados especialmente para las señoritas, y pueden colocarse, sin el menor escrúpulo, en todas las manos, aun en las de las adolescentes.’ 8 See Hurtley and Ortega’s chapter in the present book.

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George Eliot in Spain   225 due to political restrictions, but he was behind the project, and the emblem of the series, which appeared alongside its name, ‘Colección Ave Phoenix’, was also a symbol of Janés’s strength, indicating a recovery from the moral wounds his cultural project had incurred as a result of the Civil War, and its being reborn anew. This venture was integrated with a far-reaching cultural project involving Catalan translators and publishers – who after the Civil War wanted to re-establish the European literary heritage and transmit it to their readership – which would also include translations into Catalan (Hurtley 1986; 1992). It is noteworthy that AB was published after the end of the Spanish Civil War and before the end of World War II, in 1944, a year in which the Allies were preparing the Normandy landings and Germany was in retreat from the Soviet Union. At this stage, the Spanish censorship system was not very strict on account of the uncertainty of the international situation and the difficult position of Spain after the Civil War. This translation of an English text was submitted to censorship by José Janés on 8 November 1943 and a nihil obstat verdict was the answer sent to the publisher nine days later, after a positive reader’s report by Leopoldo Panero Torbado (1909–1962), a poet of the Spanish Generation of 1936, known as ‘the tolerant censor’ (Huerta 2012), since he tended to be ideologically lenient when dealing with highbrow English literature. These data are provided by the Spanish censorship archives (Archivo General de la Administración), in which we learn that the reviewer, coded as Reader number 1 and ‘Head of readership’ (‘Jefe de lectorado’), was Leopoldo Panero Torbado. He stated that the novel was not against either any legal institution or the regime, as this was a requirement at the time, and regarding the novel, he reported as follows: ‘A work of very high literary quality and considerable intrinsic merit. It is one of the works by the author that may be deemed a classic novel in its period. Nothing prevents its being approved either from a moral or an artistic point of view’ (Panero Torbado 1944, n.p.).9 The files indicate that volumes of the published version were received by the Spanish censorship officials on 10 March 1944 (‘Expediente de censura 7306–44’, the censorship file number code, indicates both the numerus currens in the censorship archives and its reception year). Silas Marner It seems that we must wait until 1918, nearly the centenary of her birth, in order to see a second novel by Eliot rendered fully in Spanish and Catalán versions.10 This novel is SM: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), published in

9

‘Obra de muy buena calidad literaria y considerable mérito intrínseco. Es probablemente una de las novelas de su autora que puede ser considerada clásica dentro de la novelística de su tiempo. Ni desde el punto de vista moral ni desde el artístico encontramos nada que impida su aprobación.’ 10 Thanks are due here to Professor Antonio de Toro for kindly sharing with me data from his research project on ‘The Reception of English and Irish Literature in the Spanish Press’ concerning George Eliot, particularly Josep Carner’s translation into

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226   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Castilian 58 years after the publication of the original text. This lapse is not that surprising, if considered with the appropriate perspective, as at the time no editions of Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë existed in Spanish either (Navas 2007, 364). George Eliot’s text was produced by the publishing house known at the time as ‘Editorial Calpe’, still in existence today with the name Espasa-Calpe or simply Espasa. The translation is by Isabel Oyarzábal Smith (Oyarzábal de Palencia) and entitled SM: Novela. Its English subtitle was not included. However, it seemed to be necessary to indicate to the prospective readers the literary genre of the text (‘novela’), particularly in the case of Eliot, who uses proper names as titles, which could be confusing and would not give per se any clue to a foreign reading public. Another noteworthy characteristic of this version, as the title page indicates, is that the translation was made directly from the English language, and – it may be inferred – that was a change from the common Spanish practice of translating English texts through French (Pegenaute and Lafarga 2004, 120; Pajares 2006, 87). Oyarzábal’s mother was a Scot, and her daughter had a bilingual education in Málaga in the school run by the Asunción nuns in Gibralfaro (Oyarzábal de Palencia 2010, 61; Navas 2007, 369). Her linguistic and literary training, together with her writing vocation, allowed her to perform the task proficiently. The fact that a copy11 of her first novel, El sembrador sembró su semilla (The sower sowed his seed) (1922), contains a handwritten dedication to Gloria [Pérez Corrales], wife of the prime minister of the Second Spanish Republic, Santiago Casares Quiroga, indicates clearly the translator’s good relations with the Spanish cultural and political intelligentsia in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the novel’s highbrow readership. Her SM translation has been assessed in detail by Gracia Navas, and her conclusion is that it was made with a didactic purpose for a Spanishspeaking reading public and probably for a quick publication without further revisions (2007, 403). As an example, the title page did not feature the quotation from William Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ that appeared in the English edition. The division into two parts that structures the novel in English is not present either in the Spanish edition (1919c), which keeps the correlative chapter numbers, both in the original translation and in the 2006 reprinting. Additionally, the translator’s later career as a feminist intellectual is not reflected in this version since she does not make innovative decisions regarding the role of women in the text. On the contrary, according to Navas, we can say that patriarchal expressions appear in the translation, even where they do not occur in the English source text. For example, for ‘he presented himself ’ (Eliot 1861, 68), Oyarzábal translates ‘al fin se presentó el amo de la casa’, that is, ‘the landlord presented himself ’ (1919c, 116) (cited in Navas 2007, 394). The same could be said of the following excerpt discussed by Navas (394), in which the negative features of the father are erased altogether, and he is presented Catalan of SM (George Eliot, Silas Marner, (Catalan) trans. Josep Carner, Llorenç Riber l’Albaflor, Morera i Galicia and Carles Riba (Barcelona: Editorial Catalana, 1919b), reviewed in La revista Barcelona, 5.81 (1919: 43). 11 Extant in a Coruña Public Library.

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George Eliot in Spain   227 as irreproachable and declared the stronger sex: ‘That was not what she had been used to see in her own father, who was the soberest and best man in the country-side, only a little hot and hasty now and then, if things were not done to the minute’ (Eliot 1861, 88–90).12 All in all, Isabel Oyarzábal’s translation is a pioneer text in Spanish as far as the reception of Eliot is concerned, as it was issued by Calpe, a publishing house that tried to make foreign literature known in Spain by means of quality translations by well-known intellectuals at reasonable prices (Botrel 2008, 25). Moreover, another version without a translator’s name (1919a) was also published in the same year in a deluxe edition in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which gave Eliot the opportunity of reaching the Latin American market. In the mid-twentieth century other editions of SM were published in Spanish. According to Navas, all of them are based on Oyarzábal’s version, and they contain variations that do not allow us to give them the label of new translations but only of texts based on the previous one with slight changes, although the names of their respective translators are included on the title pages. The first, entitled SM (1945), claims to be a direct version by Juan Ruiz de Larios, although it follows Oyarzábal’s version. The second version that, according to Navas, follows Oyarzábal’s translation, is SM: El hilandero de Raveloe, translated by Luis Ferrán de Pol and published in Guanajuato, México (1946c). The third, entitled SM and labelled ‘revision literaria de Montenegro’ (‘literary revision by Montenegro’), was published in Barcelona by Baguñá Hermanos (1948) and reproduces Oyarzábal’s translation with variations and no mention of the original Spanish version. The fourth version, published some time during the 1940s is entitled simply El hilandero (The weaver); according to Navas, it is a fake version of Oyarzábal’s translation, although it is claimed to have been translated by Francisco Roselló (Navas 2007, 404). The fifth and final version, entitled SM (1951b), was published in Barcelona; it claims to have been translated from the English original by Tomás Mario Cerro González and contains a preliminary note by F.S.R. (Federico Sáinz de Robles). The subsequent translations of the same novel, by Anna D’Aumonville Alegría in 1980 and by Hernando Valencia Goelkel in 1992, are altogether different cases. The first one is a modern translation made in the Iberian Peninsula, different to that made by Oyarzábal, although, surprisingly enough, it reproduces some fragments from it. It was reprinted in 2000 in Valdemar. The second one is an independent translation produced in Santa Fé de Bogotá, Colombia, and it is probably the best example of a translation into Spanish, although it does not attempt explicitly to reproduce the dialectal varieties present in the original English text. This absence of a dialectal register is a manipulation, to use the technical term in translation studies (Lefevere 1992), but being recognized in the publication, the readers might fill this gap. Additionally, there are two further translations which had a limited readership: one by J. Sirvent, edited in the 1950s in Barcelona, and an edition by Editorial 12

‘La intachable conducta del señor Lammeter era para Nancy norma que debían ajustarse todos los miembros del sexo fuerte’ (1919c, 155).

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228   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Saymón in 2009, translated by Roser Vilagrassa Sentís, which was surprisingly never publicly distributed. The Mill on the Floss The most popular novel among the Spanish audience, as far as the number of translations is concerned, is MF (1860). It was published for the first time in Castilian in 1932 (that is, 72 years after its publication in English), translated by G[uillermo] Sans Huelin, a professional translator who worked both with scientific and literary texts. The translation was presented to the Spanish audience as El Molino (The mill) by the same publishing house that had issued SM, Calpe, although there are at least six subsequent versions with different titles, including El molino junto al Floss (The mill by the Floss) (1943), El molino del Floss (The Floss mill) (1946b) and El molino a orillas del Floss (The mill upon the Floss) (1951a), which gives us an idea of the positive reception of this text from the 1930s until the present moment, since the last translation was published in 2003. El molino del Floss (1946b), translated by Rafael Sardá, announces itself as having been rendered from English, which points once again to how frequently Spanish versions of English texts were translated via other languages, generally from French, and not from the original text. Although most of the versions of MF are intended for the general public, one of them, published in 1988, is meant for an academic or educated audience, since it includes a critical scholarly introduction by Doireann McDermot, with no information about the translation or the expurgated passages in it. This Planeta edition reproduces the 1943 translation by María Luz Morales, then issued by Iberia. Thus, the twenty-first-century version by Carmen Francí (2003) can claim to be the only complete one, since the preceding texts in Spanish had been censored in 1932 and this expurgated version was retained during Franco’s regime (particularly regarding the allusions to the Catholic religion), despite the fact that some of them claim to be new translations with no missing passages. A good example of this is the version by Mauro Armiño (1969), which reads on the cover ‘Edición íntegra’ (‘complete edition’), but omits relevant passages referring to religion or gender issues. A case in point is this passage from the original: ‘Saints and Martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets. She knew little of saints and martyrs, and had gathered, as a general result of her teaching, that they were a temporary provision against the spread of Catholicism, and had all died at Smithfield’ (Eliot 2008c, 286). This excerpt refers to the Protestant martyrs who had been burnt at the stake in 1555 under Queen Mary, many of them in Smithfield Market, London, thus exposing the cruelty of Catholics in England. In both Sans Huelin’s (1932, 2: 155) and Armiño’s versions (1969, 275) the passage becomes ‘Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets […]’.13 In Morales’ translation (1943, 274–75), it 13

‘Los santos y mártires nunca habían interesado a Maggie tanto como los sabios y los poetas’.

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George Eliot in Spain   229 becomes ‘Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets. She knew little of saints and martyrs […]’,14 where ellipses stand for the expurgated sentences. The following example sheds further light on the issue of religion and how it was profoundly connected with political and even military issues: ‘They could exchange their views concerning the Duke of Wellington, whose conduct in the Catholic Question had thrown such an entirely new light on his character; and speak slightly of his conduct at the battle of Waterloo, which he would never have won if […]’ (Eliot 2008c, 74). Sans Huelin (1932, 1: 122) renders this as ‘They could exchange their views concerning the Duke of Wellington, whose conduct in the Catholic Question had thrown such an entirely new light on his character; and speak slightly of his conduct at the battle of Waterloo, which he would never have won’;15 Morales (1943, 71) as ‘They could exchange their views concerning the Duke of Wellington, whose conduct in the Catholic Question had thrown such an entirely new light on his character; and speak slightly of his conduct at the battle of Waterloo, which he would never have won’;16 and Armiño (1969, 71) as ‘They could exchange their views concerning the Duke of Wellington, and about his conduct in the battle of Waterloo, which he would never have won […]’,17 where ellipses again stand for the expurgated sentences. The censorship archives indicate clearly that we are witnessing selfcensorship on the part of the translators or the publishers, since no restrictions appear in the relevant files in the Archivo General de la Administración regarding this particular novel (cf. ‘Expediente’ 1943, 1950 and 1961). It seems that, since it had already been published in Spanish in 1932 without these direct allusions to Catholicism, no further comments were considered pertinent or necessary on the part of the censors. Another example of self-censorship regarding the female character’s interest in learning, and how society did not make it possible for her, whereas her brother had opportunities for it, appears in book five, Chapter 2. According to Santoyo Mediavilla (1996, 309), these may be considered voluntary suppressions, but one wonders how free a translator feels as far as social patriarchal impositions are concerned. The fact is that the 1932 translation is complete, and the versions published in the 1940s and 1950s have missing paragraphs, as in the example of this passage: […] and gaining more difficult conquests. So it has been since the days of Hecuba, and of Hector, Tamer of horses: inside the gates, the women with streaming hair 14

‘Los santos y mártires nunca habían interesado a Maggie tanto como los sabios y los poetas. Verdad es que sabía muy poco de mártires ni de poetas […]’. 15 ‘Podían cambiar sus puntos de vista respecto al Duque de Wellington, cuya conducta en la Cuestión Católica había arrojado nueva luz en su carácter, y hablar de su comportamiento en la batalla de Waterloo, que nunca hubiera ganado […]’. 16 ‘Podían cambiar sus puntos de vista respecto al Duque de Wellington, cuya conducta en la cuestión católica mostraba a una nueva luz su carácter, y hablar de sus hazañas en la batalla de Waterloo, que nunca hubiera ganado […]’. 17 ‘Podían cambiar impresiones acerca del duque de Wellington, y sobre su comportamiento en la batalla de Waterloo, la cual nunca hubiera ganado […]’.

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230   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe and uplifted hands offering prayers, watching the world’s combat from afar, filling their long, empty days with memories and fears: outside, the men, in fierce struggle with things divine and human, quenching memory in the stronger light of purpose, losing the sense of dread and even wounds in the hurrying ardour of action. // From what you have seen of Tom, I think he is not a youth of whom you would prophesy failure in anything he had thoroughly wished: the wagers are likely to be on his side, notwithstanding his small success in the classics. For Tom had never desired success in this field of enterprise […]. (2008c, 308–11)18

The Spanish expurgated version (1969) includes a suppression of nearly two paragraphs, reading as follows: ‘gaining more difficult conquests Tom had never desired success in this field of enterprise’19 (Santoyo 1996, 109–10). In this case, due to gender prejudices, censored paragraphs do not allow the Spanish audience to have a complete panorama of a particular work of art or of the culture which produces it. It was only in 2003 that another publishing house, Alba, claimed to offer readers the only unexpurgated version to date in Spain of MF. Some of the Spanish versions contain illustrations on the covers, whose graphic style correspond to the period in which they were issued. The cover of the Armiño translation (1969) presents a rural scene with the siblings in the foreground by a river with a mill, and a man in a boat. The seemingly idyllic drawing is unsigned, and realized in basic colours, in the aesthetics of film advertising posters of the 1960s and 1970s. The 1962 Planeta edition is a more sober one. It presents on the cover a picture of Eliot by d’Albert-Durade, who painted his friend in a very positive light in 1849. The 2003 version by the present-day professional translator Carmen Francí, issued by Alba, is illustrated

18

‘[…] ganando conquistas más definidas. Así ha sido desde los días de Hécuba y de Héctor, domador de caballos; dentro de las casa las mujeres con el pelo suelto y las manos en alto, ofreciendo plegarias, vigilando el combate mundano desde lejos y llenando sus días largos y vacíos con memorias y temores; al exterior los hombres; en lucha fiera con lo divino y lo humano, perdiendo el sentimiento del miedo y aun de las heridas, en el ardor precipitado de la acción. // Por lo que sabemos de Tom, se puede inferir que no es un joven de quien se pueda profetizar que fracasará en lo que se haya propuesto; las apuestas han de estar de seguro a su lado, no obstante su poco éxito con los clásicos. Pues Tom nunca deseó prosperar en estos estudios […]’ (1932, 2: 191); ‘[…] ganando conquistas más concretas. Así ha sido desde los tiempos de Hécuba y de Héctor su marido, domador de caballos; dentro de la casa, las mujeres con pelo suelto y las manos en alto ofrecen las plegarias, vigilan el combate del mundo desde lejos, llenan sus días largos y vacíos con recuerdos y temores; en el exterior, los hombres se agitan en la lucha feroz con las cosas divinas y humanas, apagan el recuerdo para no ver sino la fuerte luz del propósito, pierden el sentimiento del temor y aun de las heridas, en el precipitado ardor de la acción. // Por lo que sabemos de Tom se deduce que no es un joven a quien pueda profetizarse fracaso en cuanto se proponga; las apuestas caerán de su lado, pese a su escaso éxito con los clásicos. Pues Tom nunca deseó el éxito en este campo […]’ (1943, 295). 19 ‘y ganando batallas más definidas. Nunca deseó prosperar en estos estudios’ (1969, 272).

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George Eliot in Spain   231 with a painting by John Constable, Water Meadows near Salisbury (c. 1820). The calm atmosphere conveyed by the river scene provided by this master of English landscape transmits to the intended readership an idea of a classical, respected English novel to be enjoyed by an educated Spanish audience. Scenes of Clerical Life The censorship system may help to explain why some texts were not even introduced in the Spanish cultural system while others, such as JR, entitled Arrepentimiento (Repentance) (1946a), was the fourth text by Eliot considered fit for Iberian audiences. It belonged to SCL (1858), a work seemingly published in Spanish in instalments, as had occurred in its original publication in Blackwood’s Magazine. Arrepentimiento was first published in Barcelona in 1946 with an indication that it was a direct translation – ‘traducción del inglés por J. Farrán y Mayoral’ (‘translation from English by J. Farrán y Mayoral’) – on the title page. Additional information is provided regarding its original title and its authorship, as Mary Ann Evans is included between brackets under the author’s pen name. However, no reference to its originally belonging to Scenes of Clerical Life is offered to the Spanish audience. The plot summary found on the dust jacket offers readers information about the theme of the text, and how a battered woman, married to a cruel husband, has turned to drink, decides to quit her addiction, forgives her husband and devotes her life to faith and charity: Our readers are presented with this wonderful and not very well-known narration by a famous female English writer. This novel, with so nice and picturesque initial chapters, seems to be a satiric novel of manners and provincial gossip, but as soon as Janet’s character appears, it acquires the quality of a masterpiece due to the vigorous character drawing, and to the intense tragedy they experience. The reader will never forget such well-represented characters as Janet, her cruel husband, her selfsacrificing parson friend, and many other characters living near them.20

This is a topic that may sound contemporary, but it might also have been considered appropriate in post-war Spanish society, since it represented the submissive behaviour that was expected from pious women. The illustration on the cover depicts the central scene of the novella, in which the heroine’s cruel husband is seriously ill and experiences hallucinations involving her as the Greek figure Medusa, with live snakes coming out of her head instead of 20

‘Ofrecemos hoy a nuestros lectores esta preciosa y poca conocida narración de la famosa escritora inglesa. Esta novela, que en sus primeros capítulos tan graciosos y pintorescos, parece un relato satírico de costumbres y chismes provincianos, en cuanto aparece la figura de Juanita, adquiere todo el relieve de una obra maestra por el vigoroso trazado de sus personajes, y la intensa tragedia que viven. El lector no olvidará jamás, tan vivamente están representados, a Juanita, a su cruel esposo, a su abnegado amigo el pastor, y a muchos personajes de los que viven en derredor de ellos’ (1946a, cover).

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232   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe hair, as was wonderfully painted by Caravaggio (1597) and by Rubens (1618). While representations of Medusa appear in mosaics in many Roman cities as an emblem of good luck and protection for their inhabitants, and usually have a serene countenance, those by the aforementioned Renaissance painters present a terrible expression in tune with the fear they might produce in their viewers. George Eliot employs this frightening version of the image in her novella.21 The gender issues explored in Eliot’s text are manipulated as they are transposed into Spanish, reducing the status of women to a more subordinate position – for instance where we read ‘ese miembro del sexo débil’ (‘that member of the weak sex’) (1946a, 9) for Eliot’s ‘that member of the fair sex’ (1988b, 171). Other sections of Scenes of Clerical Life, however, had to wait until the present century in order to be translated into Castilian. This is the case with Amos Barton, which was translated for the first time in 2008 by César Palma, as Los infortunios del reverendo Amos Barton. The cover of this edition features the painting Frosty Morning by J. M. W. Turner (exhibited 1813), which depicts country life, although – as with other cover illustrations used for Eliot’s novels – postdates the text by nearly 50 years. In this edition, information about the work to which it belongs is offered to readers, as well as notes explaining the verse quotations included in the English texts. As far as is known, there has not been an individually published Spanish version of MG, originally included in the same book. In 2013, however, the complete text of SCL was published in Spanish as Escenas de la vida parroquial, translated by Marta Salís. Middlemarch Another text translated into Spanish is M (1871–72), although this eight-book novel was not published in Iberia until 1984, probably due to its length. It appeared in a carefully presented edition along with a study of the author and her whole literary oeuvre. In 1991 a new translation by José Luis López Muñoz was issued, and reprinted by a different publishing house in 2000. This new version of the text, intended for a general audience, features a somewhat strange omission of the word ‘nacional’, which appears in the prelude to the novel in the English original and in all other Spanish versions. The prelude revolves around the topic of the Spanish Saint Teresa of Jesus, who – accompanied by her brother – left her home while a teenager in order to fight the Moors for the reunification of the country: ‘Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beaten to a national idea’ (2003b, 26).22 The fact that this controversial topic had been used by Francoism – the so-called National spirit 21

This symbolic image is reinterpreted in a different light by the French feminist Hélène Cixous in her influential article ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ (‘The laugh of the Medusa’) (1975), in which she proposes a positive view on classical stories of women and on their interpretation. 22 ‘Juntos salieron de Ávila con pasos infantiles, los ojos muy abiertos y un aire tan

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George Eliot in Spain   233 – as an emblem for a Catholic Spain may have induced the translator to use hypercorrection as a reaction to the charged use of the word ‘nacional’ in the Spanish dictatorship. It was not until 1993 that the Spanish literary public had the opportunity to read a critical edition by a professor of English literature, Pilar Hidalgo, in the prestigious Cátedra edition. This edition includes a brief biographical note, a textual note, a summary and a study of George Eliot’s work, plus two pictures of the novelist, one by Frederick William Burton (1864) and the other by her friend and translator of her novels into French, d’Albert-Durade (1849) – although it does not include a review of the novel’s reception in Spain, but only a short bibliography of translations. A second edition of this text was brought out in 2010. Curiously enough, the covers of the three Spanish versions of M offer a kind of summarized panorama of English painting from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century, with George Stubbs’s A Gentleman Driving a Lady in a Phaeton (1787) (Eliot 1984), Julia Powell Frith’s The Lovers (1855) (Eliot 1993) and pre-Raphaelite Lord Frederick Leighton’s The Maid with the Golden Hair (1895) (Eliot 1991, 2000 repr.). The presence of these paintings is proof of carefully edited books, which is the main feature of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Spanish editions of George Eliot. The appropriateness of the last illustration is proven by the fact that another drawing by Lord Leighton, Under the Plane Tree (1862), was included in the original edition of Eliot’s historical novel R (1863b). Other Recent Translations and Contemporary Studies Given that the Spanish censorship archives do not contain evidence of the rejection of Eliot’s texts, there must be some other reason for the scarcity of Spanish versions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although technically Spain did not participate in World War II, as the country was allied to the Axis powers, relations with the English-speaking world were not encouraged in Spain during the autarchy period: rather, the opposite was the case – English culture was not promoted, and ‘perfidious Albion’ was used as an emblem for everything dangerous for both religious and socio-political reasons. As a consequence, it is only in the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first that Eliot’s texts have been translated into Spanish, when a considerable increase of translations of English texts took place. This translation boom may be connected to a political and educational change in the country, to the creation of Translation and English Studies faculties, to new research in the field and to the new films about the author. Most of Eliot’s works have been recently translated into Spanish, except FH and R, probably due to their political subject matter. LV (1859) was translated into Spanish by Ángel Bofarull in 1987 as El velo descubierto, and it represents a late reception of a novella that may be explained indefenso como el de dos cervatillos, aunque también con corazones humanos porque latían por un ideal’ (1991, 13).

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234   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe by the subject matter of the text – although other novels of the same sub-genre are widely known in the peninsula, for instance Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) (Lázaro 2008). However, regarding the reception of Eliot’s literary productions, it seems that in the twenty-first century both editors and translators are making up for lost time. A new edition in Spanish came out in 1999, El velo alzado, together with another edition in Catalán in 1989, El vel alçat. Surprisingly enough, this text was promoted for the Spanish audience by selling it with the newspaper Diario de Las Palmas (Journal of Las Palmas of Gran Canaria) on 27 June 2008, within a series of seven novellas entitled ‘La mujer y el amor’ (Women and love), thereby following the nineteenth-century fashion of publication in instalments, although in this case, as they are short novellas, readers can enjoy the full text after just one purchase. It is also a text whose publication in Spain has been overtly connected to women, as had happened before with other novels by Eliot. Likewise, BJ reached the Spanish reading public in 2004, in an edition by the publishing house Alba, which seems to be interested in transmitting Eliot’s texts to Hispanic audiences with modern translations by Carmen Francí, a respected contemporary translator, aiming for the complete rendering of Eliot’s literary output into Spanish. Overall, the reception of texts by Eliot in Spain may be considered as modest. While some of her texts are still non-existent for the Spanish reading public, for instance SG, R and FH, other works by Eliot have not reached the Spanish market until the twenty-first century. As mentioned above, this may have a historical origin, and the present-day appearance of her texts is probably due to the influence of films, series and biopics in English produced in the 1990s and 2000s, as the dust jacket of the first Spanish translation of DD (2010a) suggests, by featuring a picture of Hugh Dancy, the main actor in the 2002 BBC series (Guelbenzu 2010). Conclusion In conclusion, regarding the existence, or rather, the absence of a regular reception of Eliot’s works in the Iberian Peninsula, it can be argued that her early presence in literary journals, and that of Lewes, is discreet but very positive. It begins approximately in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and it lasts until the 1930s, not only in Spanish but also in Latin American publications, particularly those issued in Havana and Buenos Aires. Moreover, after the 1970s more academic articles are found regarding Eliot’s literary works, especially produced by university lecturers (for example, Conejo Fort 1989; Fraga 1999; García-Bermejo Giner 1986; Navas 2007; Pujals 1981; Sierra 2007). As far as her influence on late nineteenth-century writers is concerned, although there is no direct evidence that she was thoroughly read by Spanish elites, several parallels have been pointed out in the works of authors such as Juan Valera, José María de Pereda, Clarín (Leopoldo García-Alas Ureña), Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán and Rosalía de Castro. Concerning translations, my contention is that the length of the novels and their religious and/or cultural origins could have been a deterrent for

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George Eliot in Spain   235 early publication in the Spanish literary market, as they were scarcely present in the Spanish nineteenth-century literary market. In this period Spain saw an abridged edition of FH, in 1867, and an illustrated version of AB in 1884, both edited in Barcelona. In the early twentieth century two different translations of SM appeared, one in Catalan and one in Spanish, both in 1919. Some ten years later, in 1930, a new translation of AB was issued in Barcelona, together with a version of MF (1932) issued in Madrid. These Spanish editions of Eliot’s works, published before the Spanish Civil War, indicate how variable was the reception of this author in the 50 years following her death in 1880, when she was already considered a canonical writer in the English-speaking world – and in Europe in general – and nearly all her works were being received in other European languages. In the 1940s and 1950s, new editions of texts already known by Hispanic audiences, AB and SM, were issued in Spain, although they are to be considered separately. The former is a new translation, belonging to the publishing project of Josep Janés, who was trying to restore the highbrow literary market after the Civil War, whereas the latter, presented in supposedly new versions by different translators, reproduces Isabel Oyarzábal’s translation issued in 1919. In 1946, JR was also translated into Spanish. The choice of texts to be translated in this period may have been determined by the pious topics dealt with in the novels, and by the endurance in the face of adversity shown by their heroes and heroines, perfectly in tune with post-war Spain. Additionally, the country’s cultural atmosphere through most of the twentieth century was mediated by the presence of mandatory censorship, which acted as a possible deterrent for the publication of some works, or even of some excerpts, in otherwise well-received novels, which have seen many versions and editions and have brought certain popularity for this Victorian writer both in lowbrow and academic spheres. MF is a case in point in this respect, since it was published during Francoism and later in various versions which were expurgated in matters of religion and gender. It was only in the present century that a new, uncensored version of the novel was issued. M is a different case, in that it was translated for the first time in Spain in 1980, more than a hundred years after its original publication in English, and after that it saw two other translations. Thence, the first decades of the present century has propitiated new editions and new printings of texts by an author unanimously acclaimed in the English literary canon, who had not been widely known in the Iberian Peninsula previously. Examples are El hermano Jacob (BJ) (2004a), Los infortunios del reverendo Amos Barton (AmB) (2008b), El velo descubierto (LV) (1987), El velo alzado (LV) (2012a), DD (2010a), Impresiones de un tal Teofrasto (ITS) (2011), Las novelas tontas de ciertas damas novelistas (‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’) and Escenas de la vida parroquial (2013). Nevertheless, Eliot’s essays are not yet collected in Spanish editions and have not been received in due form by Hispanic audiences. All in all, it can be said that Eliot’s reception in Spanish is uneven both in the academic world and on the part of the publishers, since even today her complete literary production is not yet available to a Spanish audience, with whole missing genres, particularly her translations, poetry and essays. The best proof of this is that even in the present century we are unable to read in

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236   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Spanish her entire fictional output, which may be considered a veiled cultural censorship. This may be due partly to the political evolution of the country and to its relationship with all things English, and partly to the censorship system, which has rendered us unconscious of how deep-rooted and pervasive it was, even today, since the public may be reading censored texts extant in all public libraries and be completely unaware of it. Consequently, changes need to be made if we are to enjoy a regular reception of this Victorian writer in the Spanish-speaking world in the near future.

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12

George Eliot in the Catalan Lands: The Long and the Short of It1 Jacqueline Hurtley and Marta Ortega Sáez

The presence of George Eliot’s fiction in Catalonia stretches over a century and spans ‘Els Països Catalans’ (The Catalan Lands)2 as well as covering the distance from Barcelona to Buenos Aires and back. It is a lame presence in that it is constituted by only a part of Eliot’s output, taking in SM, AB and M, together with the two short stories (LV and BJ) originally published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Cornhill Magazine and subsequently included in the Cabinet edition of SM (1878). Both SM and M were translated into Catalan and published prior to (SM) and following (M) dictatorships in Spain which imposed restrictions on the public production of Catalan – that is, under the Primo de Rivera regime (1923–30) and over the Franco years (1939–75). AB appeared in Castilian in Barcelona towards the end of World War II, though given the place of publication and the profiles of both publisher and translator, the text may also be considered a Catalan product, initially geared towards a Catalan readership established before the war. Undoubtedly the text sought to be interpreted as such on home ground, at a time when manifestations of Catalonia’s language and culture were systematically suppressed (Benet 1979; 1995). Following the transition from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy in Spain in the later decades of the twentieth century (Chislett 2013, 74–101), two instances of Eliot’s shorter fiction also appeared: LV in Catalan and BJ in the Valencian tongue. The present chapter will focus on the aforementioned texts, awarding particular attention to the reception of Eliot’s works in given historical

1

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This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Jordi Castellanos i Vila (1946–2013). The term ‘Els Països Catalans’ (The Catalan Lands or Countries) refers to a geographical expanse in the Spanish state which takes in what today constitute two autonomous communities: ‘Cataluña’, where both Castilian and Catalan are co-official languages, and the ‘Comunidad Valenciana’, where both Castilian and Valencian are recognized as co-official. The coinage dates back to the nineteenth century and is not without controversy (see below). The term ‘Catalan Lands’ will be used in this chapter.

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238   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe contexts within the Spanish state with consequences peculiar to Catalonia: post-World War I, the post-Civil War period and the years in which the so-called Catalan Lands have constituted two of Spain’s 17 Comunidades Autónomas (autonomous communities); it will also allude to the publishers, translators and reading publics involved in the process. Furthermore, attention will be given to the rendering of Eliot’s Englishes, both standard and dialectal, into Catalan and Valencian. The two novels translated into Catalan will be considered, in order of publication, before the Castilian rendering of AB is referred to. The shorter fictions will then be analysed. The Long Arguably, the work of George Eliot was familiar to readers in Catalonia from the late nineteenth century, given the publication in Castilian of a version of the writer’s first long novel, Adán Bede (AB), by the Barcelona publisher Doménech [sic]3 in 1884.4 Moreover, the translation into French by Eliot’s French-Swiss friend, the painter François d’Albert-Durade, authorized by Eliot herself and published in 1861, may well have become available to educated Catalans, often familiar with the neighbouring Romance language and culture. On the other hand, early editions of the writer’s texts in the original English may be found in Catalonia’s national library in Barcelona, the Biblioteca de Catalunya, as well as in the library of the Universitat de Barcelona. Thus, her writing became accessible to those literate members of the public able to purchase the Doménech publication and to those who were members of libraries or the university community familiar with French and/or English. The first novel to appear in Catalan was Eliot’s third, SM (first published in 1861), a shorter option than either AB (1859) or MF (1860) and perhaps selected for this reason, though questions of a transcultural nature together with contextual considerations may also have contributed to the particular choice of text. Barcelona had already looked to northern Europe for social, cultural and political inspiration in the nineteenth century, taking on trains and the trappings of the textile industry as Catalan industrialists modernized their milieu, exploiting their business acumen and the damp climate of northeast Spain. The city had also reflected the nostalgia for a pre-industrialized society made manifest in the architecture of Antoni Gaudí, as it had been in the literary work and art of William Morris (Cerdà 1981).5 By 1918, the Catalan capital was bustling with enterprise, having established herself as an industrial economy and, more recently, having achieved economic prosperity as a consequence of Spain’s lack of military involvement in World War I. The impact of European nationalism, registered in Catalonia (albeit ‘[f]or 3

The Catalan surname would today be written Domènech. For more information on the Doménech publishing venture, see María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia’s chapter devoted to George Eliot in Spain. 5 On the influence of Ruskin and Morris on Gaudí, see Gijs Van Hensbergen, Gaudí (London: HarperCollins, 2002). 4

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George Eliot in the Catalan Lands: The Long and the Short of It   239 convenience’ (Mackay 1985, 1)) with poet Bonaventura Aribau’s ‘Oda a la Pàtria’ (‘Ode to the Fatherland’) (1833), together with growing economic success, was contributing to an increased sense of national (Catalan) identity, which was consolidated with the founding of the Mancomunitat de Catalunya (Commonwealth of Catalonia) in 1917.6 Therefore, the publication of Silas Marner in Catalan translation in 1918 coincided with what constituted a moment of political promise for Catalonia,7 one bolstered by economic prosperity and not altogether dissimilar to the moment registered towards the close of SM, when Marner’s handloom is becoming obsolete (‘the weaving was going down’, Eliot 2003, 141) in the wake of Edmund Cartwright’s steam or water-powered invention; Catalonia had been moving, increasingly, towards mechanization. Furthermore, the moment possessed its ideological manifesto, expressed through Noucentisme, which proudly proclaimed Catalonia as ‘City’ [sic], an exaltation of the urbane over what came to be conceived of as rude ruralism.8 The discourse, proclaimed by Eugeni D’Ors i Rovira,9 conveyed the convictions of a blossoming and ambitious middle class whose values might seem to be of little relevance to a central theme in SM: the rural labourer’s lot. Yet the political preoccupation of the Catalan bourgeoisie in the wake of the Russian Revolution lay in convincing the proletariat to keep their place at a time of social unrest, made manifest in the ‘Setmana Tràgica’ (Tragic week) of 1909 in Barcelona (Benet 2009, 19–62) and in syndicalist struggles in the city, ongoing from 1917 and lasting until into the 1920s (Sobrequés i Callicó 2012, 138–39). Thus, Silas Marner, though not incorporated into a capitalist economy, was, nonetheless, a worker – one whose quiet devotion to his task and humble mien might be deemed exemplary, whilst his inclination towards stockpiling money, an ugly avarice seen to bring the ‘truthful […] simple soul’ (Eliot 2003, 42) no rewards, could also be read as a warning to workers thus tempted. Furthermore, Marner’s human redemption is ultimately achieved through the practice of fatherhood (and motherhood), albeit via adoption, a possibility biologically open to the proletariat at large. Indeed, parenthood could afford workers a similar joy while also contributing to the maintenance of the status quo through the production of more ‘Hands’.10 6

7 8

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The Mancomunitat signified a degree of home rule for Catalonia. See J. A. González i Casanova, ‘Mancomunitat de Catalunya’, in Joan Carreras i Martí (ed.), Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana (Barcelona: Enciclopedia Catalana S.A., 1981 (1976)), 9: 516. In spite of the passing of the Mancomunitat’s first president, Enric Prat de la Riba, in the very year that the Catalan Commonwealth was established. Trenc Ballester and Yates have referred to Noucentisme’s ‘swiftly [invoking] the virtues of order, restraint and responsibility in the service of a nationalism whose conservative cast became clearer as its political achievements gained consistency’ in the wake of the Modernista movement (Eliseu Trenc Ballester and Alan Yates, Alexandre de Riquer (1856–1920): The British Connection in Catalan Modernisme (Sheffield: The Anglo-Catalan Society, 1988), p. 19). See ‘Eugeni D’Ors’ [n.d.]. As in Dickens’s Hard Times (1854).

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240   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe The translator Josep Carner i Puig-Oriol (1884–1970), a native of Barcelona and a university graduate in both letters and law, was 34 when his rendering of Eliot’s work on the weaver of Raveloe was published in Barcelona. As a boy, Carner had taken to reading Dickens and Walter Scott (Garcés 1927, 141), and by the time he came to translate Eliot’s novel he had himself acquired recognition in his homeland as a poet of distinction and a successful journalist. Given his command of the language, he had also been actively involved within the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (Institute of Catalan Studies) in the task of establishing norms for the Catalan language, which were published in linguist Pompeu Fabra’s Normes ortogràfiques in 1913.11 At about this time, Carner travelled to England (Manent 1969, 317, n. 32), and four years later, perhaps prompted by financial concerns in the wake of his marriage (Manent 1969, 184), apart from maintaining a fervent political and cultural commitment to Catalonia and her language, he would become the literary editor of Editorial Catalana. This publishing venture was founded around the month of July 1917 and hailed as Prat de la Riba’s ‘last patriotic creation’12 as president of the Mancomunitat. Albert Manent described Editorial Catalana as part of a plan of political expansion by means of cultural penetration (1969, 183) and it is understood that in his capacity as literary editor Carner was responsible for choosing both authors and texts. A series known as the ‘Biblioteca Literària’ (‘Literary library’), devoted to foreign literature in Catalan translation, was founded in 1918, as was the ‘Biblioteca Catalana’ (‘Catalan Library’), all of whose authors were the nation’s own. Both series were supported by advertising in the Catalan daily La Veu de Catalunya (The voice of Catalonia) and became highly successful with print runs of 4,000–5,000, far exceeding the standard run at that time of 1,000 (Manent 1969, 321, note 24). Of the 72 volumes published over the first six years, only 12 of the authors were Catalans, thus exemplifying what Manent referred to as ‘making the world’s authors our own […] [,] one of the aims of Noucentisme, which sought to open the country [Catalonia] out towards Europe’.13 By the time SM was published in Carner’s translation, he had also produced renderings of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (Una canço nadalenca) and Mark Twain’s short story ‘The Stolen White Elephant’ (‘L’elefant blanc, robat’), as well as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Les aventures de Tom Sawyer) and tales (Contes) by Hans Christian Andersen under the pseudonym J. d’Albaflor, to be later adopted for his translation of Arnold Bennett’s The Price of Love (El preu de l’amor), all in the ‘Biblioteca Literària’. Up until 1922, when Carner’s career took a turn towards diplomacy, he is recorded as translating ‘almost torrentially, without pause or consulting a dictionary’14 and performing his task as he walked back and forth

11

See ‘Normes ortogràfiques’ [n.d.]. ‘la darrera creació patriòtica de Prat de la Riba’. Albert Manent cites the description as from an article by Carner in the Barcelona newspaper La Veu de Catalunya in 1921 (Josep Carner i el noucentisme (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1969), p. 183). 13 ‘L’anostrament d’autors universals […] [,] una de les fites del Noucentisme que volia esbatanar el país a Europa’ (Manent 1969, 184). 14 ‘gairebé torrencialment, sense pauses ni consultes de diccionari’ (Manent 1969, 12

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George Eliot in the Catalan Lands: The Long and the Short of It   241 in his office while dictating to a secretary, a ‘method’ which might meet with some scepticism. Nevertheless, Carner established a reputation as a translator of renown, recognized by a fellow Catalan who also translated from English, Cèsar-August Jordana, as producing in his translations ‘a delightful exercise in seeking out relations between languages and an in-depth knowledge of Catalan’.15 In an article devoted to Carner as translator, Lluís Cabré and Marcel Ortín outline three elements pertinent to the translating process, two of which will be brought to bear here: first, the question of choice regarding the text selected for translation, which (in the absence of other determining factors) will be decided by the translator’s identification with the text in question; and, second, the contribution of translations in providing a prose model in the language.16 Carner’s affinity with George Eliot’s ‘truth of feeling’17 is revealed in the brief foreword to his translation of the Cabinet edition of 1878, where he speaks of Marner as ‘helplessly and heroically human’.18 Furthermore, Carner recognizes in the protagonist a moral message and example, which he was also anxious to convey, aware of the importance of educating both ethically and socially a growing middle-class reading public as well as an increasingly literate and class-conscious urban workforce. Thus, Silas Marner is seen to encompass both a challenge and a warning while also being awarded a symbolic quality by Carner, who conceives of him as ‘a living representation of the People [sic], suffering, unknown, obstinate, a choice clay of undiscovered marvels’,19 rather than a menace. Whether a source of hidden treasure or potential threat, Carner insists on what constitutes for him a dignifying of the simple man in Eliot’s novel, where he sees him as being awarded heroic stature.20 With

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185). It is unclear from Manent’s text whom he is quoting; perhaps it was popular wisdom. However, he explains in a note that the scholar Jordi Rubió [i Balaguer] and writer Josep Pla confirm the information in question (1969, 321, n. 25). ‘una delitosa recerca de relacions entre idiomes i un apregonament del coneixement del català’ (Manent 1969, 186). The third element, highlighted between these two, is the conception and process involved in translation (Lluís Cabré and Marcel Ortín, ‘Aproximació a Josep Carner, traductor (Els anys de l’Editorial Catalana: 1918–1921)’, Els Marges, Barcelona, 31 (1984): 115–17). George Eliot to Sara Hennell, 9 October 1843, cited in David Carroll (‘Introduction’, in George Eliot, Silas Marner (London: Penguin, 1996), p. xxiv). ‘desvalgudament i heroicament humà’ (Josep Carner, ‘Davant la traducció de Silas Marner’, in George Elliot [sic], Silas Marner (Barcelona: Editorial Catalana, [1918]), p. 6). In the sentence quoted from, ‘Silas Marner’ appears in plain typeface, adopted in Carner’s [1918] introduction when referring to the title of the novel. The text of the introduction, save citing the title of the novel, appears throughout in italics. However, it is clear from the following sentence that the character rather than the novel is being referred to. ‘una figuració vivent del Poble [sic], sofridor, inconegut, de sentiments obstinats, argila predilecta d’insabudes meravelles’ (Carner [1918], 6). ‘un protagonista heroic’ (Carner [1918], 6).

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242   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe regard to providing a prose model in the language, Carner appreciated that the translation of the works of authors who had attained recognition in their cultures of origin could contribute to building instructive models for home consumption as well as providing a stimulus to the craft of creation in the Catalan language. In spite of Catalonia’s readiness to open herself to Europe, what Europe had to offer might not be so readily rendered into what would be deemed by the appropriator a suitable product for home consumption, given cultural differences and/or preferences. Xavier Pericay and Ferran Toutain have remarked on how in the early twentieth century texts by foreign authors were adjusted to the dictates of Noucentisme, whose impact was felt, moreover, for the following 20 years: [I]n the hands of Catalan translators, the author vanished, was swallowed up by the stylistic imprint of the struggling interpreter […] Shakespeare, Swift, Molière, Defoe, Andersen, Tolstoy, Poe, Twain, Dickens, Proust not only spoke Catalan, the Catalan that they spoke was beautiful, measured, exalted, immaculate. An ideal Catalan.21

Carner spoke of his attachment to English culture in the wake of the intense translating task he performed between 1918 and 1922: Years have passed and I have remained faithful to my childhood anglophilia. I shall never be able to fully understand anyone who hasn’t experienced a degree of nostalgia in front of a Gainsborough, or who remains untouched by the utter friendliness of the English landscape, or remains indifferent to Mr Pickwick’s human warmth, or is incapable of joining in a sailor’s song in the fog, or who hasn’t even read a detective novel.22

Carner’s admiration for Eliot’s writing, and SM in particular, is clear from his foreword to the novel in his Catalan translation, yet, to some degree, it constituted an extraneous product in terms of culture: both the poetry of William Wordsworth and the religious creed of Calvinism are cases in point.23 21

‘[E]n mans dels traductors catalans, l’autor es difuminava i quedava engolit per la marca estilística de l’esforçat torsimany […] Shakespeare, Swift, Molière, Defoe, Andersen, Tolstoi, Poe, Twain, Dickens, Proust, no tan sols parlaven català, sinó que el català que parlaven era bell, ponderat, excels, immaculat. Un català ideal’ (Xavier Pericay and Ferran Toutain, El malentès del noucentisme (Barcelona: Proa, 1997 (1996), p. 19). 22 ‘Han passat anys i m’he mantingut fidel a la meva anglofilia de noi. Mai em podré entendre perfectament amb qui no hagi romàs una mica nostàlgic davant Gainsborough, o es mostri insensible davant la cordialitat minuciosa del paisatge anglès, o no es commogui davant la cordialitat humana de Mr Pickwick, o sigui incapaç de degustar una cançó de mariner sota la boira, o al menys de llegir una novel·la de detectius’ (Carner in Manent 1969, 153–54). 23 Carroll refers to ‘many echoes, allusions and quotations from Wordsworth in the novel’ (George Eliot, Silas Marner, ed. David Carroll (London: Penguin, 2003 (1996), p. 184, n. 1).

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George Eliot in the Catalan Lands: The Long and the Short of It   243 The quote from the 1836 edition of Wordsworth’s poem ‘Michael’, which appeared as epigraph on the title page of SM in 1861, figures in the Catalan publication of 1983: A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts.

The lines are attributed to Wordsworth and the original English is maintained; however, they do not appear in translation, and no further information is supplied regarding the poet or his poetry. The edition also carries the explanatory footnotes provided by Carner.24 However, why Carner should have opted not to include the lines from ‘Michael’ in [1918] is perplexing since Noucentisme valued poetry highly and the lines provide a particularly apt reflection in relation to the novel which follows, ‘[centred] on the covenantal relationship between father and child’ (Carroll, in Eliot 2003, 184, n. 1). Perhaps there was a will not to draw attention to Wordsworth’s ‘Radicalism’ (Leavis 2003, 209), though such an explanation seems far-fetched. As for the Calvinist culture of Lantern Yard, it would have been largely unfamiliar in Catholic Catalonia. Its anti-hierarchical thrust, ‘the poorest layman [having] the chance of distinguishing himself by gifts of speech, and [having], at the very least, the weight of a silent voter in the government of his community’ (Eliot 2003, 9), might have been seen as alien, if not undesirable. However, the labelling of the Lantern Yard community as ‘a narrow religious sect’ (Eliot 2003, 9) where, moreover, Marner is unjustly accused of theft, enables Carner to sum up the weaver’s nonconformist substance as ‘Biblical fetishism’25 and, thus, dismiss the matter. The ‘many overtones’ (Leavis 2003, 234–35) from Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, as well as certain biblical echoes, might have been lost on a Catalan reading public, but these were no impediment to an appreciation of Marner’s journey. According to a number of accounts, it seems that when Carner took on the translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1908 he knew little English and, therefore, drew on a French rendering of Shakespeare’s comedy (Manent 1969, 124). Ten years on, he had visited England and may well have felt more confident in tackling an English text at source. However, he may also have had recourse to d’Albert-Durade’s 1863 translation into French to support him through Eliot’s, on occasion, daunting density. Notwithstanding Carner’s admiration for SM in the original English,26 24

Footnotes appear on three occasions (Eliot [1918], 11, 128, 175), to clarify ‘those war times’, the notion of ‘chapel’ and that of ‘hornpipe’ (Eliot 2003, 7, 83, 113) in Chapters 1, 10 and 13. 25 ‘el fetitxisme de la Biblia’ (Carner [1918], 6). 26 Confirmed in the second sentence of the opening paragraph of his foreword to Silas Marner: ‘Mary Ann Evans, que, sota el nom manllevat de George Elliot [sic], escrigué tan belles pàgines transparents, arribà en Silas Marner a una quieta perfecció insuperada, admirablement cenyida, de noble mesura, on les crisis spirituals viuen amb penetrant angoixa autèntica, i l’element dramàtic té

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244   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe the opening chapter of the novel in the Catalan translation already reveals a transformation of the author’s less-than-temperate textuality, lengthy paragraphs being broken up in this ‘re-creation’,27 apparently whenever the translator saw fit.28 The chapter also reveals simplification in the imagery, a feature which is not common in the translation overall. Thus, both ‘in the winking of an eye’ and ‘as soon as you can say “Gee!”’ in Jem Rodney’s speech are resolved with ‘en un dir Jesús’.29 The phrase is apt, the repetition impoverishing in relation to the character’s colourful speech. Having said that, the people’s colourful spontaneity, as expressed in their speech, was not a Noucentista priority. Even though Carner may have been more confident and, indeed, competent in approaching Eliot’s novel as translator a decade beyond his ‘dreaming’ of Shakespeare’s play,30 his text carries some errors which today (aided by an array of dictionaries) would be readily solved and are, in any event, few in number.31 These include the description of Marner as creating the impression l’amplitud i la lògica profunda d’un joc providencial, i les més anecdòtiques figures ressalten com a trobadisses, i la mescla de pessimisme i elevació i exquisit humorisme compassiu, amara l’ànima del lector d’una indefinable i generosa recança: on els elements habituals d’Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss i Middlemarch, encaixen uns amb altres en deliciosa i proporcionadíssima unitat.’ (‘Mary Ann Evans, who, under the pseudonym George Elliot [sic], wrote such beautiful, transparent pages, produced in Silas Marner an [a work of] unmatched, serene perfection, admirably structured, of noble restraint, where spiritual crises are experienced with a penetrating anguish, which rings authentic, and the dramatic element possesses the breadth and profound logic of a providential hand, and the most ordinary characters stand out as true encounters, and the blend of pessimism and lifting of the spirit and exquisite compassion fill the soul of the reader with an undefinable and generous sorrow: where elements familiar from AB, MF and M come together in a charming and perfectly balanced whole.’) (Carner [1918], 5). 27 On the process of ‘recreació’ in the translating process following on from Carner’s theory of poetics, see Cabré and Ortín 1984, 116. 28 The opening paragraph of SM is divided into two, the following one into three and the third into five, some of these latter breaks dictated by the introduction of direct speech. The long paragraph in Chapter 4, which begins ‘Keating rode up now […]’ and ends four pages later with ‘[…] Marner was not there’, constitutes six paragraphs in the translated text. 29 ‘as soon as you could say Jesus’. The forfeited opportunity may have been a consequence of Carner’s lack of time given his position as editor of the publishing venture, translator and overseer of the translations produced by others; see Cabré and Ortín 1984, 119, and Casas i Homs, cited in Manent 1969, 185. 30 In the prologue to his translation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Carner claims that the text which follows is simply ‘the fruit […] of having dreamt the DREAM [sic]’ (‘el fruit d’haver somiat el SOMNI [sic]’), admitting that were an indignant critic to push him up against a wall, he would be obliged to confess that perhaps, indeed, his Dream was not quite Shakespeare’s! (Josep Carner, ‘Abans que tot’, in William Shakespeare, El somni d’una nit d’estiu, trans. Josep Carner (Barcelona: Estampa d’E. Doménech, 1908), pp. 7, 8). 31 The errors in question may be a consequence of consulting d’Albert-Durade’s translation, if, indeed, Carner did so.

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George Eliot in the Catalan Lands: The Long and the Short of It   245 of ‘a crooked tube’ (Eliot 2003, 20);32 Godfrey’s expressing the possibility that the following day it might be ‘[raining] cats and dogs’33 (29) and his brown spaniel, Snuff, simply being classified as a bitch34 (33); Marner’s feeling of ‘ease in the thought’35 that Jem Rodney was the culprit responsible for stealing his savings (44); the butcher’s reference to ‘liver and lights’36 (49); the description of the farrier as ‘a man intensely opposed to compromise’37 (54); Marner’s ‘movement of compunction’38 (57) and the ‘hem’39 of Nancy Lammeter’s dress (106). The Catalan also appears oblivious to Eliot’s use of free indirect discourse. Describing Marner’s experiencing a cataleptic fit and his recovery following it, Jem Rodney’s colloquial turn of phrase is recorded without any inverted commas, absorbed into the textual flow: ‘[…] but just as he had made his mind up that the weaver was dead, he came all right again, like, as you might say, in the winking of an eye […]’ (Eliot 2003, 8). Jem’s ‘like, as you might say’ is omitted and, later, Mr Macey’s reference to young Lammeter’s wedding ceremony, which brings in the youth’s insistence, is distorted, on this occasion, it would seem, through misunderstanding: ‘And young Mr Lammeter he’d have no way but he must be married in Janiwary [sic] […]’ (50).40 Finding an equally intense rendering in Catalan of Eliot’s exploiting of alliteration together with rhythm and stress in ‘the black biting frost’41 (87) would certainly present the translator with a challenge, but it might be argued that the greatest challenge in Silas Marner was Eliot’s representation of working people’s speech even though it was adjusted for the sake of comprehension. As the author herself explained: It must be borne in mind that my inclination to be as close as I could to the rendering of dialect, both in words and spelling, was constantly checked by the artistic duty of being generally intelligible […] The district imagined as the scene of SM is in N[orth] Warwickshire. But here […] it has been my intention to give the general physiognomy rather than a close portraiture of the provincial speech as I have heard it in the Midland or Mercian region.42

32

‘un tub de laboratori’ [a laboratory tube] (George Eliot, Silas Marner: El teixidor de Raveloe, trans. Josep Carner (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1983), p. 28). 33 ‘si donaran l’aigua’ [if water will be given] (Eliot 1983, 38). 34 ‘gossa’ (Eliot 1983, 41). 35 ‘aquest pensament el retornava’ [this thought returned to his mind/plagued him] (Eliot 1983, 54). 36 ‘les seves despeses’ [his expenses] (Eliot 1983, 61). 37 ‘home intensament contrari a les transaccions’ [intensely opposed to transactions] (Eliot 1983, 66). 38 ‘moviment impulsiu’ [impulsive movement] (Eliot 1983, 70). 39 ‘guarnició’ [decoration] (Eliot 1983, 121). 40 ‘I el jove senyor Lammeter no tenia més remei que casar-se en gener […]’ [And young Mr Lammeter had no alternative but to marry in January] (Eliot 1983, 62). 41 ‘la negra gelada mossegaire’ (Eliot 1983, 101). 42 Eliot, Letters, IX, 39; cited in Eliot 2003, 188–89, n. 3.

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246   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe As Q. D. Leavis recalled, Eliot was anxious that ‘Art’ should represent the ‘“common labourer”’ (2003, 209) and her use of dialect is fundamental in this connection. However, Carner’s remit was quite distinct given the vicissitudes experienced by the Catalan language as a consequence of Catalonia’s having been absorbed into the Spanish nation-state. To represent dialectal variations in a community which had only just begun to fix norms for the tongue was a luxury, one which, arguably, Catalan could ill afford in 1918. Thus, the opportunity to produce and publish texts in Catalan had to be used in a way that favoured the recently standardized language. Hence, apart from two instances in Chapter 6,43 in which Raveloe folk are in conversation at the local inn, The Rainbow, the dialectal speech of the variety of characters represented adheres to the new norms. However, in the case of the Misses Gunn’s criticism of Nancy Lammeter’s dialectal distortion – ‘She actually said “mate” for “meat”, “appen” for “perhaps” and “oss” for “horse”, which, to young ladies living in good Lytherly society […] was necessarily shocking’ (Eliot 2003, 93) – the translator had recourse to circumlocution.44 With regard to dialectal lexicon, such as ‘a mawkin’, ‘mushed’ and ‘piert’, Carner aptly renders ‘piert’ (104) and ‘mushed’ (57, 69), but doesn’t rise to Priscilla Lammeter’s use of ‘mawkin’ (94).45 Finally, a word might be said about what may be interpreted as a concern to guard the reputation of the great and the good. At the end of Chapter 5, The Rainbow is described as a place where Marner understood that ‘he was likely to find the powers and dignities of Raveloe’ (Eliot 2003, 45), and in Chapter 12, reference is made to the mind of Molly, Godfrey’s wife, as ‘inhabited by no higher memories than those of a barmaid’s paradise of pink ribbons and gentlemen’s jokes’ (107). The ‘powers and dignities’ become, more vaguely, the ‘unlimited powers’46 of Raveloe, and the reference to gentlemen’s jokes, conveying the understanding that gentlemen frequented such haunts as were inhabited by barmaids of Molly’s ilk, become the jokes of ‘parishioners’47 all. It is worth adding here that Carner’s text is not plagued by omissions; but in Godfrey Cass’s dialogue of the mind with itself, Anxiety [sic] becoming his interlocutor at the close of Chapter 10, the first comment and question posed by Anxiety has been excluded, perhaps by accident or as a consequence of a lack of understanding of ‘bribe his spite’: ‘“Dunsey will be coming home 43 See

Macey’s ‘pernouncing’ (Eliot 2003, 47) and ‘ignirant’ (Eliot 2003, 54), rendered as ‘pernunciació’ [pronunciació] (Eliot 1983, 59) and ‘ainorant’ [ignorant] (Eliot 1983, 66), respectively, reproduced in italics. 44 ‘Talment, la senyoreta Nancy pronunciava o aplicava incorrectament certes paraules; i això, per a damisel·les que vivien en la bona societat de Lytherly […], era una cosa ofensiva.’ [‘Thus, Miss Nancy incorrectly pronounced or misused certain words; and this, for damsels who lived in the good society of Lytherly, was offensive.’] (Eliot 1983, 107). 45 ‘eixorivit’ [piert]; ‘aclaparat[s]’ [mushed] and ‘atrapada’ [trapped, for mushed]; ‘un fàstic’ [something disgusting, for mawkin] (Eliot 1983, 118, 69, 91 and 109 respectively). 46 ‘els poders il·limitats’ (Eliot 1983, 55). 47 ‘parroquians’ (Eliot 1983, 124).

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George Eliot in the Catalan Lands: The Long and the Short of It   247 soon: there will be a great blow-up, and how will you bribe his spite to silence?” said Anxiety’ (Eliot 2003, 88; 1983, 102). In a page of comment devoted to the appearance of Eliot’s M in Catalan in 1995, critic Joan Triadú (1995) recalled Josep Carner’s translation of SM some 70 years earlier. He noted that Carner’s early twentieth-century rendering had been reissued in the 1980s but remarked that, in effect, ‘the great English novelist disappear[ed] from among our translations’.48 Indeed, no other novel by Eliot would appear in Catalan until, almost, the end of the century, largely a consequence of Catalonia’s subjection to dictatorial regimes and the ravages of civil war rather than a loss of interest in incorporating the works of foreign authors into her literary system.49 Eliot’s Catalan comeback as novelist was staged by a Barcelona publishing house, Columna, founded in 1985 and devoted to publishing contemporary fiction as well as modern classics in Catalan.50 The publication of Eliot’s 1871–72 tome was supported by a grantin-aid provided by the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes (Institution of Catalan Letters), a body which forms part of the Catalan government’s Department of Culture and whose leading priority is to promote literature and provide a stimulus to reading in general.51 If, as Virginia Woolf asserted, M was ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’ (1919), it may be said that by 1995, having been released from years of oppression and the death throes of dictatorship almost 20 years earlier, Catalonia had had the opportunity to grow once more.52 Thus, the time may be said to have been ripe for the likes of Dorothea Brooke, a woman of ‘theoretic’ mind (Eliot 2008a, 8), full of ‘eagerness to know the truths of life’ (10) and alive to injustice experienced by women as a result of patriarchal

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‘la gran novel·lista anglesa desapareix de les nostres traduccions’. Triadú was, presumably, unaware of the 1989 translation of The Lifted Veil into Catalan (see below), or he may have been referring exclusively to Eliot’s novels. 49 See Josep Benet (Catalunya sota el règim franquista: informe sobre la persecució de la llengua i la cultura de Catalunya pel règim del general Franco (Barcelona: Blume, 1979 (1978), pp. 38–54). On publisher Josep Janés’s contribution between 1934 and 1938, see Jacqueline Hurtley (Josep Janés: El combat per la cultura (Barcelona: Curial, 1986)). 50 The back flap of the dustjacket on the hardback edition of Middlemarch (1995) carried publicity for Columna’s Catalan editions of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and A. S. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Columna was bought out by the Barcelona publishing concern Planeta in 1999, by which time Columna had become the third most important publisher in Catalan (Josep Massot and Sergei Vila Sanjuán, ‘Planeta compra Columna y desembarca en el mercado editorial en lengua catalana’, La Vanguardia, Barcelona, 31 July 1999, 32). 51 For further information, see ‘Institució de les Lletres Catalanes’ [n.d.]. 52 Catalonia’s own home rule statute (Estatut d’Autonomia) was granted by the parliament of Spain’s Second Republic on 9 September 1932, following the restrictions of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. It was eliminated in the wake of General Franco’s victory in 1939 but a new home rule statute for Catalonia was formulated in the wake of the democratic regime established following the second dictator’s passing. See ‘Estatut d’Autonomia de Catalunya’ [n.d.].

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248   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe legislation.53 The vindication of women’s rights had been high on the agenda in the wake of Francisco Franco’s passing as second-wave feminism made its mark in the Spanish state and, more particularly, Catalonia, constituting a challenge to the sexist notions of Mr Casaubon’s ilk, as expressed by the ‘scholarly’ husband to his wife: ‘The great charm of your sex is its capability of an ardent self-sacrificing affection, and herein we see its fitness to round and complete the existence of our own’ (Eliot 2008a, 46).54 Indeed, Dorothea’s imprisonment55 within her marriage could strike a chord within a country where limited legislation concerning divorce still signified a battle for women seeking to break a bond experienced as ‘a perpetual struggle of energy with fear’ (365) into the 1990s.56 Moreover, a seasoned mediator was available to introduce Miss Brooke: Barcelona-born Jordi Arbonès i Montull, who had been publishing translations into Catalan since 1969 while resident in Buenos Aires. By 1995, Arbonès had chalked up some 60 titles: among them, nineteenth-century classics Dickens, Thackeray and Jane Austen, but also twentieth-century authors ranging from the canonical English E. M. Forster

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See also Dorothea’s reflection on the experience of Will Ladislaw’s outlawed grandmother (George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008a (1997)), p. 349) before her own subjection as a widow. 54 The journal Vindicación feminista (see bibliography) provides information regarding the struggle for women’s rights in the Spanish state between 1976 and 1979. On the period leading up to 1995, see Pilar Folguera (‘De la transición política a la democracia: La evolución del feminismo en España durante el periodo 1975–1988’, in Pilar Folguera (ed.), El feminismo en España: Dos siglos de historia (Madrid: Fundación Pablo Iglesias, 1988), pp. 111–33) and Elena Grau Biosca (‘De la emancipación a la liberación y la valoración de la diferencia: El movimiento de mujeres en el estado español,1965–1990’, in Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (eds), Historia de las mujeres en occidente (Madrid: Taurus, 1993), pp. 673–83). On the first women’s bookshop in the Spanish state, set up in Barcelona, and the feminist publishing concern in Catalan, La Sal Edicions de les Dones, see Mary Nash (‘El moviment feminista durant la Transició’, in Pelai Pagès i Blanch (ed.), La transició democràtica als Països Catalans (València: Universitat de València, 2005), pp. 361–62). On Spanish women’s achievement of legal parity with men, see Mary Nash (Mujeres en el mundo: Historia, retos y movimientos (Madrid: Alianza, 2004)). 55 ‘the mere chance of seeing Will occasionally was like a lunette opened in the wall of her prison’ (Eliot 2008a, 339). 56 On the question of a widow’s rights, or lack of them, over property left to her by her deceased husband and his will condemning her to the loss of her rights should she remarry, Maridès Soler (Trier) has drawn enlightening parallels between Pilar Prim (1906) by the novelist who documented the Barcelona bourgeoisie in his writing, Narcís Oller, and Eliot’s Middlemarch. Soler (Trier) points out that Oller had a number of contacts in French literary circles: Edmond de Goncourt, Maupassant and Huysmans as well as Zola, and, therefore, may well have been familiar with the popular French translation of Eliot’s novel, published in 1890 (Maridès Soler (Trier), ‘Els codis socioculturals de la “viuda desheredada” a Pilar Prim de Narcís Oller i a Middlemarch de George Eliot’, Zeitschrift für Katalanistik, Freiburg, 19 (2006): 103–17; 104).

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George Eliot in the Catalan Lands: The Long and the Short of It   249 and D. H. Lawrence to off-beat Americans such as Ambrose Bierce and Gore Vidal.57 Apart from any financial gain which translating might afford him, Arbonès was moved to produce translations into Catalan by a sense of service to the nation. Acknowledging a letter from Triadú in the late 1960s, he expressed his desire to be of use: Your letter provided the encouragement that those of us who live far from home need; we live with the single purpose of service, of doing what will be useful to our Native Land [sic]. And it is important for us to know that what we do is what needs to be done!58

Triadú represented a link in the homeland with the Noucentista movement which strongly marked Arbonès’s Catalan as he took to translation.59 His education in the language was lacking as a consequence of having been of secondary school age during the early years of the Franco regime when Catalan was not taught in schools. Indeed, he claims to have subsequently discovered that translating into Catalan was ‘a good means of carrying out writing exercises in one’s own language’.60 Arbonès’s output as a translator may be said to reveal a taste for tomes. By 1995 he had tackled Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair; therefore he was not to be daunted by the length of M, for which, moreover, he produced a not insignificant number of explanatory footnotes.61

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Arbonès took up residence in Buenos Aires in 1956, where he died in 2001. For a full account of his output, see Alba Pijuan Vallverdú (‘Entrevista a Jordi Arbonès’, Quaderns: Revista de traducció, Barcelona, 10 (2003): 153–63). ‘La vostra carta ens va injectar aquell ànim que tanta falta ens fa a tots aquells qui, lluny de la terra, vivim amb l’únic propòsit de servir-la, de fer coses que siguin útils a la Pàtria [sic]. I és tan important saber que el que fem és el que cal fer!’ (Arbonès 1967). For a critical view of Arbonès’s adherence to Noucentista models, see Pericay and Toutain (1997, 287–92). For Arbonès’s response to criticism of his translations as a consequence of being locked into outmoded models, see Jordi Arbonès (‘Més reflexions sobre aspectes pràctics de la traducció’, Revista de Catalunya, Barcelona, 103 (1996a): 85–100; and ‘Encara més reflexions sobre aspectes pràctics de la traducció’, Revista de Catalunya, Barcelona, 104 (1996b): 112–20) and Pijuan Vallverdú (2003, 154–55). ‘un bon mitjà per a fer exercicis d’escriptura en la pròpia llengua’ (Jordi Arbonès, ‘Reflexions sobre aspectes pràctics de la traducció’, Revista de Catalunya, Barcelona, 94 (1995): 75). For further information on Arbonès, see Pijuan Vallverdú (2003), Ramon Farrés (‘Les traduccions de Jordi Arbonès: una visió de conjunt’, Quaderns: Revista de traducció, Bellaterra; Barcelona, 12 (2005)) and Marcos Rodríguez Espinosa (‘Identidad nacional y traducción: entrevista a Jordi Arbonès’, Trans, Málaga, 6: 215–24, 2002, http://pagines.uab.cat/catedrajordiarbones/content/ entrevista (accessed 24 March 2013). The translation carries 86 footnotes, the majority of which (66) appear in books one to four. The notes provide information regarding names, concepts and historical references as well as occasionally passing critical comment, as in note 1 of book one, Chapter 6, where Eliot’s blurring of boundaries between fact and

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250   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe However, detecting ‘how Eliot generally works as she moves through the novel’s layers, from her theme to her characterization’ (Bonaparte 2008, xiii) might, on occasion, escape the most diligent. In this connection, Bonaparte points to the imagery of death in relation to Casaubon (2008, xiii). It is reflected through Celia’s perception that Casaubon’s proposal of marriage and his person evoked ‘something funereal’ (Eliot 2008a, 45) and also carried through into Dorothea’s response to her sister, ‘do not grieve’ (45), which is forfeited in Catalan, becoming, ‘Don’t worry, […] don’t concern yourself ’.62 With regard to characterization, Mr Vincy’s patriotic pronouncement ‘It’s a good British feeling to try and raise your family a little’ (Eliot 2008a, 120) becomes a less imperial whole in the Catalan: ‘I consider it very English and a good thing’;63 and the idiosyncracy of Mr Featherstone’s pronunciation – his ‘dockiments’ [documents], ‘speckilating’ [speculating] and ‘speckilation’ [speculation] (2008a, 102–03) – are not reflected in the Catalan. The language had possessed its norms since 1913, but in the 82 years that followed, up until the publication of M (1995), it had been disabled by dictatorships for almost half of the period. Arbonès’s translation earnestly sought to be a contribution to the language’s ‘normalització’64 and he firmly defended adhering to the established model.65 Thus, neither could Dagley’s dialectal and drunken speech (2008a, 370–72) find expression in Catalan. Characterization is also affected through omission, as in Will Ladislaw’s assessment of Casaubon as a ‘coxcomb’ (204), or misinterpretation, as in Alfred Garth’s qualifying his reliable sister Mary as ‘an old brick’ (Eliot 2008a, 375), the Catalan metaphor employed signifying a good-natured person.66 Rendering successful alliterative sequences which may, moreover, carry an ironic thrust – the reference to the song ‘Home Sweet Home’ viewed as a suitable ‘garnish for girls’ (108), Rosamond’s sense of being a Romantic heroine ‘and playing the part prettily’ (279), and Dorothea seated on a dark

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fiction is referred to (George Eliot, Middlemarch, trans. Jordi Arbonès (Barcelona: Columna, 1995), p. 59). They may be found lacking, however, as for instance in book one, Chapters 7 and 8, when ‘the Catholic question’ is cited, though earlier footnotes highlight the issue; see Chapter 1, n. 1, on Robert Peel, and Chapter 4, n. 2, on Sir Samuel Romilly (Eliot 1995, 15, 44). ‘No t’amoïnis, […] no pateixis’ (Eliot 1995, 54). ‘Considero molt anglès i una bona cosa […]’ (Eliot 1995, 132). The Law of Linguistic Normalization [La Llei de Normalització Lingüística] was approved by the Catalan parliament in 1983, ‘an attempt to repair, as far as possible, some of the harm caused by persecution, carried out […] by General Franco’s regime for well nigh forty years’ (‘un intent de reparar, en el possible alguns dels danys causats per persecució, feta […] pel règim del general Franco durant gairebé quaranta anys’) (Josep Benet, L’intent franquista de genocidi cultural contra Catalunya (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1995), p. 513). See also Jude Webber and Miquel Strubell i Trueta (The Catalan Language: Progress towards Normalisation (Sheffield: Anglo-Catalan Society, 1991)). In this connection, see Arbonès’s view as expressed in interview (Pijuan Vallverdú 2003, 154). ‘un tros de pa’ – literally, ‘a piece of bread’ (Eliot 1995, 375–76).

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George Eliot in the Catalan Lands: The Long and the Short of It   251 ottoman in the library ‘with the brown books behind her’ (341) – might prove impossible, a less subtle expression having to suffice. However, it may be argued that the feminized language in Dorothea’s speech is essential to Eliot’s purpose overall: ‘[…] by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil – widening the skirts of light […]’ (367, our emphasis).67 However, although the text may seek a softness of which Casaubon is incapable, the assessment of Middlemarch life can be piercing, reflected in Lydgate’s synthesis of the family party at the Vincys, seen as characterized by ‘gossip, protracted good cheer, whist-playing and general futility’ (328). The translation is less severe, employing ‘frivolitat’ (1995, 344) for ‘futility’, thus avoiding the indictment expressed in the source text. Between the Catalan translations of SM and M, Eliot’s highly successful AB (1859) was translated into Castilian and published in Barcelona in 1944. As indicated above, the novel had already been translated into Castilian in the late nineteenth century, a text which may have been drawn upon by Catalan writer and Noucentista devotee Agustí Esclasans i Folch, whose forename appeared as Agustín (i.e. in the Spanish form) in the 1944 text. Esclasans was imprisoned in the wake of the Civil War and, like other former authors in Catalan, found himself eking out a living as a translator into Castilian. His Adán Bede was brought out by the former publisher, poet and journalist in Catalan, Josep Janés i Olivé, who had also experienced imprisonment as the war ended and over the years of World War II looked to create a new publishing enterprise. Relocated in totalitarian Spain as José [sic] Janés, he sought to carry through Catalonia’s commitment to culture within the confines of the new regime.68 The Eliot volume was published in a series which bore the title ‘Ave Phoenix’, announced as ‘The books which are forever reborn’69 and whose titles in English included Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers and Melville’s Moby Dick. It might be anticipated that the character of Hetty Sorrel, her extra-marital relationship with Arthur Donnithorne, her pregnancy and her subsequent abandonment of her child would not make of AB an appropriate text for consumption in the conservative Catholic Spain of the early 1940s. Certainly Barbro’s suffocation of her newborn offspring in the Spanish translation of 67

Rendered into Catalan as ‘eixamplem l’abast de la llum’ (‘we expand the reach of light’) (Eliot 1995, 383), our emphasis. 68 For further information on Esclasans and Janés, see Jacqueline Hurtley (‘War and Peace – Pater’s Part: Translations of Walter Pater in 1930s and 1940s Spain’, in Stephen Bann (ed.), The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), pp. 246–47), and on Janés both before and after the Civil War see Hurtley (1986). 69 ‘Los libros de eterno renacer’ (see the description of the series on the back of the dustjacket of Adán Bede (1944)). The series was symbolically represented by an open book situated over flames above which the phoenix rises in flight. The phoenix became Janés’s emblem as publisher in the post-war period, aptly expressing his determination to defy destruction and death in order to re-establish his relationship and cultural objective with the reading public he had contributed to creating with the Quaderns Literaris between 1934 and 1938.

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252   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil (Bendicción de la tierra), published by Janés the year before Adán Bede appeared, had been excised according to the dictates of the recently established Vicesecretaría de Educación Popular (Vice-Secretary’s Office for the Education of the People).70 It was one of the same readers within the state’s censorship apparatus, Leopoldo Panero, who had approved of the excision in question, who subsequently reported on the application for permission to publish Adán Bede, yet he expressed no objection whatsoever in connection with Eliot’s novel.71 The differing verdict would appear to be indicative of Panero’s objections to Hamsun’s fascist affiliation rather than an ethical objection on the grounds of infanticide. And the Short of It Helen Small has claimed that although The Lifted Veil and ‘Brother Jacob’ were not ‘originally conceived as a duo, they make a natural pairing as the only two self-contained short stories [...] [George Eliot produced]’ (2009, xxx). As referred to above, these two stories were published together with SM in the prestigious Cabinet edition of Eliot’s work, since the writer’s desire was ‘to protect The Lifted Veil by giving it the right companion. “Brother Jacob” was the perfect moral contrast’ (Small 2009, xxx). The Lifted Veil was rendered into Catalan in the latter part of the twentieth century and ‘Brother Jacob’ into Valencian in the first decade of the twenty-first. The Lifted Veil was translated as El vel alçat by Catalan philologist Maria Dolors Ventós. This was the second text by Eliot to appear in Catalan, some 70 years after the publication of SM. Despite the fact that the Franco dictatorship ended in 1975 and with it the legal limitations placed on the Catalan language,72 El vel alçat (1989) was the first post-Franco translation into Catalan of a text by George Eliot.73 The translation was marketed by the publishing house Laertes, and the Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat de Catalunya (Department of Culture in the Catalan Government) provided a grant-in-aid. Laertes, founded in 1975 and established in Barcelona, publishes texts in both 70

For further information on the censorship of Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil and other texts, see Jacqueline Hurtley (‘A Hunger for Hamsun? Translation and Reception in Spain, 1941–1952’, in Peter Fjågesund (ed.), Hamsun Abroad: International Reception (London: Norvik Press, 2009), pp. 109–29). 71 See the chapter by María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia on the Spanish translations of Eliot’s novels, in which she quotes from the file carrying the resolution regarding the publication of Adán Bede in the 1940s. 72 See Benet (1979); Albert Manent and Joan Crexell (Bibliografia catalana dels anys més difícils (1939–1943) (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Monsterrat, 1988)); Bibliografia catalana dels anys més difícils (1944–1946) (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Monsterrat, 1989); Amparo Hurtado Díaz and José Ruiz Casanova (Literatura comparada catalana i espanyola al segle XX: gèneres, lectures i traduccions (Lleida: Punctum & Trilcat, 2007)); Sílvia Coll-Vinent, Cornèlia Eisner and Enric Gallén (La traducció i el món editorial de postguerra (Lleida: Punctum & Trilcat, 2011)). 73 At the time of writing there have been no reprints or new editions of this text.

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George Eliot in the Catalan Lands: The Long and the Short of It   253 Castilian and Catalan. ‘L’arcà’ (‘The secret’), one of the series in Catalan, is mainly devoted to literature in the genre of the fantastic; before El vel alçat it had published translations of Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and H. P. Lovecraft, among other European writers. Thus, Eliot’s El vel alçat was thematically in keeping with the series. The translation was published in paperback and on the back cover provides paratextual information74 which is worth examining. First, there is a summary of the text and a biographical sketch of the author, in which Mary Ann Evans is identified. Furthermore, El vel alçat is compared to the texts of other nineteenth-century women writers who cultivated the Gothic – Mary Shelley and Mary Elizabeth Braddon – most probably to encourage readers of the genre to read Eliot’s ‘forgotten short story’ which, it is claimed, ‘represents her lifelong interest in mystery and the supernatural’.75 Finally, there is a list of the author’s major texts and a reference to the only other instance of Eliot’s writing in Catalan at this time, SM, with particular reference made to its quality: ‘outstandingly rendered into Catalan by Josep Carner’.76 The translator of El vel alçat, Maria Dolors Ventós, has outlined her view on translation,77 which explains her practice:

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Gérard Genette coined the term ‘seuils’ – ‘paratexts’ in English – in a book of the same title originally published in French in 1987. Genette defines paratexts as elements which ‘[o]ne does not always know if one should consider [as belonging] to the text or not, but in any case they surround it and prolong it [...] to present it, [...] to make it present, to assure its presence in the world, its “reception” and its consumption’ (Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 1). The author establishes a distinction between two different types of paratexts: peritexts and epitexts. The former would include all the elements appended to the book such as the title, format, series, cover, prefaces, notes, illustrations, among others. Epitexts, on the other hand, are ‘any paratextual element not materially appended to the text within the same volume but circulating, as it were, freely, in a virtually limitless physical and social space’ (344). Therefore, interviews with the author, his or her correspondence and diaries, reviews of the book, etc., would fall into this category. 75 ‘aquesta oblidada novel·la curta constitueix un testimoni de l’interès que George Eliot va tenir durant tota la vida pel misteri i el sobrenatural’ (George Eliot, El vel alçat (LV), trans. Maria Dolors Ventós (Barcelona: Laertes, 1989), back cover). 76 ‘magníficament traduïda al català per Josep Carner’ (Eliot 1989, back cover). 77 Ventós has translated mostly into Catalan from a variety of languages including Portuguese, Italian and English. She began translating from English in 1987 and has rendered into Catalan texts such as Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (Barcelona: Club Editor, 1990), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (Barcelona: Proa, 1992) and E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (Un món sense àngels) (Barcelona: Columna, 1997). Since 1996 Ventós has been the only translator into Catalan of the works of the popular Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho (Victòria Alsina, ‘Les traduccions de Jane Austen al català’, 1611: Revista de Historia de la Traducción, Madrid, 2.2 (2008), http:// www.traduccionliteraria.org/1611/art/alsina.htm (accessed 29 March 2013)).

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254   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe One should take into account the kind of language the author uses [...] and the register – formal or colloquial – so that the translation reflects how the author would have expressed him or herself if he or she had spoken the target language [...] I think that what is most important when translating is to show respect above all towards the original work, even if certain changes are necessary in order to keep the original sense […] Literal translations are almost impossible and […] one often has to look for equivalent set phrases, sayings and other expressions, or try to explain them, without forfeiting the charm of the original sentence [...] I believe the translator’s task is highly significant since it brings together cultures and opinions that would otherwise remain completely unknown to us.78

As regards her rendering of The Lifted Veil, Ventós took on the commitment about a year before publication. In her view, translators were not so pressured then as they are nowadays and this made for high-quality texts. Ventós has also accounted for the inclusion of Eliot’s short story in the ‘L’arcà’ series on the grounds of its appeal for a cultured readership as well as a younger audience.79 El germà Jacob (BJ) is the most recent translation of George Eliot’s work to have been produced in the Catalan Lands, translated into the Valencian tongue in 2009. Valencian and Castilian hold co-official status as languages in the Comunitat Valenciana (Valencian community) and Valencia, the capital city, is the third-largest in Spain after Madrid and Barcelona.80 However, the linguistic standing of Valencian has been the subject of much debate: whereas it is considered a dialect of Catalan by some linguists and by the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (Institute of Catalan studies),81 others, such as the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua (Official language academy

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‘Cal que tinguem ben present el llenguatge que utilitza l’autor [...] i el registre – culte o col·loquial – de manera que, en traduir-ho, ens expressem tal com s’hauria expressat l’autor si hagués parlat la llengua de destí [...] Penso que el més important d’una traducció és tenir un immens respecte per l’obra original, encara que haguem de fer algunes variacions per conservar-ne el sentit. […] [L]es traduccions literals són gairebé impossibles i […] sovint has de buscar l’equivalent de frases fetes, refranys i expressions o bé fer la manera d’explicar-ho sense que se’n ressenti la gràcia de la frase [...] Crec que la feina del traductor és molt important perquè posa en contacte cultures i opinions que, d’altra manera, ens serien completament desconegudes’ (Maria Dolors Ventós, ‘Traductors’, Ressò de Ponent: Revista de l’Ateneu Popular de Ponent, Lleida, 137 (1996): 4). 79 ‘in illo tempore et donaven temps per fer la feina ben feta’ (email correspondence with Maria Dolors Ventós, 26 February 2013). 80 The Comunitat Valenciana is made up of three provinces, known as València, Alacant and Castelló in both Valencian and Catalan. 81 The Institut d’Estudis Catalans declares Valencian as a territorial name for Catalan. See the bibliography entry on ‘Declaració de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans davant la constitució de l’Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua’ (Declaration of the Institute of Catalan studies on the constitution of the Offical language academy of the Valencian community) (2001).

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George Eliot in the Catalan Lands: The Long and the Short of It   255 of the Valencian community)82 consider Valencian a language in its own right.83 Thus the translation of BJ seems the riskier publication of the two short stories, both because it was rendered into Valencian – which is the vehicle of communication of a linguistic minority – and because the translation was included in a literature series geared towards young readers, a minority (albeit not insignificant) readership in itself. El germà Jacob was published in 2009 by Tres i Quatre, a Valencian publishing house founded in 1974. The novella was translated by Fernando Bielsa Rodríguez84 and Ariadna Villarreal Rodríguez85

82

At the plenary meeting of the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua on 9 February 2005, the ‘Dictamen sobre los principios y criterios para la defensa de la denominación y entidad del valenciano’ (‘Report on the principles and criteria for the defence of the denomination and entity of the Valencian language’) was sanctioned. The document points to the controversy concerning the status of Valencian: ‘As is well known, a group in Valencian society believe the language of the Valencian people to coincide with the one that is spoken in other territories of the ancient Crown of Aragon, whereas another group considers it a different language. The said controversy has often been connected to the national identity of the Valencian people. That is why for some social groups the idea of the identification of the language of the Valencian people with that of other people (especially Catalonia) would contribute to the loss of the identity of the Valencian people and to a hypothetical submission from the outside’ (‘Como es sabido, un sector de la sociedad valenciana considera que el idioma propio de los valencianos coincide con la lengua que se habla en otros territorios de la antigua Corona de Aragón, mientras que otro sector considera que es una lengua diferente. Esta polémica se ha vinculado, a menudo, al tema de la identidad nacional de los valencianos. Por ello, en algunos sectores sociales, ha tenido eco la tesis según la cual identificar el idioma propio de los valencianos con el de otros pueblos (especialmente Cataluña) contribuiría a la pérdida de las señas de identidad del pueblo valenciano y a una hipotética sumisión exterior’). See ‘Dictamen sobre los principios y criterios para la defensa de la denominación y entidad del valenciano’ (2005), http://www.avl. gva.es/va/busca.html (accessed 29 March 2013). 83 See José Ramón Gómez Molina (‘Préstamos léxicos del castellano en el valenciano central: inserción, evolución y actualización’, in Echenique Elizondo, María Teresa and Juan P. Sánchez Méndez (eds), Actas del V congreso internacional de historia de la lengua española, Valencia 31 enero–4 febrero 2000 (Madrid: Gredos, 2002)); Emili Casanova (‘Castellano y catalán, lenguas en contacto en Valencia’, in Echenique Elizondo, María Teresa and Juan P. Sánchez Méndez (eds), Actas del V congreso internacional de historia de la lengua española, Valencia 31enero–4 febrero 2000 (Madrid: Gredos, 2002)); and Vicent Climent-Ferrando (The Origins and Evolution of Language Secessionism in Valencia: An Analysis from the Transition Period until Today (Barcelona: CIEMEN, Working Papers, 18, 2005), http://www.Ciemen.org/ mercator/pdf/wp18–Def-Ang.Pdf (accessed 24 February 2013)). 84 Bielsa Rodríguez graduated in 2008 and is currently working as a freelance translator. 85 Villarreal Rodríguez graduated in 2007 and subsequently obtained a postgraduate degree in Translation Technologies from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (2007–08), a master’s degree in Media Translation from the Universidad de Cádiz (2008–10) and a master’s degree in International Commerce from the Escuela

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256   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe as part of an internship while they were undergraduate students in the Facultat de Traducció i Interpretació (Faculty of translation and interpretation) at the Universitat Jaume I in Castellón. The translated text was supervised and checked by Josep Marco, a lecturer in the faculty, who also produced the introduction, together with a series of suggestions for activities86 and a glossary. The paratextual elements that accompany the translation are intended to help teachers in the classroom. It is striking that a Valencian publishing house took on the investment since the target readership is secondary-school pupils who read Valencian. Moreover, it is unlikely that Catalan speakers from other areas or of different ages would access the text. Marco supported the project, declaring: [I]n the field of books targeted for school consumption, Valencian production and that of the Principality of Catalonia do not compete directly since the system (those who prescribe, first and foremost, primary and secondary school teachers) favours books produced at home, rooted in a linguistic model which is closer to the profile of students.87

He has explained in personal correspondence that the choice of the text in question was an attempt to widen the scope of literature in translation for young people.88 Eliot’s novels tend to be lengthy, and as the books in the series are limited to 40,000 words her novels were not taken into consideration; moreover, the fact that the majority of secondary-school pupils tend to read only when obliged to also excluded the choice of a lengthy text. ‘Brother Jacob’ is a brief satirical text which, according to Marco, possessed the potential for arousing stimulating discussion. He also expressed the belief that once young readers had succeeded in tackling Eliot’s ‘literary universe’, and in spite of the fact that Eliot did not specify that the text was addressed to a young readership, they would then be equipped ‘to navigate aboard more ambitious works’.89 As a lecturer, Marco was not unaware of the risk in the choice he was making:

86

87

88

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Europea de Dirección y Empresa (2011). She has since worked as a freelance translator, an academic coordinator and an executive assistant in international commerce. There are 18 activities (pp. 85–94) divided into three categories: a) the context of the text and of the story; b) the novel: comprehension and assessment; c) apropos of the novel: creative activities. ‘[E]n el terreny dels llibres concebuts per al consum escolar, la producció valenciana i la del Principat no entren en competència directa, ja que el sistema (els prescriptors, en primer lloc, que no són altres que els mestres i professors de secundària) afavoreix els llibres autòctons, amb un model de llengua més proper al perfil dels alumnes’ (Josep Marco, ‘Aprendre a traduir literatura infantil i juvenil: singularitats i fites d’un procés formatiu’, Quaderns Divulgatius, XVIII Seminari sobre la traducció a Catalunya, 42 (2011a); 80, emphasis in the original). Email correspondence with Josep Marco (8 September 2011). ‘per a un lector jove és una manera idònia d’entrar en el seu univers literari, pel qual més endavant podrà navegar a bord d’obres més ambicioses’ (Josep Marco, ‘Introducció’, in George Eliot, El germà Jacob (València: Tres i Quatre, 2009), p. 12).

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George Eliot in the Catalan Lands: The Long and the Short of It   257 It should be acknowledged that venturing to translate George Eliot in a series addressed to a reading public in schools was quite a gamble because the English author’s style is far from simple. However, it is clear and uncluttered and the structure of the moral fable could appeal to young readers since it offered a familiar pattern. In any event, it could be said that the work would contribute to some degree in widening the horizon of expectations of translated literature for children and teenagers.90

The translation has not undertaken great changes with regard to the original which, according to Marco, is quite a common practice when translating for a young audience: ‘when you translate a text originally conceived of for adults, the highest priority is intelligibility’.91 In fact, ‘the translation [...] does not go out of its way to accomodate a likely lack of knowledge on the part of readers, perhaps because the translators thought readers should rise to the text, even if that meant a degree of effort, and not the other way round’.92 Nevertheless, punctuation has been altered and, on occasion, conjunctions have been added to make connections more explicit.93 Finally, it might be added that the colloquial register of both David94 and Mrs Palfrey95 is not reflected. This said, there has been an attempt to represent Jacob’s speech impediment,96 though this is not consistent.97 The edition also includes 20 footnotes, which clarify cultural aspects. However, if one bears in mind that the Oxford University Press edition in English (2009a) has 60 explanatory notes, it may be argued that further elaboration on certain issues would have been useful. On the other hand, the glossary (pp. 95–101) does include lexical explanations, though these are not signalled in the main text. The publication of a George Eliot text in Catalan at the end of World War I, and a translation of one of her texts into Catalan or Valencian every decade since the death of Franco in 1976, makes Eliot’s writing a presence for 90

‘Val a dir que apostar per George Eliot en una col·lecció adreçada al públic escolar comportava un cert risc, ja que l’estil de l’autora anglesa fa poques concessions a la senzillesa. Tanmateix, és clar i net, i l’estructura de la faula moral podia jugar a favor dels joves lectors, en la mesura que els oferia un esquema recognoscible. En qualsevol cas, podria dir-se que l’obra venia a eixamplar una mica l’horitzó d’expectatives de la LIJ [Literatura Infantil i Juvenil] traduïda’ (2011a, 81). 91 ‘quan allò que es tradueix per als lectors joves és un text que fou concebut originàriament per a adults, la màxima prioritat és la intel·ligibilitat’ (2011a, 85). 92 ‘La traducció [...] no fa grans concessions als més que probables dèficits cognitius dels lectors, potser perquè els traductors van pensar que eren els lectors que havien de posar-se a l’alçada del text, encara que els costara una mica d’esforç, i no a l’inrevés’ (2011a, 86). 93 See the examples cited by Marco (2011a, 86–87). 94 George Eliot, The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009a (1999)), pp. 54, 58, 81; George Eliot, El germà Jacob (BJ), trans. Fernando Bielsa and Ariadna Villarreal (Valencia: Tres i Quatre, 2009b), pp. 30, 36, 72–73. 95 Eliot 2009a, 82; Eliot 2009b, 75. 96 Eliot 2009a, 53, 80, 81; Eliot 2009b, 28, 71, 72. 97 Eliot 2009a, 55, 81; Eliot 2009b, 31, 74.

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258   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe peacetime and progress. Catalonia or Valencia might now contemplate a translation for the current decade. Undoubtedly, the author’s work has much to communicate to countries in the West where ethical concerns have acquired a new urgency, both personal and public morality has been foregrounded and held to account, suspicion of the outsider lingers and prejudices ‘like odorous bodies’ (Eliot 2008a, 409) persist. Caleb Garth’s exasperation concerning the ‘mismanagement’ of ‘people […] who go into politics’ could also ring disturbingly familiar, but a lesson could be drawn from his insight into ‘the nature of business’ (2008a, 379). It might be taken as a challenge for the present and a reminder of responsibility towards the future: ‘to have the chance of getting the country into good fettle, […] and putting men into the right way with their farming, and getting a bit of good contriving and solid building done – that those who are living and those who come after will be the better for […] I hold it the most honourable work that is’ (2008a, 379, 377).

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Part 3 Eastern Europe

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13

The Reception of George Eliot in Russia: The Start that Determined the Paradigm Boris M. Proskurnin

The reception of George Eliot in Russia has a long history. Her main works began to be published in translation in the late 1850s, and since then there have been three major periods of reception of her work: the late 1850s–1917; the Soviet period (1917–91); and the New Russian period (from 1991 to the present). This chapter will concentrate on the first of these, which establishes the main lines of Russian analysis. The only Russian monograph on Eliot was written and published during this period, by the well-known Russian democrat Lidiia Tugan-Baranovskaia writing under the name Davidova (1891). The critics of this period remain stimulating and provocative, and are in many ways closer to us now than are the Soviet academics. Soviet Eliotiana can be characterized as predominantly sociological, searching for anti-bourgeois themes and characters, and comparing her works with those of Dickens and/or Thackeray. This approach presented Eliot as the leading representative of the social novel of the late Victorian period. Some Soviet academics also searched for naturalistic modes in her works, in order to squeeze her into the Soviet periodization of world literature.1 However, already by the end of the 1970s – well before Gorbachev’s Perestroika – the process of delivering Eliot’s reception from excessive Soviet ideological pressure had begun. Contemporary Russian Eliotiana, with its renewed interest in Tsarist-era criticism, is, however, a primarily academic phenomenon. There is currently a strange combination of booming academic and pedagogic

1

See Valentina V. Ivasheva, ‘U istokov angliiskogo Naturalism’, in Angliiskii realisticheskii roman XIX veka v ego sovremennom zvuchanii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1974); Yulia A. Andreeva, Mesto Dzordzh Eliot v razvitii angliiskogo romana vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow: Moscow State University, 1974); Astra L. Lugais, Problemy realizma i naturalizma v tvorchestve Dzordzh Eliot (Rannii period, 1851–1861) (Tallinn: Nauka, 1987).

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262   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe interest, with a near-total absence of any interest by publishers. As a result, most Russians today do not know her name.2 The first time that Eliot’s name was mentioned in Russia was in 1859 in the literary journals which played so great a part in shaping Russian intellectual life. This followed the publication of AB, the most widely read of her works in pre-revolutionary Russia. For more than a half a century the very name of Eliot was associated in common readers’ minds with this novel (titled as Adam Bid (AB) or as Detoubiitsa (Infanticide)), which was published in pre-1917 Russian translations eight times (in 1859, 1865, 1899, 1900 twice, 1902, 1903 and 1909) – more than any other novel by Eliot.3 Several great Russian writers read Eliot’s works, edited Russian translations of them and wrote about her: Ivan Turgenev, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin, Ivan Goncharov and Leo Tolstoy. The two latter read the novels FH and M (Goncharov) and SCL, AB, SM and FH (Tolstoy) in English. Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin acted as the literary editor of the translation of M published by the Krasovskii Publishing House in St Petersburg in 1873, a job which required a serious reading of the novel in English. Of these authors, Tolstoy is one of the first to mention Eliot in his letters and Diaries. On 12 June 1859 he wrote to his older friend and distant relative Aleksandra Andreevna Tolstoy that had she been in Russia he would have recommended her to read SCL and, especially, JR. He continues, ‘Happy are the peoples who imbibe with their mother’s milk Christian doctrines; 2

See Karen Hewitt, ‘Dzordzh Eliot i eio “Middlemarch”’, Voprosy Literatury, Moscow, 2 (2005); Boris M. Proskurnin, ‘Pochemu Dzhordzh Eliot nedootsenena v sovremennoi Rossii, ili O polze zarubezhnogo vzgliada na rossiiskuiu anglistiku’, Voprosy literatury, Moscow, 2 (2005); Natalia V. Gorbunova, ‘K voprosu o vospriiatii Dzordzh Eliot v sovremennoi Rossii’, in Larissa Nazarova (ed.), Zarubezhnaia literatura v vysshei shkole: innovatsii, metody, problemy izuchenia i prepodavaniia (Ekaterinburg: Urals State University, 2010). 3 In the period of 1859–1915 the following works of George Eliot besides AB were translated into Russian and published – either in full, or abridged, adapted, or retold for common readers: Sailas Marner (or Devochka s zolotymi volosami, or Ne v den’gakh schastie, or Tkach iz Ravenlou) – SM (or A girl with golden hair, or Money is not happiness, or Weaver from Ravenlow) seven times (1889, 1901, 1904, 1906, 1910, 1912, 1915); Mel’nitsa na Flosse (or Brat i sestra) – MF (or Brother and sister) four times (1865, 1902, 1904, 1915); Feliks Gol’t, radical (or Buria v tikhom omute) – FH (or The storm in a quiet pool) three times (1867 – twice in different translations, 1915); Middlmarch – M (1873, twice in different translations); Raskaianie Dzhenet – JR (1860); Romola – R (1891, 1892); Daniel’ Deronda – DD four times (1877, 1902, 1904, 1915). Just to compare, within the whole Soviet period (70 years), and in post-1991 Russia (23 years), only three of Eliot’s novels were retranslated: SM (an abridged retelling in 1949, and a very good translation of N. Yemeliiannikova in 1959); MF, translated by G. Ostrovskaia and L. Poliakova, published in 1963 and republished in 2014; another translation of MF into Russian was done in 1983 in Tallin; and M (in 1981 – the first publication of the translation of I. Gurova and Ye. Korotkova, reprinted by various publishers in 1983, 2007, 2011 and 2012). In 2010 there was a shortened translation of MF – a primitive retelling for a mass market – in the series ‘Illustrated Classics’.

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The Reception of George Eliot in Russia   263 what is more – in such lofty and pure a form as Evangelical Protestantism. This is an example of the moral and religious book, which I liked and which impressed me so strongly’4 On 11 October 1859 he made the following Diary entry: ‘Was reading AB. Very tragic, though not true to life and full of only one thought. This is not in me.’5 In 1885 he informed Sophia Tolstoy that he was reading FH, and stressed that ‘it is a magnificent book’.6 In Tolstoy’s library at Yasnaya Polyana there were and are copies of George Eliot’s novels with marginal notes by Tolstoy. He often read, reread and talked about her works.7 Ivan Goncharov, one of the best literary investigators of the so-called Russian soul, who was also a brilliant connoisseur of Western literatures and cultures, wrote the following in November 1869 in his ‘Predislovie’ (Foreword) to the novel Obryv (Precipice) (when repudiating charges of violating norms of morality in his images of Granny and Vera): ‘I do not know how to answer this reproach – this rather routine understanding of moral purity, on the one hand, and limitation of an author’s rights on the other. In response, I may refer to some classic English novels, and among them, the works of one of the best new authors, George Eliot – and more precisely, to AB; I will add nothing more.’8 His final ‘I will add nothing more’ indicates that AB and its author were by 1869 already part of Russian literary culture, and that for any writer it was natural to refer to George Eliot as an authority, both literary and moral. The same is apparent in the response of one of the intellectual leaders of Russian democrats in the 1860s–1870s – Nikolay Chernyshevskii. In February 1875, seeing by chance the surname ‘Eliot’ mentioned by his correspondent (publisher Mikhail Stasiulevich), he asked him, ‘isn’t this person a namesake (or even a relative?) of that well-known, kind, simplistic, but charming English novelist?’9 This remark shows how deeply Eliot was rooted in the cultural

4

‘Schastlivy liudi, kotorye, kak anglichane, s molokom vsasyvayut khristianskoe uchenie, i v takoi vysokoi, ochiscchennoi forme, kak evangelicheskii protestantizm. – Vot nravstvennaia i religioznaia kniga, no kotoraia mne ochen′ ponravilas′ i sdelala sil’noe vpechatlenie’ ( Lev N. Tolstoy, Dnevniki, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 43 (Moscow: Gosudarsnvennoe izdatel′stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1949), p. 300). 5 ‘Chital AB. Sil′no tragichno, khotia i neverno i polno odnoi mysli. Etogo net vo mne’ (Lev N. Tolstoy, Pis’ma, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 48 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1952), p. 23). 6 ‘eto zamechatel′naia kniga’ (Lev N. Tolstoy, Pis’ma, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 60 (Moscow: Gosudarsnvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1938), p. 477). 7 See Irina B. Gniusova, ‘Dzhordzh Eliot i L. N. Tolstoy (Pastoral′naia traditsiia v “Adame Bide” i “Voskresenii”)’, Vestnik Tomskogo Universiteta, Tomsk, (2012): 356. 8 ‘Ne znaiu, kak otvechat′ na etot upriok, na eto neskol′ko rutinnoe ponimanie chistoty nravov, s odnoi storony, i ogranichenie prav pisatelia – s drugoi. V otvet ia mogy soslatsia takzhe na nekotorye obraztsovye angliiskie romany, mezhdu prochim, na odnogo iz luchshikh novykh avtorov, eto Dzordzh Eliot, i imenno na roman “Adam Bid” – i bol′she nichego ne pribavliu’ (1955, 167–68). 9 ‘Anglichanin; odnofamilets (uzh ne rodstvennik li?) izvestnogo, milogo, chuzhdogo

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264   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe field of an educated and well-read Russian – although Chernyshevskii clearly entirely failed to perceive Eliot’s sophistication. It is well known that Ivan Turgenev was a close acquaintance of the family of G. H. Lewes and George Eliot,10 and, as Henry James wrote in his memoirs, Turgenev many times stated his admiration for George Eliot and her works (Dzheims 1969, 334). The Russian writer Elena Blumberg (who wrote under the pen name Evgenii Ardov) remembered meeting Turgenev in the summer of 1876 when he attended a public reading of George Eliot’s DD which he, like many others, found ‘long-winded’ (Ardov 1969, 185). Turgenev’s appraisal of DD is reflected in the memoirs of Maksim Kovalevskii, a Russian academic and lawyer, who remembered his talk to Turgenev in 1878 when the latter came to London from Cambridge after spending a day with the Leweses. Turgenev told Kovaleskii that Lewes practically pounced on him, eager to know what Turgenev thought about DD. ‘Just imagine, – Lewes said to Turgenev, – that you are in the jury which has to decide which work of my wife should be put ahead of all others. Tell me, for which novel of hers would you have voted? – No doubt for MF, – answered Turgenev. – That is your wife’s most ingenuous and artistic work.’ When Lewes began to insist that Turgenev should reread DD for a better understanding of its merits, Turgenev, the memoirist stressed, remained adamant in his view.11 One would think that as the poet of Russian peasantry in Bezhin Lug (Bezhin Meadow), Turgenev would show a preference for AB or SM, but he preferred the novel concerning the inner passions of a young woman. Maybe her inner struggle and huge effort to find the purpose of life reminded Turgenev of Nezhdanov, protagonist of his novel Nov (Virgin Soil), which was finished less than a year before Lewes’s playful ‘interrogation under torture’.12 Indeed, that novel’s Nezhadanov, Markelov and Marianna are all ‘full of deep inner doubts, vague awareness of their alienation from other people, and feelings of personal and

vsiakim mudrenym mysliam, no milogo angliiskogo romanista’ (Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii, Pis′ma 1838–1876, in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 14 (Moscow: OGIZ, 1949), p. 585). 10 Turgenev met the Leweses at least three times – in 1871, 1872 and in 1878, as evidenced by his letters of 12 December 1872 and 20 October 1878. See Ivan S. Turgenev, Pis’ma 1872–1874, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 10 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1965), vol. X; XII, Book 1. In April 1871, at their house, the Priory, Regent’s Park, there was a luncheon at which they received Turgenev, Anthony Trollope, Browning, BurneJones and Louis Viardot (see R. C. Terry, Oxford Reader’s Companion to Trollope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 464). 11 ‘Predstav′te, – skazal on emu, – chto vy naznacheny v prisiazhnuiu komissiiu i chto vashemu resheniiu podlezhit vopros, kakoe iz proizvedenii moei zheny dolzhno byt postavleno vo glave ostal′nykh? Skazhite, v pol′zu kakogo iz romanov podali by vash golos?’ – ‘Nesomnenno v pol’zu Mel’nitsy na Flosse, – otvetil Turgenev, – eto samoe bezyskusstvennoe i khudozhestvennoe sochinenie vashei zheny’ (Mikhail M. Kovalevskii, Vospominania ob I. S. Turgeneve in I. S. Turgenev v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, vol. 2 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1969), p. 142). 12 ‘dopros s pristrastiem’ (142).

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The Reception of George Eliot in Russia   265 social doom’.13 He discerned the same approach to character-making in the novel which he praised so highly. The period in which Eliot was first received in Russia was one in which a new paradigm of social and cultural life was being formed. The intelligentsia began to provide intellectual and moral leadership and was looking for new ways of thinking about the individual and society. Russian writers’ interest in Eliot’s works can be explained by the fact that she wrote about highly reflective people, and her heroes – especially in the later novels – were intellectually sophisticated characters.14 That is why in the 1870s–1900s Russian critics wrote very highly of MF, FH, R, DD and M (although the last of these was underestimated by them, initiating a sad tradition). The approaches to Eliot’s works by pre-revolutionary Russian literary critics of varying (and sometimes opposing) socio-political views – Mikhail Mikhailov, Alexandr Druzhinin, Piotr Tkachev, Piotr Boborykin, Seraphim Shashkov, Piotr Veinberg and Maria Tsebrikova – are remarkably similar. They all used her works to show how difficult the fate of an individual in Russia of that time was. That is, they demanded that literature should not only be true to life, but should inspire free thought. Russian critics of the so-called thick literary journals, from the time of Vissarion Belinskii onwards, had been helping to shape social thought for the booming Russian reading public. The novels of Eliot, and the critical comments thereon, regularly appeared in such journals as Sovremennik (The contemporary), Delo (The affair), Otechestvennye zapiski (Fatherland notes), Vestnik Evropy (The herald of Europe), Russkii Vestnik (The Russian herald), Biblioteka dlia chteniia (The library for reading) and so on. These were the main media of social, political and moral thought, and centres of serious aesthetic and socio-political discussion, of the time. Eliot’s reception history in these journals starts with two essays by the Russian democratic critic Mikhail Mikhailov, published in the most radical journal of the time, Sovremennik (The contemporary), in 1859 and 1860. They are worth discussing since they lay down the foundations for the Russian assessment of Eliot’s works for many decades. The first essay was inspired by Mikhailov’s reading of AB and by reviews of the novel published in The Times and the Westminster Review. Mikhailov begins his essay of 1859 with the categorical statement that in AB Eliot presents herself ‘in the full maturity of her thought, sense and artistic strength’.15 He gives a profound 13

‘polnyi glubokikh vnutrennikh somnenii, smutnogo soznaniia otchuzhdennosti ot narodnykh mass, chuvstva lichnoi i obshchestvennoi obrechiennosti’ (Gennadii N. Pospelov, Istoria russkoi litratury XIX veka (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1972), p. 333). 14 It should be noted that Dostoevskii, who knew English and adored, for example, Dickens (he tried to translate The Old Curiosity Shop into Russian), did not even notice Eliot. What Dostoevskii knew well was G. H. Lewes’s book The Physiology of Common Life (1859), published in Russia in two translations (1861 and 1867) by recommendation of another famous Russian writer and politician, Aleksandr Herzen; see Aleksandr I. Herzen, Pis’ma, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 14, Moscow: OGIZ, 1958), p. 368. Sonya Marmeladova in F. M. Dostoevskii’s Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Crime and Punishment) (1886) reads this book. 15 ‘v polnoi zrelosti mysli, chuvstva i khudozhestvennoi sily’ (1859, 104).

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266   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe and detailed analysis of the novel with decent citation from the original in his own (also decent) translation. He launches the Russian literary critical tradition of comparing Eliot’s art with Dutch painting (following Eliot’s lead in Chapter 17 of AB). He admires ‘the adorable simplicity’ of Eliot’s narrative in this novel16 and wonders at the author’s capacities to produce a very strong moral impact on a reader without being openly didactic.17 He is sure that the ‘philosophy of the novel’ is able ‘to nourish morally the next generations’.18 By the time of writing his essay of 1860, Mikhailov knew the gender of the author of MF, which is the essay’s principal focus. He therefore added to his discussion some speculations about women writers (based on his understandings of George Sand and Harriet Beecher Stowe), and their emphasis on the content of their writing over its form. He distinguishes Eliot from this type of woman writer by stressing that her novelistic art demonstrates a ‘combination of content which is vital and relates to essential moral issues, with a form which is genuinely beautiful and even factually true to life’.19 Mikhailov was the first Russian critic who admired Eliot’s artistry in presenting child psychology. Since the publication of his essays, this aspect of her creative ability has been highly and rightly praised by Russian academics and critics across several periods, including Maria Tsebrikova (1871), Lydiia Davydova (1891), Kirill Rovda (1935 and 1963), Valentina Ivasheva (1974), Boris Kuz’min (1977), Astra Lugais (1987), Maya Tugusheva (1990) and Boris Proskurnin and Karen Hewitt (2004). A survey of pre-1917 Russian works on Eliot substantiates Natalia Maslova’s contention (2001) that Eliot’s Russian contemporaries preferred her early novels as ‘being more fresh and ingenuous’, while critics of the later periods thought of them as being too simple in many ways.20 Moreover, if we look at the works of the critics of the period 1870–1900, it is apparent that they wrote more about FH and DD, very often putting aside her masterpiece – M – as an ‘endlessly long novel’ which is ‘terribly expanded’, and actually ‘is a combination of three novels’.21 FH and DD were used by Russian critics of that time to raise issues of contemporary Russian socio-political life. Because their writings ostensibly concerned foreign novels, they were not so severely persecuted by censorship, which was quite severe in the second half of the nineteenth century. 16 17

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‘izumitel’naia prostota’ (1859, 128). ‘ne zabotyas′ o tom, kakie primeneniia mozhno sdelat′ iz ego (avtora) khudozhestvennogo analiza’ (1859, 129). ‘nravstvenno pisat′ sleduiushchie pokoleniia’ (1859, 130). ‘soedinenie zhivogo i blizkogo k sushchestvenneishym nravstvennym interesam soderzhaniia s istinno prekrasnoiu i do osiazatel′nosti vernoiu deistvitel′nosti formoiu’ (Mikhail I. Mikhailov, ‘Novyi roman Dzordzh Eliot “The Mill on the Floss”’, Sovremennik, St Petersburg (1861): 317). ‘Sovremenniki otdavali predpochtenie rannim romanam kak naibolee neposredstvennym, a kritiki rubezha vekov vosprinimali ikh kak dostatochno neslozhnye’ (2001, 3). ‘beskonechno dlinnyi roman’ (Lidiia K. Davidova, Dzhordzh Eliot: Eio zhiz’n i literaturnaia deiatel’nost’ (St Petersburg: A. Transhelia, 1891), p. 63).

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The Reception of George Eliot in Russia   267 For example, Pyotr Tkachev used his analysis of the character of Felix Holt to adumbrate his dream of so-called ‘new people’ in Russia, having much in common with Chernyshevskii and his heroes in Chto delat? (What should be done?) (1863). These people may sacrifice themselves for a new life for the common people: ‘These people do not hide and do not have those feelings which grip the poor hearts and petty minds of philistines.’22 He develops his ideas by saying (having already included Felix in the list), ‘People of the Future are very often subjects of severe reproach for their asceticism, for estrangement from the life which does not fit their ideals.’23 He is, however, ironical (if not outright critical) towards Esther who, he considers, follows Felix not because of her newly-acquired beliefs (which are praised by Tkachev), but because she falls in love with the man. He therefore concludes with the rhetorical question: Does it mean that without love there is no happiness for a woman? Is that so? Should really the whole nature of a woman be reduced just to love of the one whom she likes? Could there be any other inspirations or yearnings besides the ones which excite hens, cats and doves?24

The first Russian attempt to write a history of English women’s writing was made by the democratic radical critic Maria Tsebrikova in three articles collected as English Women Writers. In this she is severe in attacking Eliot’s indifference to the political aspect of the ‘Woman Question’ and her incapacity (characterized as disbelief equal to that of Doubting Thomas) to see that ‘now, under the pressure of new times, a woman can rise to a new life’.25 Lidiia Davidova agrees with Tsebrikova when stressing the mastery of Eliot in depicting ‘a type of a girl-idealist, who is eager to do something lofty and to live for others’,26 but at the same time notes that ‘In her own life George Eliot was not a particularly ardent advocate of the Woman Question.’27 22

‘Eti liudi ne skryvaiut i sovsem ne ispytyvaiut tekh chuvstv i myslei, kotorye oburevaiut uboguiu golovu filistera’ (1868, vol. 4, 83). 23 ‘Liudi budushchego vsego chashche podvergaiutsia upriokam v asketizme, v otchuzhdenii ot toi zhizni, kotoraia ne ukladyvaetsia v ramki ikh ideala’ (1868, vol. 4, 83). 24 ‘Neuzheli vsia priroda zhenshchiny ischerpyvaetsia tol′ko odnoi liuboviiu k tomu individu, kotoryi ei nravitsia? Neuzheli v nei ne mozhet byt drugikh pobuzhdenii i stremlenii, volnuishchikh kur, koshek i golubei?’ (1868, vol. 5, 48). 25 ‘Teper′, pod dvizheniem dukha vremeni, i zhenshchina voskresla k zhizni’. Maria Tsebrikova wrote probably the only serious and profound Russian analysis of the poems of George Eliot; see Maria K. Tsebrikova, ‘Angliiskie pisatel’nitsy’, Otechestvennye zapiski, St Petersburg (1876). Similarly, the only Russian response to the collections of essays published by J. W. Cross posthumously in 1881 was the review of Dmitrii Koropchevskii (‘Kriticheskie statii Dzordzh Eliot’, Iziaschnaia literatura, St Petersburg, 10 (1884)), where he pays special attention to the essay on Heinrich Heine. 26 ‘tip devushki-idealistki, stremiashcheisia k chemu-to vysshemu, mechtaiushchei o tom, chtoby zhit′ dlia drugikh i delat′ kakoe-nibud′ poleznoe delo’ (1891, 66). 27 ‘V zhizni Dzhordzh Eliot tozhe ne byla osobennoi goriachei pobornitsei zhenskogo voprosa’ (1891, 66).

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268   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe When Russian translations of DD were published, the novel was acclaimed by several critics as remarkable and it became the most discussed of Eliot’s novels during the period 1880–1900. Lidiia Davidova wrote in 1891, ‘None of George Eliot’s novels has had such a tremendous and sensational success, and aroused such contradictory rumours, as DD.’28 A critic who wrote under the pseudonym ‘S-skoi’ (probably S. Shashkov) claimed that George Eliot achieved ‘the apogee of her literary fame due to this novel’.29 This was in large part due to the topicality of the Jewish question in Russia at the time. The last two decades of that century and the beginning of the twentieth century were characterized by a serious sharpening of the question, which led to the pogroms of the early 1900s on the one hand and to a crucial enlargement of the social and political activity of Russian Jews on the other. In the fifth volume of Vestnik Evropy (The herald of Europe), as early as in 1877, translations of several chapters of DD appeared. The ‘Introduction’ to these chapters was written by an O. P-skaia (perhaps, Olga Polonskaia) and demonstrates an overwhelming interest in the national and political, rather than artistic, aspects of the novel. She does, however, write much about the titular hero, supposing him to be quite different from Adam Bede, Felix Holt or Tertius Lydgate. The first two ‘are outstanding – clever, honest, sympathetic, but both belong to the practical people: their inner and their external activity derive from one entity, they are cut from one whole stone’.30 Deronda, on the other hand, is just a man, a human being: ‘from Eliot’s pen came a living man, no doubt – quite a rare man, but nevertheless real’.31 She has in mind here some of the fairy-tale qualities of Adam and the artificiality of Felix. She continues, ‘Such people [as Daniel] really exist – strong, easytempered, reasonable, and therefore indulgent, affectionate and forgiving; they are helpful, just by virtue of existing.’32 The critic emphasizes as ‘the most remarkable feature of Deronda’s character his ability to sympathize with all and everyone’.33 P-skaia thinks that this quality of the hero’s character is based on

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‘Ni odin iz romanov Dzhordzh Eliot ne imel takogo gromadnogo, sensatsionnogo uspekha i ne vozbudil stol′ko raznorechivykh tolkov, kak Daniel’ Deronda’ (1891, 71). ‘apogeia literaturnoi slavy ona dostigla etim poslednim romanom’ (S-skoi, Dzhordzh Eliot i eio roman ‘Daniel Deronda’ (Ekaterinoslav: Satanovskii, 1899), p. 4). ‘oba – liudi iz riada von vykhodiashchie, umnye, chestnye, simpatichnye, no kak tot i drugoi prinadlezhat k chislu tak nazyvaemykh prakrichnykh liudei: ikh vnutrennii mir sostavliaet odno nerazdel′noe tseloe s ikh vneshnei deiatel′nostiiu, oni kak by vyrezany iz odnogo kuska’ (Olga P-skaia, ‘Vstuplenie: Stseny i kharaktery iz novogo romana Eliot “Daniel Deronda”’, Vestnik Evropy, St Petersburg, 5 (1877): 117–18). ‘pod perom Eliota iavilsia zhivoi chelovek, konechno, chelovek redkii, no tem ne menee realnyi’ (1877, 118). ‘Takie liudi sushchestvuiut – sil′nye, a potomu i spokoinye, – razumnye, a potomu i sniskhoditel′nye, liubiashchie i vseproshchaiushchie; oni polezny uzhe tem, chto zhivut’ (1877, 118). ‘Naibolee simpatichnaia cherta v kharaktere Derondy – ego sposobnost′ sochuvstvovat′ vsem i kazhdomu’.

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The Reception of George Eliot in Russia   269 his own moral sufferings. It is clear that she is trying to disrupt stereotypes of Jews in Russian society; this is why she calls upon readers to admire Daniel’s soul ‘in its glory’.34 She interprets the moral regeneration of Gwendolen Harleth as a ‘reflection of Deronda’s moral influence’.35 Such a treatment of the image of Daniel to a certain extent prepares readers for her analysis of the two unambiguously major Jewish characters in the novel: Mordecai and Mirah. The first she describes as ‘an enthusiast in the best meaning of the word’; the second, as a ‘charming poetic creation’.36 In the February 1885 issue of the Jewish journal Voskhod (Rising), a short essay was published – ‘Dzordzh Eliot i evrei’ (‘George Eliot and the Jews’) – written by someone with the initials R. Ia. This author was inspired not by a new publication of the novel; s/he was responding to the publication in London of J. W. Cross’s George Eliot’s Life, as detailed in her Letters and Journals. It begins with an appeal to the Jews to be grateful to Eliot for her defence of them in DD. Ia gives no analysis of the artistic merits of the novel; s/he writes about the ideas, views and emotions that s/he presumes Eliot to have had when writing the novel. S/he stresses the fact that thanks to Eliot, the Zionist banner had been raised to a new height (Ia 1885, 34). Ia even argues that ‘George Eliot writes DD for the sake of ennobling Judaism in Christian opinion.’37 It is a noteworthy essay. In its own way it continues the tradition of the use of her works for urgent political and social purposes, which was launched by the democratic and liberal critics of the late 1850s–early 1860s such as Mikhailov, Tkachev and Druzhinin. ‘S-skoi’ (probably S. Shashkov) published a pamphlet about DD in 1899 in Ekaterinoslav (now the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk). It reflects several main aspects of Russian attitudes to this novel. First, he describes DD as a philosophical novel, arguing that it ‘is equal in its depth of thought, epic tendencies and humanism to Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, the best apologia for the Jews and Judaism so far.’38 Second, S-skoi stresses the part of the narrative which he calls ‘the pure ideological part which dominates over the novelistic part itself ’.39 Almost all of his discussions are of those chapters which concern Judaism. S-skoi’s analysis has an obvious and topical anti-anti-Semitic message. He cites Eliot’s arguments from her letters to Harriet Beecher Stowe, from her essay Jews and their Antagonists, and from her Diaries. His interest is focused not on the figure of Daniel (which he does not consider the novel’s best achievement), but on that of Mordecai; he considers his portrait to be a

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‘vo vsei krase svoei’ (1877, 118). vospitatel′noe vliianie Danielia Derondy’ (1877, 119). 36 ‘entuziast v luchshem znachenii etogo slova’; ‘prelestnoe poeticheskoe sozdanie’ (1877, 119). 37 ‘chtoby oblagorodit’ iudaizm v glazakh khristianskogo obshchestva, [Dzhordzh Eliot] i sozdaiot ‘Danielia Derondu’ (1885, 35). 38 ‘raven po glubine mysli, epicheskoi tendentsii i khudozhestvennomu gumanizmu Natanu Mudromu Lessinga, schitaiushchemusia luchshei apologiei evreev i evreistva’ (S-skoi 1899, 3). 39 ‘chisto ideinaia chast′ preobladaet v niom nad romanicheskoi’ (1899, 3). 35 ‘otrazilos′

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270   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe great example of ‘subtle analysis of mental and spiritual qualities’.40 He pays special attention to the depiction of Mirah’s moral evolution. In writing little about the part of the novel which concerns Gwendolen and Grandcourt, he typifies pre-1917 Russian attitudes to the novel (whereas in the Soviet period an interest in the scenes of high society predominated).41 S-skoi nevertheless stresses that ‘Eliot was able with the help of bright colours to paint many typical and everyday peculiarities of the English beau monde.’42 Russian critics of the end of the nineteenth century were united in their special appreciation of Eliot’s psychological penetration (of which Mikhailov, Tkachev and even Tsebrikova wrote much less). Such appreciation had been slow coming; among the critics of the 1860s–early 1870s, Pyotr Veinberg stood out. As early as in 1869, he wrote, ‘George Eliot belongs to that group of new writers who depict not the social relations of people, but the inner side of a human being, who search for the charms of poetical creative work not in everyday events, but in the human heart.’43 According to him, her art is interesting by virtue of its ‘striking insight, which helps her to reveal everything that is going on in the psyche’ of a character, and this psychological analysis by Eliot ‘verges on clairvoyance’.44 Lidiia Davidova, who on the whole thinks that R is not Eliot’s best novel, argues in her ‘Vvedenie’ (Foreword) to the 1900 edition of AB (based on her own book on Eliot published earlier) that ‘the greatest achievement in R (besides the historical truthfulness which made many admire the novel) lies not in the treatment of events, but the profound psychological attention paid to the characters’.45 To prove her argument she analyses Tito Melema as an ‘especially subtly organized’ character,46 claiming that, ‘All unanimously agree that this character is depicted by genius.’47 However, in her otherwise perceptive Foreword, Davidova makes no mention of M where, it is generally agreed, Eliot’s skill as a psychological writer is no less; on the contrary, her psychological art here reaches greater heights, if we take into account not only Dorothea and Lydgate, but Bulstrode. Few English writers can give as profound an account of the moral torment of an anti-hero. Another aspect of Eliot’s art widely discussed in Russian literary criticism before 1917 is the nature of her realism. It should be noted that in the middle 40

‘tonkii analiz dushevnykh kachestv’ (1899, 18). See Ivasheva 1974. 42 ‘Eliot v iarkikh kraskakh sumela peredat′ mnogo tipichnykh i bytovykh chert iz zhizni velikosvetskoi Anglii’ (1899, 4). 43 ‘Dzhordzh Eliot prinadlezhit k toi obshirnoi shkole novykh pisatelei, kotorye izobrazhaiut ne vneshnie otnosheniia liudei, no vnutrenniiu storonu cheloveka’ (1869, 262). 44 ‘Udivitel′naia pronitsatel′nost, raskryvaiushchaia avtoru vsio proiskhodiashchee v dushe cheloveka’; ‘granichit s iasnovideniem’ (1869, 276). 45 ‘velichaishee dostoinstvo Romoly (pomimo istoricheskoi vernosti, udivlaiushchei znatokov) zakliuchaetsia ne v zanimatel′nosti sobytii, a v glubokom psikhologicheskom interese kharakterov’ (1900, 29). 46 ‘osobenno tonko organizovannyi kharakter’ (1900, 30). 47 ‘vse iedinoglasno priznaiut, chto na sozdanii etogo obraza lezhit pechat′ geniia’ (1900, 31). 41

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The Reception of George Eliot in Russia   271 of the nineteenth century in Russian literary criticism the two terms realism and physiologism were more or less synonymous. A famous representative of the democratic trend in Russian social thought of the time, Daniil Mordovtsev, in his essay ‘Zadachi sovremennogo romana’ (‘Missions of the contemporary novel’) (1870), presents Dickens as a brilliant painter ‘of general pictures of the physiology of English life’.48 He argues that Dickens ‘showed how much social confusions threaten an individual’ and that ‘his disciples should demonstrate what refutation an individual can give to all these confusions’.49 He observes that writers including Eliot already do this, by offering ‘the fruits of studies similar to those of historians or natural scientists’.50 However, their study is based not on ‘specimens of plants, animals and human corpses’, but on the study of ‘streets, side-streets, factories, markets, basements – of all places where a contemporary man lives, suffers and rejoices’.51 Twenty years later, Pyotr Boborykin (who knew Eliot personally and met her in 1868)52 argued similarly when he characterized her as the ‘champion of all principles to which current thought is indebted’.53 At the same time, he thought that Eliot on the whole ‘did not reach high levels of creative activity’ due to the fact that ‘while producing the objects of beauty’ she was unable to free herself of ‘intentional or involuntary idealization’,54 or to avoid the ‘intrusion of blatant reasoning’ due to the influence of the Protestantism.55 Both Mordovtsev and Boborykin, as well as many other Russian critics, discuss the influence of Auguste Comte on Eliot. Particularly important in this respect is Leonid Slonimskii’s ‘Dzordzh Eliot: Ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva’ (‘George Eliot: a sketch of the life and works’) published in Vestnik Evropy (The herald of Europe) in May 1884, and written as a review of the 1883 book on Eliot by Mathilde Blind, a German-born poet. In his essay, Slonimskii writes that ‘George Eliot represents true realism and Naturalism, i.e. truth and naturalness in art.’56 He specifies further, drawing on an idea already applied to

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‘Dikkens predstavil v svoikh romanakh obshchie kartiny fiziologii angliiskoi zhizni’ (1870, 52). 49 ‘Dikkens pokazal, kak tiagoteiut nad otdel′noi lichnostiu neuriaditsy obshchestvennoi zhizni’; ‘ego ucheniki dolzhny pokazat′, kakoi otpor mozhet dat′ otdel′naia lichnost′ etim neuriaditsam’ (1870, 52). 50 ‘Ikh romany – plody takikh zhe uchionykh izyskanii, kak liuboi istoricheskii ili estestvennonauchnyi trud’ (1870, 52). 51 ‘ne po ekzempliaram rastenii, zhivotnykh i trupov, po ulitsam, pereulkam, fabrikam, rynkam, podvalam, bel′etazham, po vsem mestam, gde zhiviot, stradaet i raduetsia sovremennyi chelovek’ (1870, 52). 52 See Piotr V. Boborykin, Stolitsy mira (Moscow: E. N. Akhmatova, 1911). 53 ‘pobornitsei vsekh printsipov, kotorymi sovremennaia mysl′ obiazana estestvoznanui’ (Piotr V. Boborykin, Evropeiskii roman XIX veka: zapadnyi roman za dve treti veka (St Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevich, 1890), p. 532). 54 ‘ne dostigla vysokikh granei khudozhestvennogo tvorchestva’, ‘obiekty krasoty’, ‘vozderzhivatsia ot kakoi by to ni bylo idealizatsii’ (1890, 532). 55 ‘ot vsiakogo vtorzheniia rezonerstva chisto pisatel′sgogo kharaktera’ (1890, 534). 56 ‘Dzhordzh Eliot – predstavitel′nitsa istinnogo realizma i naturalizma, to est′ pravdy i estestvennosti v iskusstve’ (1884, 171).

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272   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Eliot’s art: ‘Without Dutch painting and without the English novel Naturalism is a vagrant system in the huge field of metaphysics.’57 This point suggests Eliot’s importance to the formation of the Russian realistic tradition. Her name was from the very beginning strongly associated with realistic aesthetics by all those who wrote about her works, and the writers who admired her most were the great Russian realists: Turgenev, Goncharov, Saltykov-Schedrin and Tolstoy. On the one hand, theirs was the time when a new socio-cultural and political force was coming into existence. It was associated with the raznochinzy (people not of noble birth) who mostly formed the Russian intelligentsia. It marked the process of democratization of the Russian polity which began at the end of the reign of Nicholas I and was boosted when one of the greatest reformers took the throne: Alexander II. As far as Russian literature of that time is concerned, this socio-cultural phenomenon is connected with the emergence and swift popularity of the so-called ‘Russkaia Naturalnaia Shkola’ (Russian natural school). This school of circa 1840–60 built on innovations by Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol, and introduced to Russian literature democratization and the de-idealization of the hero and of common life. Rather, they tried to reveal ‘the dignity of truth’, as Nikolai Nekrasov stressed in his essay ‘Fiziologiia Peterburga’ (‘The physiology of Petersburg’),58 and the unification of typicality with psychological distinctiveness. The great critic Vissarion Belinskii gave a metaphorical but precise notion for this character-making: ‘a familiar stranger’ or ‘the whole world in one man’.59 These phrases appear in one of Belinskii’s most famous works, a declaration of a new, realistic, Russian literature – O russkikh povestiakh i povestiakh gospodina Gogolia (On Russian long stories and the long stories of Mr Gogol) (1847). Belinskii, and after him some other critics including Chernyshevskii, established an obvious link between the emergence of the Russian realistic tradition in the literature of the 1840s–1850s and physiological sketches. Three collections of such essays already mentioned – Fiziologiia Peterburga (Physiology of Petersburg) in two volumes (1845), and Peterburgskie rasskazy (Petersburg collected stories) (1846) – are considered a sort of manifesto of the Russian Natural School, with its turn to the depiction of everyday life and the manners of the common people. The hero would be deeply embedded in Russian life (national specificity was seen in this social sphere with all its advantages and disadvantages), and he (male characters dominated) was both analytical and spiritual. It should be stressed that the followers of the Russian Natural School inclined, as Lidiia Lotman writes, to ‘portray consciousness in its elemental forms’,60 which was why it insisted on democratic heroes and presentation of the lives of the masses. 57

‘Bez gollandskoi zhivopisi i bez angliiskogo romana Naturalism – brodiachaia sistema v pole metafiziki’ (1884, 171). 58 ‘dostoinstvo pravdy’ (1950, 143). 59 ‘znakomyi neznakomets’; ‘tselyi mir v odnom cheloveke’ (1953, 296). 60 ‘izobrazhat′ soznanie v ego prosteishikh formakh’ (1974, 158).

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The Reception of George Eliot in Russia   273 It is not by chance that the 1850s was the period of formation of the so-called ‘narodnyi roman’ (‘novel of the people’). Eliot’s early novels, which had become part of Russian literary culture by that time, played an important role in that formation. One of the most interesting innovators in this genre was Fiodor Reshetnikov (1841–1871), whose famous long story (povest) titled Podlipovtsy (1864) is very close to SM and AB as a rural novel. Reshetnikov’s narration is, however, more concentrated on depicting the dark and sad sides of rural life, and it does not have the lyric and romantic idealization of peasantry peculiar to Eliot. The emergence of the genre and that special interest in Eliot’s rural novels coincided with a famous trend in Russian sociocultural life: the narodniki movement (narodnichestvo). In the 1860s the narodniki movement contributed a great deal to the changing political climate in Russia, and favoured both trends of socialism – Marxist, and that which grafted Marxist ideas onto the pattern of the Russian patriarchal peasant commune. The increasing interest in rural life and its depiction went hand in hand with this movement. Between 1850 and 1870 in Russia on the whole there was a particular interest in rural, peasant life. Ivan Turgenev began as a writer with his brilliant pictures of that life in the sketches entitled Zapiski okhotnika (Hunter’s sketches). This did not, however, prevent Russian literature from constructing a hero as a ‘complex ethical and psychological system’, as Lidiia Lotman writes.61 In this respect she discusses Reshetnikov’s long story Podlipovtsy, as well as his novel Glumovy (The Glumovs) (1866), arguing that Reshetnikov’s heroes raise themselves morally and intellectually when going through the trials of life (see 1974, 157–59). Some other Russian critics, Aleksei Chicherin for instance, write that in Reshetnikov’s works there is a remarkable conjugation of private life, family history, kinship saga and the history of a people (1958, 18). Lidiia Lotman, in her turn, says that with the help of ‘the narrative structure built on the basis of the line hero–family–kin–community–society’, the writer reconstructs ‘some definite stage of the historical development of the country’.62 To prove this she draws our attention to the final triumph of the two sons of the main character in Reshetnikov’s Podlipovtsy. She rightly connects the triumph with the fact of their mental development, when both Ivan and Pavel ‘began to understand more than their father, Sysoiko and Matrena’,63 and this gives rise to new sources of strength and the capacity to deal with the hardships of life. In other words, the tendency to portray an ordinary person of inner strength and wisdom is prominent in Russian literature about rural life, and was one aspect of Eliot’s importance to Russian writers. This is despite the differences between the English peasantry of Eliot’s time and the Russian

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‘slozhnaia etiko-psikhologicheskaia sistema’ (1974, 153). ‘struktury povestvovaniia’, ‘geroi – semia – rod – soslovie – obschestvo’, ‘avtor vosproizvodit novyi istoricheskii etap razvitiia strany’ (1974, 159). 63 ‘nachali ponimat′ v zhizni bol′she chem otets, Sysoiko i Matriona’ (Fiodor M. Reshetnikov, Izbrannoe, vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1956), p. 69). 62

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274   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe peasantry on the eve and just after the abolition of serfdom. It is reflected in the fact that of all her novels, SM and AB were the most frequently translated, published and reviewed in Russia (there were eight and seven editions of these novels respectively within half a century – for the novels of a foreign writer, an impressive figure). This, as well as the closeness of her doubting, intelligent protagonists to the Russian intelligentsia, meant that Eliot’s art, thoughts and ideas drew a serious response from Russian critics, writers and educated people. Moreover, this pre-1917 response to her works drew in many ways the main outlines of Russian Eliotiana and arguably formed its paradigm, operative even during the Soviet period. That is why any Russian taking the first steps towards understanding George Eliot will find much assistance in the works of the critics of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

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George Eliot in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia (1917–2014) Natalia V. Gorbunova

Post-revolutionary Russian criticism of Eliot first took off in the mid-1930s. During the revolutionary period itself – with its concentration on avantgarde art on the one hand and workers’ art on the other – Eliot’s art was considered old fashioned. Even after the mid-1930s, some researchers of West European literature in Soviet Russia were suppressed. For example, in 1935, Kirill Iosifovich Rovda (1901–1999) defended his dissertation on George Eliot, ‘Dzhordzh Eliot i ee otsenka v Rossii’ (George Eliot and her assessment in Russia) (1935), but his article on Eliot and Lev Tolstoy was not published, and his book Dzhordzh Eliot v Rossii (George Eliot in Russia) was suppressed as soon as it was published. He was then arrested and exiled to Kazakhstan.1 This was a time at which many analysts of Western literature were subjected to harsh official criticism. In the following year, Dmitrii Sviatopolk-Mirskii (1890–1939), a fellow employee of the Western Division of Pushkin House since his return from exile in the West, was arrested too.2 Boris Arkadievich Kuzʹmin (1909–1943) defended his dissertation on Eliot in 1940, but soon thereafter died in the Great Patriotic War (Kuzʹmin 1977). Nonetheless, Rovda’s and Kuzʹmin’s approaches to some extent set the pattern for Soviet criticism of the late Victorian novel. Despite the strong pressures to write ideologically-inflected criticism during the 1930s and 1950s, they tried other approaches, and others followed suit. In his article ‘Tvorchestvo

1

See Mariia Emmanuilovna Malikova, ‘Zapadnyi Otdel (1935–1950)’, Pushkinskii Dom, 2011, http://www.pushkinskijdom.ru/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=ogyY7bv-4o%3d&tabid=134 (accessed 14 March 2014). 2 See Rostislav Iurievich Danilevskii, ‘Institutsionnoie znachenie deiatelʹnosti V. M. Zhirmunskogo v istorii russkoi germanistiki 1920–h – 1930–h godov (po materialam Sankt-Peterburgskogo Otdelenia Arkhiva Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk)’, 2011 http://www.ruthenia.ru/archiv.html?topic=inet (accessed 14 March 2014).

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276   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Dzhordzh Eliot’ (The works of George Eliot), written no later than 1940, Kuzʹmin aimed to determine Eliot’s degree of adherence to positivism, and the extent of G. H. Lewes’s influence on her aesthetics (Kuzʹmin 1977). Kuzʹmin thought that although Eliot showed much interest in positivism in her non-fiction, her creative works often floated free from its implications. He also notes the polemical character of Eliot’s views and her distinctness from other English writers in her interest in real life (1977, 86). He notes that ‘religion in her works is not presented as intercourse with the other world (that pre-exists it), but as a phenomenon of love, charity, and other human feelings’.3 According to Kuzʹmin, ‘tragic collisions are not Eliot’s strong point. The best elements in her novels are true descriptions of domestic life, scenes resembling genre-painting, and descriptions of rural nature.’4 Her distinctive features are a ‘democracy of themes, and attention to the “prosaic”, “professional” sides of life’.5 He argues that Eliot aimed to avoid such contrasts and exaggerations as characterized much contemporary literature. She also ‘resuscitates Oliver Goldsmith’s themes, subjects and general feeling in the second half of the nineteenth century’.6 She ‘frequently substitutes interior, psychological action for real physical action and conflict’,7 as in JR and LV. In her late novels, too, ‘The deficiency of dramatic effect is compensated for through subtle psychological analysis’ – though in general he found her late novels less interesting, since he thought that Eliot’s distinctive features were seen in them less clearly (101). However, in conformity with the Soviet concentration on social themes, he observed in his chapter on Eliot, Trollope, Read and Collins, for a 1953 history of English literature, that Eliot’s realism was compromised and conciliatory, in comparison with that of Dickens and Thackeray. He thought that Thackeray’s Vanity Fair showed more unpleasant truth than all of Eliot’s novels (Kuzʹmin 1953). In his chapter on Eliot for Istoria angliiskoi literatury (The history of English literature) (1956), A. A. Anikst (1910–1988) argued that even in the best of her novels, MF or DD, didacticism prevailed over artistry. He conceded, however, that she had innovated in her striving for veracity, in her optimism and in the profundity and precision of her psychological observations (337). 3

‘religia v ee proizvedeniiakh – uzhe ne forma obshcheniia s potustoronnim mirom (kak prezhde), a iavlenie togo zhe obshechelovecheskogo psikhologicheskogo poriadka, chto i liubov, miloserdie, drugie gumannye chuvstva’ (Boris Arkadievich Kuzʹmin, ‘Tvorchestvo Dzhordzh Eliot’, in OGoldsmite, o Bairone, o Bloke: Statii o literature (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1977), p. 84). 4 ‘luchshuiu storonu ee darovaniia sostavlaiut otnudʹne tragicheskiie kollizii. Luchshie mesta v ee romanakh – te, gde deistvie pochti ne razvivaetsa, no dany vernye opisaniia byta, zhanrovye stseny, kartiny selʹskoi prirody’ (Kuzʹmin 1977, 98). 5 ‘demokratichnostʹ tematiki, vnimanie k “prozaicheskim”, “professionalnym” storonam zhizni’ (Kuzʹmin 1977, 89). 6 ‘vozrozhdaet vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka tematiku, siuzhetnye kollizii i obshchee nastroenie, kharakternye dlia proizvedenii O. Goldsmita’ (Kuzʹmin 1977, 102). 7 ‘neredko zameniaet napriazhennoie realnoie deistvie vnutrennimi psikhologicheskimi sobytiiami’ (Kuzʹmin 1977, 109).

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George Eliot in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia (1917–2014)   277 The marginalization of Eliot’s works was noted by V. V. Ivasheva in her chapter on Eliot for her monograph on nineteenth-century realist English fiction (1974): ‘Only academics of English studies and students preparing for examination on nineteenth century literature read Eliot’s works in the first half of the twentieth century.’8 In general, interior conflicts, religious doubts and agnosticism with regard to the proper solutions for life’s problems received little state endorsement. This may have been why Eliot, during the first decades of the Soviet Union, was considered a secondary writer. Nonetheless, Russian interest in her work rose in the second half of the twentieth century, as it did also in Britain and the USA. V. V. Ivasheva explains this in terms of an increasing interest in psychological analysis (1974, 359). In 1959, M. A. Gritchuk defended her dissertation on the aesthetic peculiarities of Eliot’s realism. At the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, two of Eliot’s novels were retranslated into Russian and published with a preface and notes: SM (1959, trans. N. Yemeliiannikova, preface by A. G. Levinton) and MF (1963, trans. G. Ostrovskaia and L. Poliakova, preface by K. I. Rovda). Rovda’s preface was a general review of Eliot’s life and work directed at the general reader. He noted that ‘George Eliot wrote in one of the blooming periods of the development of English capitalism […] but her creative work had a tragic character.’9 He also described Eliot as unjustly forgotten in Russia, and thought that her work could enlarge Russians’ notions about English realistic literature of the nineteenth century. However, he found her novels to lack the pathos of Dickens or Thackeray. He found her best characteristics to be truthfulness in describing real life, the presentation of the tragedy of everyday life, skill in psychological analysis, and lively language. He characterized the weak parts of her novels as those under the influence of positivism – for example, the presentation of the conflict between Tulliver and Wakem, which he considered to have a Darwinist spirit. In the 1960s, the problems of life in bourgeois society were the main subject of M. A. Gritchuk’s article on Eliot’s FH (1964). But Eliot’s aesthetics were now also attracting particular interest. For example, Iu. M. Kondratiev (1918–76) concentrated on Eliot’s divergence from positivism in the direction of Wordsworthian Romanticism, particularly in SCL, AB, MF and M (1966). In his article on M, which novel he thought to be her masterpiece, he looked at conceptions of heroism (Kondratiev 1967b). In his doctoral dissertation 8

‘Dzhordzh Eliot – pisatelʹnitsa, izriadno zabytaia i chitavshaiasia v pervoi polovine XX veka […] lish spetsialistami ili studentami, sdavavshimi ekzamen po […] literature XIX veka’ (Valentina Vasilievna Ivasheva, ‘U istokov angliiskogo naturalizma: Dzhordzh Eliot’, in Valentina Vasilievna Ivasheva (ed.), Angliiskii realisticheskii roman XIX veka v ego sovremennom zvuchanii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1974), p. 358). 9 ‘Pisala Dzhordzh Eliot v odin iz samykh tsvetushchikh periodov razvitia angliiskogo kapitalizma […] a tvorchestvo ee nosit tragedinyi kharakter’ (Kirill Iosifovich Rovda, ‘Dzhordzh Eliot i ee roman “Mel’nitsa na Flosse”’, ‘Vstuplenie’, in D. Eliot, Mel’nitsa na Flosse, trans. Galina Arsenievna Ostrovskaia and L. Poliakovaia (Moscow; Leningrad: Goslitizdat, 1963, p. 4).

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278   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe on Eliot, Meredith, Butler and Hardy (1967a), he concentrated on the relationship between narrative form and dramatic conflict. In the 1970s–80s, the Victorian Age in general, and Eliot in particular, became more popular still. L. K. Putykevich, in her article on Eliot’s literary criticism (1973), concentrated on the question of an individual’s intellectual development. T. L. Selitrina in her article on Eliot’s aesthetics (1974) discussed Eliot’s didactic mission, the difference between art and science and the relationship between subject and form. She characterized self-respect and an original intellect as the main qualities of Eliot’s heroes and heroines, basing her arguments on various examples from Eliot’s letters, SCL and – unusually for Russian critics – ITS (Selitrina 1974, 107, 114). V. V. Ivasheva’s monograph on the English realistic novel of the nineteenth century reflected many new tendencies in Victorian studies. It was intended for the general reading public. Its chapter on Eliot presents an analytical review of Eliot’s biography and creative work, almost entirely independent of ideological context (341–93). Exposing the peculiarity of Eliot’s religious, aesthetic and ethical views, Ivasheva attempts to explain how Eliot was an innovator in her own time. She notes Eliot’s ‘great attention to science’10 and her ‘striving for a documentary exactness’11 as her aesthetic priorities. She notes her ‘slighting attitude towards contemporary mass literary production’ (Ivasheva 1974, 351)12 and her polemics against W. Collins and C. Read as sensation novelists. She agrees with Anikst that ‘George Eliot opened a new page in the history of English literature’ (Ivasheva 1974, 360).13 But she does not agree with Anikst that the second half of the nineteenth century was one of decadence in English realism. According to Ivasheva, ‘George Eliot is the greatest creator of the English novel of critical realism’ (Ivasheva 1974, 17)14 – yet also an innovator in Naturalism (376). Her positivism, agnosticism and acknowledgement of the significance of heredity and environment demonstrated the latter. Ivasheva drew on works by G. Haight, W. Harvey, W. Allen, U. A. Knoepflmacher, A. Kettle and others, as well as many of Eliot’s works, including ITS. Iu. A. Andreeva argued similarly in her doctoral dissertation on the influence of Eliot’s novels on the development of English realist fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century (1974). By this time, more attention was being paid to the Russian critics of the nineteenth century, as for example by Irina Bushkanets in her articles on N. A. Nekrasov’s evaluation of Eliot (1974), and on Eliot’s critical evaluation in Russia in general (1975). A. A. Belʹskii’s article on Eliot for A Brief Literary Encyclopedia (1975) included a detailed description of Eliot’s life and the main ideas of her aesthetics: her positivism, her conception of evolution and of the ‘harmony of classes’, her aspiration to

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‘ogromnyi interes k nauke’ (Ivasheva 1974, 351). ‘stremlenie k dokumentalʹnoi tochnosti v iskusstve’ (Ivasheva 1974, 354–55). 12 ‘prenebrezhitelʹnoe otnoshenie k massovoi literaturnoi produktsii svoego vremeni’ (Ivasheva 1974, 351). 13 ‘otkryla novuiu stranitsu v istorii angliiskoi literatury’ (Ivasheva 1974, 360). 14 ‘Dzhordzh Eliot krupneishii sozdatelʹ angliiskogo romana kriticheskogo realizma’ (Ivasheva 1974, 17). 11

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George Eliot in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia (1917–2014)   279 describe provincial life of the past, her interest in social and ethical conflict in the English society, and that society’s gradual transformation. The article also notes that she anticipated Naturalism (219). T. L. Selitrina’s dissertation on the character of Eliot’s realism in her late period (1975b), and her articles of 1975 and 1980, demonstrated the aspiration to effect a shift in the understanding of Eliot’s late novels and of late Victorian aesthetics in general. Previously, she argues, Eliot’s later works had been underestimated. L. K. Putykevich’s article of 1975 argues that Eliot straddled two epochs in the development of the English realistic novel, particularly with regard to the concept of heroism (111). Putykevich asserted that ‘non-heroism’ (‘negeroichnost’) characterized the earlier nineteenth-century fiction of Edgeworth, Austen, Scott, Charlotte Brontё, Thackeray and Dickens. Eliot followed this tradition, in that she took heroes from ordinary life. But Eliot’s heroes also affirm high ethical principles: ‘The evolution of the heroes in the early Eliot’s creative work reflects the strained search for a positive essence in human nature and society.’15 Putykevich concentrated on Eliot’s early work, probably because that period had been treated as more important and successful than her late period in the Soviet academic tradition. In 1976 she completed her dissertation on the peculiarities of Eliot’s artistic method. In 1981, a collection of critical essays, notes and prefaces to novels, concerning nineteenth- and twentieth-century English fiction, reflected changing attitudes to Victorian writers. A. A. Anikst, author of its preface, noted that ‘Eliot’s creative work opens a new stage in the history of English realistic novel – the psychological and problematic novel.’16 With Eliot, ‘Quiet and sluggish narrative about everyday happenings triumphed.’17 Therefore, Eliot’s distinguishing features, which had long been considered as demerits in the Soviet academic tradition, were now considered her merits in the context of the development of English and European literature. In the 1980s, interest also finally turned to the later Eliot. V. Skorodenko, author of the preface to a new translation of M in 1981, noted the ‘epic’ and ‘dramatic’ elements of its poetics and the great number of interweaving plotlines. He noted that even its minor characters have individuality: ‘The exposition of character determines every detail in Eliot’s novel: descriptions of appearance, speech, gestures, acts, ideas, the material world, and even names.’18 15

‘negeroizm (negeroichnostʹ)’, ‘evoliutsia problemy geroia v rannem tvorchestve D. Eliot otrazhaet napriazhennye poiski pozitivnogo nachala v chelovecheskoi prirode i obshchestve’ (Liudmila Konstantinovna Putykevich, ‘Problema geroia v rannii proizvedeniiakh Dzhordzh Eliot’, in Anon. (ed.), Problemy zarubezhnoi literatury, Sbornik trudov (Moscow: n. pub., 1975), p. 130). 16 ‘Tvorchestvo D. Eliot otkryvaet novyi etap v istorii angliiskogo realisticheskogo romana, – voznikaet roman psikhologicheskii i problemnyi’ (Aleksandr Abramovich Anikst, ‘Predislovie’, in M. P. Tugusheva (ed.), Pisateli Anglii o literature: 19–20 vv., Sbornik statei perevedeno na russkii iazyk (Moscow: Progress, 1981), p. 9). 17 ‘Vostorzhestvovalo spokoinoe i medlitelʹnoe povestvovanie o veshchakh povsednevnykh’ (Anikst 1981, 8–9). 18 ‘Zadacham takogo raskrytiia kharakterov podchineno bukvalʹno vse: opisaniia vneshnosti, rechʹ, zhesty, postupki, mysli, izobrazhenie materialʹnogo mira,

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280   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe In the middle of the 1980s, Eliot became a subject of comparative studies. T. L. Selitrina, for example, identified the evident resemblances of Eliot’s and Lev Tolstoy’s aesthetic views, which she explained in terms of the similar dominant ideas (for example, concerning ethical perfection) in both European and Russian culture of this period (1982). For both writers, Selitrina argues, morality and religion are foundational for human unity; yet both writers’ realism was also on the borderline with Naturalism. In an article of 1984, Selitrina compared DD to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady through a comparison of their heroines. She found both novels to concentrate more on character than plot, to be concerned with investigating the limits of individual independence in a bourgeois society and to innovate in depicting characters’ spiritual altitudes (49, 53). She found Eliot in particular to offer a profound psychological analysis of her protagonists through ‘introspection, interior monologue, and an acute interest in a human’s physical nature’, where ‘hereditary complexes, which Eliot presented long before Zola, and the mysterious sphere of the subconscious, are brought together in Eliot’s novels with a prose belonging to the twentieth century’.19 Selitrina notes that Eliot did not create active heroes, but presented ‘the character of the intellectual hero, who is conscious of the degree of his or her dependence from the objective circumstances of life’.20 The problem of social and historical determinism is also investigated by A. L. Lugais. In her 1987 monograph on early Eliot she notes that the literature of the 1850s–60s had lost its social radicalism compared with the ‘critical realism’ of ‘the hungry forties’, and explains Eliot’s concentration on questions of individual morality in terms of this trend (Lugais 1987, 5).21 She also notes the importance of science and positivism to early Eliot, and considers that this feature of her work caused her to be undervalued by Soviet critics during the 1950s–1960s (5). She herself judges that ‘Eliot-the-artist was higher than Eliot-the-thinker’22 and considers this to be the reason why, in Kuzʹmin’s chapter for The History of English Literature, Eliot was placed on a level only ‘with secondary writers of that time, Charles Read and Wilkie Collins’, even though ‘George Meredith and Thomas Hardy are closest to veshchei; dazhe imena vyveski […]’ (Vladimir Andreevich Skorodenko, ‘Velikii angliiskii roman’, in D. Eliot, Midlmarch, trans. Irina Gavrilovna Gurova and E. V. Korotkova (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1981), p. 12). 19 ‘samoanaliz geroev, vnutrennii monolog, obostrionnoie vnimanie k fizicheskoi prirode cheloveka’, ‘biologicheskie kompleksy nasledstvennosti, kotorye ona pokazala zadolgo do Zolia, i tainstvennaia sfera podsoznatelʹnogo, – vse eti kachestva sblizhaiut roman Eliot s romanom XX veka’ (Tamara Lʹvovna Selitrina, ‘Daniel Deronda Dzhordzh Eliot and Zhenskii portret G. Dzheimsa’, Literaturnye sviazi i problemy vzaimodeistviia, Gorky (1984): 53). 20 ‘kharakter geroia mysliashchego, soznaiushchego stepenʹ svoei zavisimosti ot obiektivnykh zhiznennykh obstoiatelʹstv’ (Selitrina 1984, 55). 21 ‘kriticheskim realizmom’ ‘golodnyh sorokovykh’ (Asta Leopolʹdovna Lugais, Problemy realizma i naturalizma v tvorchestve Dzhordzh Eliot (Rannii period, 1851–1861) (Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1987), p. 5). 22 ‘Eliot-khudozhnik vyshe Eliot-myslitelia’ (Lugais 1987, 5).

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George Eliot in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia (1917–2014)   281 Eliot in importance’.23 She considers Eliot to have been underestimated during the 1880s and 1890s because her explicit interest in morality conflicted with the aesthetic interests of that period (8, 13–14). She also notes the evident influence of Goldsmith’s and Austen’s works on SCL (68–69), but notes that, in distinction to them, ‘Eliot’s nostalgic attachment to the past has evident philosophical implications’.24 Lugais cites as an example MF, where Eliot first properly developed the idea of the interdependency of things and human relations. This idea was then more fully realized in M. SM is a novel in which ‘symbol and fact […] moral parable and naturalistic details are interlaced together’.25 It is ‘a complicated intellectual phenomenon saturated with the philosophical, scientific and ideological ideas of the nineteenth century’26 and ‘remains the first deep penetration by Eliot of the problem of alienation of our time’.27 She concludes that Eliot, with her attention to deep psychological and philosophical analysis, ‘accentuated the dependence of her characters on social circumstances, heredity and other peculiarities of life’.28 However, in contrast with the French Naturalists, Eliot ‘rarely presented the gloomy sides of life in its physiological aspects’,29 rendering her ‘the first English realist with a naturalistic trend’ who was, however, not under the sway of ‘any continental tendencies of realism or Naturalism’.30 Also in the first half of the 1980s, A. V. Karelskii’s 1983 article and 1990 monograph, Ot geroia k cheloveku: Dva veka zapadnoevropeiskoi literatury (From a hero to a man: two centuries of Western Literature), suggested a theory of the ‘ordinary hero’ in literature: ‘A Hero must be pushed aside and dethroned first before a real Person can triumph.’31 This approach to representation ‘considerably enriched the potential of the European realistic novel’, and ‘the interior logic of realism reached its perfect expression precisely at this

23

‘s takimi vtorostepennymi pisateliami togo vremeni kak Charlʹz Rid i Uilki Kollinz’, ‘Dzhordzh Meredit i Tomas Gardi gorazdo blizhe ee po masshtabu’ (Lugais 1987, 5–6). 24 ‘nostalʹgicheskaia priviazannostʹ k proshlomu imeet iavnyi filosofskii podtekst’ (Lugais 1987, 69). 25 ‘simvol i fakt […] moralʹ pritchi i naturalisticheskie podrobnosti splavliaiutsa voedino’ (Lugais 1987, 138). 26 ‘slozhnoe intellektualʹnoe obrazovanie, nasyshchennoe filosofskimi, nauchnymi i ideinymi techeniiami XIX veka’ (Lugais 1987, 139). 27 ‘pervym glubokim proniknoveniem G. Eliot v problemu otchuzhdeniia, aktualʹnuiu dlia prozy XX veka’ (Lugais 1987, 148). 28 ‘zavisimostʹ svoikh personazhei ot ikh sotsialʹnoi sredy, nasledstvennosti drugikh zhiznennykh uslovii’ (Lugais 1987, 156). 29 ‘redko rassmatrivala tiomnye storony zhizni v ikh fiziologicheskikh aspektakh’ (Lugais 1987, 157–58). 30 ‘pervym angliiskim realistom naturalisticheskogo tolka’, ‘ni odnogo iz techenii kontinentalʹnogo realizma ili naturalizma’ (Lugais 1987, 58) 31 ‘obyknovennogo geroia’; ‘prezhde, chem vostorzhestvoval chelovek, dolzhen byl byt otstranion i, esli ugodno, razvenchan Geroi’ (Alʹbert Viktorovich Karelskii, Ot geroia k cheloveku: Dva veka zapadnoevropeiskoi literatury (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatelʹ, 1990), p. 201).

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282   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe time’.32 He notes that Eliot ran the risk of appearing dull to her readers (217) because, along with Thackeray, Gaskell and Trollope, she ‘wanted to look in the face of the real world with all its harm and good’33 and to portray the morally ‘delicate and complicated mechanism of the human soul’.34 In MF in particular, Eliot demonstrated ‘a new degree of psychological analysis’.35 In a similar vein, I. N. Ryzhkova in her 1990 article on Eliot’s ‘psychologism’ described the character of Arthur Donnithorne from AB as ‘one of the first masterly portraits in Eliot’s gallery’: ‘He is not a typical gentleman-villain […] His lack of character is founded on his sense of social superiority over others. He is good and bad simultaneously.’36 The end of Communism coincided with a revival of interest in Tsarist-era literary criticism, as exemplified in O. R. Demidova’s dissertation on Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Russian reception. In an article of 1990 she notes similarities between early Russian and English receptions of Eliot – for example the consideration of SM or MF as works for children (both were adapted for reading by young people in both countries) (136–39). George Eliot in Russia: The New Russian Period (1991 to the Present) One of the first post-Soviet articles about Eliot, by N. A. Solovieva, concerned Eliot’s relation to Turgenev (1994). Her 1996 article concentrated on Eliot’s influence on English literature at the turn of the centuries, arguing that in the 1880s the English novel was divided into the old Victorian and the new (which anticipated twentieth-century prose) – and that Eliot’s (and Meredith’s) novels featured importantly in the latter category (278). Other post-Soviet work has focused on Eliot’s artistic technique. For example, B. R. Naptsok, in her 1997 dissertation on M, examined Eliot’s use of metaphor. Using M. Schorer’s terminology (Schorer 1968), Naptsok identified several groups of metaphors and how they function as a compressed form of exposition. N. V. Gorbunova, in an article of 1998, compared Eliot’s psychological studies of ordinary individuals to those of Eliot’s contemporaries, Theodor Storm, Wilhelm Raabe, Tolstoy and Chekhov. She found Eliot to have innovated in the diagnosis and description of hidden motivations through narratorial 32

33 34 35

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‘obogatilo zapadnoevropeiskii realisticheskii roman printsipialʹno novym khudozhestvennym psikhologizmom’; ‘vnutrenniaia logika realizma imenno v danniiu epokhu poluchila svoio zakonchennoie vyrazhenie’ (Karelʹskii 1990, 200). ‘khochet gliadetʹ v litso realʹnomu miru so vsem ego zlom i dobrom’ (Karelʹskii 1990, 229). ‘tonkii i slozhnyi mekhanizm chelovecheskoi dushi’ (Karelʹskii 1990, 218). ‘novaia stupenʹ psikhologizma’ (Karelʹskii 1990, 201). ‘odnim iz pervykh masterskikh portretov v galeree Dzhordzh Eliot’; ‘On vovse ne tipichnyi skvair-zlodei […] Ego slabostʹ kharaktera osnovyvaetsa na chuvstve sobstvennogo sotsialʹnogo prevoskhodstva nad drugimi. On i khorosh, i plokh odnovremenno […]’ (I. N. Ryzhkova, ‘Stanovlenie psikhologizma Dzhordzh Eliot’, Vestnik Kievskogo universiteta, Kiev, 24 (1990): 108–09).

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George Eliot in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia (1917–2014)   283 analysis, interior monologue and the presentation of discrepancies between external behavior and states of mind. In the chapter on FH in his monograph on Victorian political fiction, Boris Proskurnin considered ‘Innovations of Poetics and Traditions of Genre’ (2000, 160–206). Here he describes Harold Transome and Felix Holt as representatives of the same political trend, but from different social groups and outlooks: ‘Precisely the ethical positions of heroes determine the particularities of plot, and of representation of their political programmes, which is highly dramatic in form’ (Proskurnin 2000, 168).37 Proskurnin also analysed Eliot’s relationships to her predecessors and contemporaries. In his 2004 monograph on MF, he considered the influence on Eliot of Feuerbach, Spinoza, Wordsworth, Scott, Thackeray, Tennyson, Browning and Ruskin. He notes that she did not, however, agree with the ‘pastoral and idyllic portraying of common life’; rather, ‘Eliot, developing the tradition of J. Austen, created the pattern of the English social and psychological provincial novel with an emphasis on ethical and philosophical problems.’38 In his monograph of 2005 on Eliot’s later fiction, Proskurnin stresses Eliot’s aspiration to cast doubt on everything, through the dialogic process which is ‘the chief peculiarity of English mentality’.39 In his chapter on R he notes the influence of Macaulay and Carlyle, and describes the novel as reflective of the Victorian interest in antique, biblical and German myths (18, 29, 37). In particular, Proskurnin finds that the secular problems of Eliot’s heroes and heroines frequently have a religious character and are presented in relation to the rhetoric, style and pathos of the Bible, thus demonstrating the ‘obvious influence of Evangelism’.40 He characterizes R as ‘the novel-summary’ of mankind’s spiritual quest through bacchanal (heathen), antique, medieval and Renaissance stages.41 The 2000s saw several dissertations on Eliot’s minor works. Articles by N. V. Gorbunova (2005, 2012) concentrated on ITS and LV, which are little known in Russia. Her 2003 dissertation describes Eliot’s essays of the 1850s, M and ITS, in their epistemological aspect. Other work on Eliot has been

37

‘Imenno nravstvennye pozitsii geroiev i opredeliaiut osobennosti siuzhetnogo, po forme vesʹma dramatizirovannogo, to estʹ povestvovatelʹno obostrionnogo, razvertyvaniia ikh politicheskikh programm’ (Boris Mikhailovich Proskurnin, ‘Politicheskii roman Dzhordzh Eliot Feliks Holt, radical: Novatorstvo poetiki i traditsii zhanra’, in Angliiskii politicheskii roman XIX veka: Ocherki genezisa i eviolutsii (Perm: Permskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 2000), p. 168). 38 ‘pastoralʹno-idillicheskogo izobrazheniia zhizni naroda, provintsii’; ‘D. Eliot, po suti, prodolzhiv traditsii D. Osten, sozdala odin iz obraztsov angliiskogo sotsialʹno-psikhologicheskogo romana o provintsii, so znachitelʹnym aktsentom na nravstvenno-filosofskoi problematike’ (Boris Mikhailovich Proskurnin and Karen Hewitt, Roman Dzhordzh Eliot ‘Melnitsa na Flosse’: Kontekst, Estetika, Poetika (Perm: Permskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 2004), p. 24). 39 ‘glavnuiu osobennostʹ angliiskogo mentaliteta’ (Boris Mikhailovich Proskurnin, Idei vremeni i zrelye romany Dzhordzh Eliot (Perm: Permskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 2005), p. 4). 40 ‘ochevidnoe vliianie evangelizma’ (Proskurnin 2005, 48). 41 ‘romanom-konspektom’ (Proskurnin 2005, 51).

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284   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe comparative. N. V. Shamina’s 2005 dissertation compared Eliot, Austen and Charlotte and Emily Brontë with regard to the problems of women as represented in Victorian novels of 1840s–1870s. Serious scholarly work on Eliot, including the production of scholarly editions of her works, continues apace – even whilst her name is now largely forgotten by the public at large.

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15

George Eliot in Bulgaria Vesela Katsarova

Freedom is a complex phenomenon. It defies restrictions, rearranges priorities, loosens hierarchies and changes accents. Before the Bulgarian version of the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the focus of publishing houses was, above all, on classical literature. Series of volumes were published in hard cover, and crowds of people queued for selected works by Dickens, Hardy, Dostoevsky, Balzac and others. However, social and political changes invariably affected the cultural sphere too. After 1989 the spontaneous response of the general reading public amounted to profound interest in the forbidden fruit. Among the first books that were published immediately after the radical changes were George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, as well as D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. What followed was a decisive reorientation of publishing houses towards lighter genres – sensational novels, thrillers, crime stories, spy fiction, erotic books and so on. Now over 20 years later, interest in classical literature has been rekindled. The private publishing house Colibri resumed the abandoned series of ‘World Classics’ and launched the translations first of George Eliot’s M and then Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. This daring enterprise in a period of economic crisis created a great stir. The intriguing question is why Dickens is comparatively well known in Bulgaria and almost all of his novels have been translated here, whereas George Eliot, another great Victorian writer, has been somewhat neglected, and for a long time presented to the Bulgarian reading public only in one novel, Vodenitsata na reka Flos (1987), a translation of MF. It is really a puzzling issue; one can only hazard a guess. It is possible that Eliot intimidated publishers as well as translators with her formidable erudition, convoluted style and voluminous novels. Or perhaps no great admirer of her fiction emerged who dared to recommend her other novels to publishing houses in the same way that the renowned Bulgarian translator Iglika Vassileva displayed the courage, erudition and talent to translate James Joyce’s Ulysses: its publication in 2004 was a kind of celebration of the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday. Sometimes great authors and great novels have to await their committed translators. As noted, the first novel by Eliot translated into Bulgarian in 1987 was Vodenitsata na reka Flos, published by Narodna Kultura, which was the leading publishing house at that time. Its translator, Iliana Saraouleva, was most

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286   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe certainly committed. She was entitled by the publishing house to choose an Eliot novel for translation, and Eliot’s autobiographical work was her obvious choice; her Master’s thesis had been entitled ‘Social realities in MF’, and in 1973 she spent three months at Leeds University culling material about Eliot’s most popular work. She was therefore exhilarated to be able to translate the novel. Saraouleva comments in a letter on her experience as a translator: To my surprise I had to rediscover the book. Only then, from the vantage point of a mature person and a translator, did I appreciate the novel truly and fell in love with it. I was fascinated by the depth and complexity of the characters; by the author’s remarkable talent of depicting her portraits through speech; her exquisite sense of humour; the subtle irony, the delightful interplay of tragic and comic. The deeper I delved into the rich texture of her prose, the harder it got to render it into another language […] How was I to cope with this formidable task? In order to be true to the slightly antiquated manner of speech of her characters, I sought for equivalents in the vernacular used in the sparse literary sources from nineteenth-century Bulgaria. As the country was then within the confines of the Ottoman Empire, the language of the time was larded with colloquial Turkish words and expressions. A moderate use of ‘Turkicisms’ could have been a solution, as they gave a quaint old-fashioned colour to the modern way of speaking. However, there was a strict ban on using such colloquialisms in a written text, a ban motivated by purism but effectively concealing the political and ideological tenets of the then system. So, I had to rely mostly on syntactic means in rendering the ‘period’ atmosphere. By playing around with the word order, using bad grammar here and there, I sought to convey the rough uneducated speech of simple country folk with maximum authenticity. The mispronounced or wrongly used ‘eddicated’ words proved a delightful challenge! The humorous bits, the tongue-in-cheek description of her characters’ appearance and conduct (‘Enter the Aunts and Uncles!’); the author’s comments made with a wink, the ‘Wellerisms’ – the unexpected twists and turns of the phrase ending with an antithesis of the original argument – all these I did with gusto! The scenes of nature and the idyllic English countryside were a great source of inspiration (‘The Christmas Holidays!’). For me, the greatest difficulty in translating George Eliot stemmed from the depth and density of her style of writing. Her phrase is fraught with meaning, rich in shades and undertones. Every single word she uses serves a special purpose. If you omit or clumsily handle a single phrase you upset the logic and structure of a sentence often amounting to a paragraph! Profundity and passion are the two features I admire most in George Eliot’s novel MF. The existential wisdom, the joys and sorrows so brilliantly depicted by the author are timeless and universal! Rereading the Bulgarian translation 25 years later, I still burst out laughing or feel pangs of sadness. (Iliana Saraouleva, 28 November 2012)

In fact Saraouleva coped admirably with her ‘formidable’ task, and could have been a brilliant translator of some other works by Eliot. However, being excellent at interpreting, too, from 1990 (immediately after the radical social and political changes in our country) to 2006 she worked as a member of the president’s staff in charge of the interpretation and translation services in the Office of the President of Bulgaria. Later on (2006–12) she became a Temporary Agent at DG Interpretation at the European Commission in Brussels. If she had continued translating Eliot, as she intended after the

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George Eliot in Bulgaria   287 publication of Vodenitsata na reka Flos, the reception of the great Victorian in Bulgaria could have been quite different. A detailed study of her translation reveals a number of merits. First, Saraouleva faithfully presents the long and involved sentences of the original work, and powerfully renders their rhythm and fluidity. Dialogue is vividly translated through the use of colloquial speech as well as through foregrounding the specific intonation, key words and mannerisms of the different characters. In the Bulgarian version of the novel the contrast between Maggie and Tom at an artistic level is also clearly outlined. The siblings’ contrasting appearance, speech, facial expressions, aesthetic responses and antithetical associations with light and darkness, heat and coldness are minutely rendered. The disparate literary discourses, reflecting the protagonists’ opposing temperaments, stand out distinctly. Maggie’s spirituality, intense emotions and idealism are conveyed through a highly metaphoric and poetic language rich in similes, symbols and images, associated with nature, light, fire, flowers and music as well as with classical metaphors. On the other hand, Tom is portrayed through a prosaic metonymic discourse deprived of imaginative power and often enlivened by irony. Particularly moving is the translation of the introductory chapter of the novel. The mood that emerges there influences the mood of the rest of the novel. In Saraouleva’s text there is a high degree of lyricism and sensuality when in the very first sentence she describes how ‘the loving tide, rushing to meet’ the Floss ‘checks its passage with an impetuous embrace’ (‘vlyubeniyat priliv, vturnal se da ya posreshtne, pregrazhda putya i s buina prgrudka’, 21). What is particularly powerful in the Bulgarian text and additionally heightens the eroticism of the image is that in Bulgarian the two words ‘river’ and ‘tide’ have different genders: ‘river’ is feminine, whereas ‘tide’ is masculine (‘reka’ and ‘priliv’ respectively). The issue of gender and its linguistic ‘simplification’ in English, which pose serious problems to Bulgarian translators, will be discussed at greater length later. What can be said here is that Saraouleva decided to present the narrator in MF as male, which is often suggested by a number of verbal forms (‘podpryan’, ‘zadryamal’, 22). She thereby conveyed the traditional Victorian view of the narrator as omniscient and definitely male. However, as the novel is explicitly autobiographical, and the writer’s identity, which had long been hidden behind the male pen name, was already well known at the time of the novel’s publication, in my opinion the narrator should be decidedly female. This is the only critical remark that can be made of Saraouleva’s brilliant translation of MF. Fortunately, these verbal forms are comparatively rare in the text as the narrator is not particularly intrusive. It is praiseworthy that the Bulgarian version of the novel has a long academic preface (nowadays, unfortunately, prefaces are a kind of luxury in which Bulgarian publishers seldom indulge). The preface was written by Professor Miglena Nikolchina, who is at present Chair of the Department for Theory and History of Literature, Sofia University. Her publications in English include Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Woolf (New York: Other Press, 2004) and Lost Unicorns of the Velvet Revolutions: Heteropias of the Seminar (Fordham University Press, 2012). As well as being an academic figure,

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288   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Nikolchina is also a poet and a short-story writer, and accordingly her critical studies, articles and prefaces are invariably imbued with poetical imagery and vision. Her preface, entitled ‘Tragika i tesnogrudie (‘Tragedy and Narrowmindedness’), is subdivided into seven parts with separate titles: ‘General introduction’, ‘The Name’, ‘From Logos to Myth’, ‘Social dimensions’, ‘Psychological dimensions’, ‘Ethical dimensions’ and ‘Metaphysical dimensions’. Nikolchina begins her preface by relating Eliot’s favourite fable about the two hamadryads who saw two different things in the mirror of the lake: one contemplated her own reflection while the other saw the reflection of the wide world in it. Thus she outlines the major dichotomy in Eliot’s fiction – the opposition between egoism and altruism, thereby emphasizing the writer’s focus on moral and ethical problems. In the second part, Nikolchina points out the various reasons for which Eliot adopted a male pseudonym – above all, gratitude for her partner in life and a wish to be objectively judged as an author. In this part an interesting parallel is drawn between George Eliot and George Sand on the one hand, and between her and the Brontë sisters on the other, who at the beginning of their careers also resorted to male pseudonyms. She further comments on Eliot’s insistence that she should be called ‘Mrs Lewes’, which in Nikolchina’s opinion suggests that the author was not entirely free from all social prejudices and conventional views of morality in her age. The critic further suggests that the name ‘Eliot’ might be also associated with Charlotte Brontë, whose rebellious heroine Jane Eyre in one episode presents herself to the reader as Jane Eliot. In the chapter entitled ‘From Logos to Myth’, Nikolchina clearly outlines Eliot’s gradual transition from philosophical works to fiction. She briefly discusses Eliot’s translations of works by Strauss, Feuerbach and Spinoza, which are viewed as a decisive foundation for the author’s later successful literary career. The influence of positivist ideas and Spencer’s views of evolution is also discussed. Nikolchina points out that the concept of empathy is the key to understanding and appreciating Eliot’s fiction. In the chapter on social dimensions the focus is on the restrictions imposed on women by Victorian society. The divided spirit of the age is foregrounded by the analysis of the conflict between Tom’s pragmatism and rationality and Maggie’s spirituality and idealism. The part entitled ‘Psychological dimensions’ offers an intriguing juxtaposition between Maggie’s attitude respectively to Philip and Stephen. According to Nikolchina, Maggie responds to them with diverse aspects of herself. Therefore, these two relationships reveal the split nature of her own being: her inner conflict between Logos and Eros, speech and music, reason and passion, spirituality and nature. The sixth part, called ‘Ethical dimensions’, effectively discusses a number of biblical allusions in the novel, through which the duality of Maggie’s nature is implicitly suggested. In ‘Metaphysical dimensions’, Nikolchina sees the ending of the novel not as a tragic one, but as an attainment of cosmic wholeness through the reunion between brother and sister, which is presented as a typical Romantic theme. As a whole, Nikolchina’s preface displays remarkable erudition, since Eliot is discussed in the wide context of West European philosophy, culture and literature. After profound analyses of illuminating details in the text, she draws some comprehensive conclusions about Eliot’s art and philosophical views.

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George Eliot in Bulgaria   289 As for the second novel by George Eliot that was published in Bulgaria, I undertook the daunting task of translating M. As a lecturer in English literature I was fully aware that its translation into Bulgarian was a necessity: such a monumental novel should be within reach of the Bulgarian general public. Besides, I knew that very few students of English managed to read it in the original, and most of them relied on the TV series based on the novel. I therefore personally recommended the novel’s publication to Colibri, the well-known publishing house, which published it in August 2012 with the financial support of the European Commission of Culture. I think the greatest challenge of the novel is its convoluted syntax and style. However, it was a fundamental rule for me that I should keep the original length of all sentences and make the meaning as lucid as possible by both foregrounding the logical stress and keeping the internal rhythm. The next important issue was to render the Victorian spirit through the slightly archaic language. Therefore, I decisively abstained from using modern foreign borrowings (which abound in our language nowadays) and often resorted to archaic Bulgarian words or Turkish words from the vernacular. Furthermore, I often came across obsolete idioms not included in any dictionary. For instance, it took me some time to find out that the idiom ‘to eat one’s dinners’ also meant ‘to study law’ – a crucial phrase, which suggested Ladislaw’s further development. Another great challenge to any translator of George Eliot is her remarkable erudition. Almost on every page there was an allusion to a biblical story, a mythological figure or an ancient author or artist, and these references required detailed research and long explanatory notes. Furthermore, the translation of the epigraphs posed a considerable difficulty. As is well known, these epigraphs sum up the message of the whole chapter by introducing the key words for deciphering it. Therefore it was next to impossible to involve a different person for its rendition into poetry, and accordingly the translator of the novel’s main text is bound to do it him- or herself. Moreover, sometimes well-established translations of, say, Shakespeare’s sonnets or plays could not be quoted when the key words were missing in the text concerned, and accordingly the lines had to be translated anew. Besides, any Bulgarian translator from English faces an important difficulty resulting from the lack of gender specification in English verbal forms or adjectives. For example, in English both a man and a woman can say: ‘I have already done it’, ‘I have said it’ or ‘I am tired’, ‘I am hungry’, and so on. However, in Bulgarian these verb forms and adjectives used predicatively have different gender forms. In other words, sometimes a Bulgarian translator must decide for himself/herself whether the narrative voice is male or female. Of course, there are always clues to be deciphered. Yet it is widely acknowledged in criticism of Eliot that the author reacted vehemently against the authoritarian presence of the omniscient male narrator, and tried to include a female or an androgynous presence. At the beginning of her literary career, in the early works SCL and AB, in a typical Victorian manner the voice of the omniscient narrator is quite authoritarian and male. In MF, however, it is already female, not only because it sounds intimate, personal, emotional and lyrical but also because the novel is obviously autobiographical. Later in M the narrator is already represented by the collective ‘we’, or the more intimate

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290   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe ‘you and I’ – that is, it is neither too authoritarian nor too emotional, and has characteristics of both sexes. Yet whenever a first-person narration was used, I decisively chose a female voice. Apart from the argument that the voice displays a high degree of empathy (which may appear a subjective and sexist argument), there is another, more objective reason. When M was published (1871–72), Eliot’s reputation was at its height and the author could afford to speak in her authentic, personal voice. In some parts of the novel, by using the feminine gender form, I deliberately foreground the voice of the female writer, which I think is essential – as, for example, in the key passage where Eliot contrasts her narration with that of Henry Fielding: ‘But Fielding lived when days were longer […] I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots […] that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web’ (Chapter XV, first paragraph). Another difficulty that every translator from English into Bulgarian invariably encounters is closely related to the use of personal pronouns. The dropping of thou in the English language is a disadvantage, because the subtleties in human relationships cannot be adequately rendered without it. In M there are probably over 100 characters, and they have very complicated relationships. A Bulgarian translator is bound to estimate the depth or degree of intimacy between different characters and then decide whether he or she should use thou or you (ti and vie in Bulgarian respectively). In my translation of M the adopted criterion for using the respective form was based on the specificity of the characters. For instance, Mr Brook is always unceremonious, direct and even rude when he addresses people. Consequently, in his speech I invariably used the Bulgarian equivalent of thou. On the other hand, as the relationship between Dorothea and Will Ladislaw is at the beginning quite formal and progresses slowly, it is only in the final love scene during the storm (Chapter 83) that I allow them to address each other spontaneously using the equivalent of thou. However, the approach of the translator can be to a large extent subjective – another translator might suggest a great degree of intimacy in their relationship by using thou in Bulgarian much earlier. There is another feature in our language, which enables a translator to display nuances in the narrator’s attitude to the characters – it is an additional mood for rendering reported speech (preizkazno naklonenie). Its use usually implies a kind of estrangement from the characters whose speech is reported – sometimes even irony and derision. Critics such as David Lodge (Newton 1991, 169–841*) have often pointed out Eliot’s skilful use of free indirect speech, through which the narrative is coloured by the thoughts and feelings of the characters. However, when it is implied that a character obviously tells a blatant lie or behaves as a hypocrite, that additional mood in Bulgarian can adequately suggest it. In conclusion, I should say that the Bulgarian language is extremely rich and supple and can in its own way express any subtleties and complexities in the original texts. As M is a significant and difficult novel, in my opinion a preface to its Bulgarian version was essential, and I wrote it. The preface begins with eight 1

*

K. M. Newton, George Eliot (London: Longman, 1991).

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George Eliot in Bulgaria   291 quotations of various critics and novelists who belong to different periods of English literature. Thus a range of opinions is offered – from Virginia Woolf ’s view of M as the first novel for ‘grown-up’ people, to Martin Amis’s and Julian Barnes’s statement that it is probably the greatest English novel. What is foregrounded thereby is that M has been highly appreciated by all generations of English writers and critics. After the short biographical sketch, the most distinctive feature of the novel is discussed – its comprehensiveness. It is pointed out that in her masterpiece, Eliot presents all classes in English society, and their stories are inextricably intertwined, forming a dense ‘web’. Further, Eliot’s intellectual approach to the novel is discussed by presenting her response to the cultural spirit of the age and the philosophical doctrines of Spinoza, Feuerbach, Comte and Spencer, which were highly controversial in the mid-Victorian period. It is stated that the novelist’s hallmark – her empathy – comes from Feuerbach and Comte and their ‘religion of humanity’. The novel’s plot is analysed as one based on the moral conflict between egoism and altruism, key concepts in the Victorian period. The contrast between Dorothea Brooke and Rosamond Vincy is briefly outlined as an illustration of the clash between two different world-views. It is further suggested that through the character of Lydgate, a pivotal figure in the novel, the impact of the doctrines of materialist determinism and free will on Eliot is revealed. It is suggested that as a result of the doctor’s ‘spots of commonness’, and the wrong choices he makes, he fails to achieve his high aspirations. At the same time the influence of the environment is studied – Lydgate is crushed in spirit and assimilated by the mediocre provincial society of Middlemarch. It is further stated that through the character of Lydgate, Eliot’s deep concern with the progress of science is revealed. The novel is next studied from a feminist point of view, and Eliot’s profound interest in woman’s life and development is emphasized. She is therefore presented as a feminist, though not as a radical one. In support of this view, Dorothea’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge is discussed, as well as the social restrictions imposed on the heroine’s altruistic and intellectual ambitions. Although she wants to do something good for the world, all her longings are thwarted. In contrast, Rosamond, the ideal Victorian woman, with her trivial feminine virtues, is briefly portrayed. In the last part of the preface the artistic merits of M are analysed along with its thematic and stylistic contribution to the development of the English novel. Particular emphasis is laid on the new themes that Eliot launches in M. If in earlier novels the focus was on romantic love, in Eliot’s work it is on vocation – an important issue, which she introduced to English literature. It is pointed out that almost all characters in M are depicted in a process of work. Perhaps this is the reason why Virginia Woolf defined it as a novel for ‘grown-up’ people. Another important achievement in M is examined, which was also studied by Barbara Hardy – the fact that Eliot often conveys her ideas not explicitly through the comments of an omniscient narrator, but implicitly through the use of symbols – the symbols of the web, of concentric circles, flowing water, rivers, streams and floods. The open ending of the novel is further discussed as unheroic and indefinite. It is suggested that the novel’s

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292   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe untraditional open ending paved the way for radical experiments in the novel in the early decades of the twentieth century. David Lodge’s article is again referenced, where it praises Eliot’s skilful use of free indirect speech. Thereby, through the omission of ‘he/she said’, the critic argues, so-called mimesis and diegesis are inextricably interwoven. The preface’s final conclusion is that Lodge’s article contributed to the re-establishment of Eliot’s reputation as an artist who gave considerable aesthetic impetus to the development of the English novel. While this book was being compiled and edited, I managed to finish the translation of AB which was published in July, 2015 by Colibri. As I still have a very clear idea of all the challenges I faced in my work, I can admit that it was the most difficult novel I have ever translated – more difficult than, say, M. While M is a mature and refined novel, in AB there is a kind of appealing spontaneous vitality, which is very difficult to render. In the first place, all characters are portrayed, above all, through speech. Thus the eloquent, dignified and erudite speech of Mr Irwine, Dinah and Bartle Massey is in stark contrast to that of Mr Casson, Lisbeth and some other local people. It is entirely through his crude dialect that Mr Casson stands out as an extremely comic character; although he repeatedly draws attention to his ‘right language’, pointing out that he lived among the gentry, the schoolmaster’s response to him is contemptuous: ‘You are about as near the right language as a pig’s squeaking is like a tune played on a key-bugle’ (Chapter 32). Mrs Poyser is quite a different case because apart from using resonant dialect, she also speaks highly aphoristically. As for the protagonist Adam Bede, he changes his speech according to the person he is talking to: ‘whenever he wished to be especially kind to his mother, he fell into his strongest native accent and dialect, with which at other times his speech was less deeply tinged’ (Chapter 4). A translator therefore has to be meticulous in rendering the various modulations in his speech. At the beginning I was somewhat at a loss as to how to render the different registers of dialect speech. I thought at first that good dictionaries of Bulgarian dialects were indispensable for my work. Later, when I discussed the problem with some professionals, two radically different approaches were recommended to me. One renowned professor said that I should by all means use highly ‘tinged’ Bulgarian dialect, whereas another one, equally renowned, said that I should only slightly suggest the local colour. I must admit that at first I started with a highly pronounced regional dialect. However, I felt that in this way I somehow ‘bulgarized’ English dialect speech. Then some specialists in this field outlined the rules I should adopt in my translation: to rely mainly on vernacular, colloquial speech, and use Turkish words which still abound in our current everyday speech. Fortunately, unlike Iliana Saraouleva, I have not been hindered by a strict political ban on using such colloquialisms in a written text. I further assiduously reread some classical Bulgarian authors who used a beautifully archaic and colloquial language. I thereby culled plenty of eloquent expressions in common speech. I also resorted to some mispronunciation or ‘mincing accent’, as Eliot herself defined it in Chapter 2. My intention was to suggest the foreignness of colloquial speech and at the same time to make it sound natural in its respective context. In other words,

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George Eliot in Bulgaria   293 following Schleiermacher’s principle, I tried to avoid complete acclimatization of foreign speech, by implying its foreignness. The other difficulty I faced at the very beginning was that I could not understand some distorted words in the text. Being a foreigner, I was initially taken aback by words and phrases such as ‘sarmunt’ and ‘twite told’ for example. It was the very context, after all, that suggested their meaning – ‘sermon’ and ‘quite cold’. Therefore, I think it essential that every translator should know the whole text in detail before translating it. As a lecturer in English literature I think that prefaces, particularly to foreign novels, are important for both students and readers. Consequently, I wrote one under the title ‘AB – the novel that moved Victorian England’. It consists of four parts entitled ‘The Mystery’, ‘The Personality behind the Pseudonym’, ‘The Manifesto of Realism’ and ‘Is George Eliot a Feminist?’ In the part entitled ‘The Mystery’, the most intriguing fact in my opinion is that Charles Dickens was among the first who suspected a woman’s hand behind the male pseudonym. The next curious fact is that when rumours began to circulate that the real author was one Joseph Liggins of Nuneaton, that gentleman went so far as to claim payment. In the part entitled ‘The Personality behind the Pseudonym’, important biographical facts about the novelist are given and the various reasons for her use of a male pseudonym are explained. I further mention a feasible decoding of her pen name by an unknown critic according to whom the pseudonym means to ‘GeorgE Lewes I Owe iT’. In the next part, entitled ‘The Manifesto of Realism’, a parallel is drawn between Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads and Chapter 17 in AB. Very much like Wordsworth, Eliot chooses ‘incidents and situations from common life’ and tries ‘to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination’. When she discusses the influence of Dutch painting upon her she uses the two key words which characterize her fiction – ‘truthfulness’ and ‘sympathy’: ‘It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings […] I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence.’ As mentioned above, this chapter can be viewed as a kind of manifesto of realism. And yet at the same time its metafictional approach suggests a departure from rigid classical rules. Therefore, a reference is made to the famous Chapter 13 in John Fowles’s postmodern novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), where the contemporary novelist also interrupts his story abruptly and outlines his artistic strategy. In the last part of the preface, entitled ‘Is George Eliot a Feminist?’, it is pointed out that although Eliot reacted against any marginalizing labels for her fiction, she was obviously deeply preoccupied with the problems of Victorian women. As I said before, in a typical Victorian manner she makes a clear distinction between virtuous, noble heroines, on the one hand, and vain, heartless ones, on the other. Thus in AB the novelist condemns Hetty Sorrell for her vanity and sinfulness, and finally punishes her severely. However, as many critics claim, the fallen heroine appears to be the product of the subconscious subversive artist in Eliot, whereas the spiritual Dinah is the product of the conscious conservative moralist in the author. I should say that the most powerful and moving chapters in the novel are those which depict Hetty’s lonely ‘journey in despair’ (Chapters 36 and 37). At the end of these chapters

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294   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe the narrator/author exclaims, ‘My heart bleeds’ for ‘poor wandering Hetty’. The final conclusion in the preface is that although woman’s life in Victorian England is quite central to the novel, all the same, Eliot’s profound concern with universal values prevails in AB. In Bulgaria there are comparatively few academic studies of Eliot, and they all outline the writer’s significant role in English literature. The first comprehensive study of her fiction was Penka Damyanova’s PhD dissertation entitled ‘Detail in George Eliot’s Novels’, which was successfully defended in 1990. Penka Damyanova was then a lecturer in English in the Department of West European Languages, Sofia University. Unfortunately Dr Damyanova died prematurely and her study has not yet been published. In her work, Damyanova minutely studies the significance of details in separate chapters entitled ‘Detail and Time’, ‘Detail and Setting’, ‘Detail and Plot’, ‘Detail and Portrait/Character/Human nature’. As she argues in the Introduction, the aim of the dissertation is to study the place, the nature and the part played by details in the novels of Eliot. According to her, the necessity of such a study seems to be justified by several considerations: first, by the importance of details for the establishment of realist art in general and the realist novel in particular; second, by the unsatisfactory results of the studies on details in literature both on the theoretical plane and in the light of historical perspective and within the work of particular writers; third, by the importance of detail in each of the novels of George Eliot, as well as within her overall work and hence within the English novel (3). Damyanova further claims in the Introduction that despite all disputes over realism, which contributed to the elucidation of a number of controversial problems, the part played by details for realistic presentation has not been adequately examined. Unlike some critics, Damyanova argues that Eliot’s works do not mark a crisis in nineteenth-century fiction but the beginning of a new and more mature stage in its development. She points out two major tendencies that characterize Victorian fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century: its growing psychological dimension and the more sophisticated use of detail, which, as Damyanova claims, to some extent complement each other in a number of cases. Both tendencies are clearly expressed in Eliot’s novels and it could be said that they point to a radically new stage in comparison with the novels of her predecessors. Particularly significant in this respect, Damyanova contends, is her unique use of details which play a twofold part in her works. On the one hand, details enhance realistic presentation of the social milieu and the moral and ethical atmosphere in her novels, while on the other hand, alongside internal speech, they constitute the basis of her psychological realism. In general, Damyanova’s study is an attempt to deal with two main tasks: first, to consider some specific functions of the details within some particular novels of Eliot, and, second, to reveal the place and the role of detail as an essential component of her realistic method. The basic thesis of the dissertation is that the specific use of details in Eliot’s works is one of the major characteristics of the new type of realistic presentation introduced by her to the English novel. Damyanova defines Eliot’s artistic method as a kind of model or even a measuring rod for realistic presentation. In her study, detail is directly related to the setting and atmosphere in Eliot’s novels, to the main

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George Eliot in Bulgaria   295 themes tackled in them, to the character-drawing techniques and to the moral, social and aesthetic positions of the author. However, the focus in the dissertation is, above all, on the artistic function of details. Damyanova’s study consists of two major parts. The first is a lengthy inquiry concerning detail in theoretical and critical literature as well as a closer scrutiny of the studies on detail in some of George Eliot’s work. In this respect she is particularly indebted to Barbara Hardy’s work The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London: Athlone Press, 1959). The second part is basically concerned with the analysis of the special role played by details for the presentation of time, setting, atmosphere, plot and characters in Eliot’s fictional work. Damyanova points out the abundant use of details in Eliot’s fiction and attempts to offer a general classification of them. She discusses their diversity and wide range, varying from prosaic or mimetic details to artistic details or even leitmotifs. According to their context, they can be classified as dramatic, tragic, comic, ironic or satiric. Further, she claims that, viewed from another angle, details can be defined as plain and concrete, descriptive and characterizing, structural and psychological. Besides, the critic convincingly discusses a specific feature in Eliot’s use of details which is closely related to her development as an artist – a gradual movement from a meticulous rendering of astronomical time (years, months, weeks, days, hours and minutes) to a less factual but more relevant and effective description of historical time-shifts. What is distinctly outlined in this study is the gradual movement from the faithful reproduction of the perceptible aspects of human beings to a sophisticated rendering of individual human nature. The author contends that the movement from a circumstantial description (of time, setting, character and plot), so typical of the English novel before George Eliot, to a more laconic and no less effective presentation of these four aspects, is fundamental to the art of detail in Eliot’s novels. Damyanova’s final conclusion is that the novelist’s utilization of the tradition of using details and, above all, her special approach and innovations in this respect, constitute an important aspect of her realistic method, which, coupled with her other major artistic achievements, contributed to the creation of a new type of English novel and a new type of realism which could meet the demands of the changed spirit of the times. Eliot’s fiction has also been the subject of a detailed study by Professor Simeon Hadgikosev. A well-known Bulgarian scholar, literary critic, writer and famous polyglot as well as a member of the Bulgarian P.E.N. centre, he has been a lecturer in Ancient and West European Literature in the Department for Theory and History of Literature, Sofia University, since 1965. Hadgikosev has published over 30 books, ranging from literary studies to memoirs, but his most monumental work is the series of eight volumes on Ancient and West European literature. What is particularly impressive in these volumes is Hadgikosev’s erudition – he invariably employs interdisciplinary approaches and draws intriguing parallels with West European or Bulgarian culture and literature. In his sixth volume, entitled Golemite angliiski realisti na XIX vek (The great English realists of the nineteenth century) (2010), he discusses the major figures of Victorian literature. Sixty-five pages (371–436) are devoted to an analysis of Eliot’s fiction. What is emphasized at the very beginning is that although Eliot is a Victorian

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296   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe writer, certain of her innovative techniques contributed to the development of literature in the post-Victorian period. He also draws an intriguing parallel between Eliot and Queen Victoria as figures highly emblematic of their age. Then he presents George Eliot and George Sand as the two most renowned women writers of the nineteenth century, both rebels against the prejudices and restrictions of their age. He juxtaposes Sand’s extroversion and liberalism against Eliot’s introversion, as well as her political and personal conservatism. In his study, Hadhikosev minutely discusses the author’s critical reception. Thus he points out the revived interest in Eliot’s fiction after World War II, and particularly after the publication of F. R. Leavis’s book The Great Tradition (1948). He also outlines the contribution of New Criticism to the profound artistic evaluation of Eliot’s fiction. Special attention is paid to the publication of the seven volumes of her correspondence. Further, a particular emphasis is laid on some contradictory approaches of feminist critics to Eliot’s fiction. Then the author’s personal life is discussed in detail, and George Henry Lewes’s impact on her as a writer is outlined. Further, Hadhikosev presents Eliot’s aesthetic and social views by commenting on long quotations from the famous Chapter 17 in AB. He argues that with her interest in ordinary people and events she comes close to the aesthetics of French realists, and even anticipates some features of Naturalism. However, in his opinion she can hardly be defined as a founder of Naturalism, as the Russian critic Valentina Ivashova claims. When Hadhikosev discusses George Eliot’s humour, he contends that it is different from Dickens’s, and closer to the ironical and satirical tone of Thackeray. In his discussion of Eliot’s first novel, AB, Hadhikosev emphasizes its significant role not only in the writer’s work, but in Victorian fiction in general. He points out the radical difference between it and the first novels of the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen. Next, the critic pays attention to the structure of the novel and particularly to Eliot’s brilliant use of dialect speech. Here he offers an impressive translation of a passage into Bulgarian dialect speech, which is a great challenge to any future translator of the novel. Hadhikosev ingeniously contends that the plot of the novel was suggested by the first part of Goethe’s Faust, where Gretchen’s love and tragedy are depicted. In support of his view, he points out that G. H. Lewes’s book on Goethe was published when Eliot was writing the novel. Further, the critic juxtaposes two analogous scenes from Faust and AB. However, Hadhikosev argues that with her powerful psychological analysis, Eliot surpasses Goethe. In this part he draws another parallel between Queen Victoria and Eliot. In his opinion the novel was the Queen’s favourite book because it embodied Victorian moral principles: unshakeable faith, determination to face all trials of fate and attain moral stability, and perfection as a result of intense suffering. Then he argues that the Queen definitely disliked Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights because love in them was presented as torrential and destructive. Finally he concludes that the moralizing spirit in AB is rather too strong for the modern reading public. In his analysis of MF, Hadhikosev defines it as the culmination of the first stage of Eliot’s literary career. He disputes the well-known view of the novel as a Bildungsroman and argues that instead it should be discussed as a social, psychological or even family novel. Further, he claims that it can be treated

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George Eliot in Bulgaria   297 as an autobiographical work only in a spiritual sense, as it is not based on any authentic events. Hadgikosev points out that with her rebellious spirit, the heroine is not a projection of the writer’s true self, but her spiritual double. Next he argues that the picture of childhood is much more powerful in Eliot’s novel than in Dickens’s Oliver Twist or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Moreover, he contends that Eliot’s sense of humour is much subtler than that of her predecessors. He even claims that Eliot’s humour might have influenced Lewis Carroll in his delineation of the child’s point of view in Alice in Wonderland, although a surrealist environment is drawn there, whereas in MF an authentic provincial world is presented. When the critic discusses the social aspects of the novel, he relates it to Balzac’s Human Comedy and further draws a parallel between Edward Tulliver and Balzac’s Grandfather Goriot. Hadhikosev highly praises the Bulgarian translation of the novel, pointing out that it renders its authentic atmosphere. However, he says that a distinctive feature of the Bulgarian language has been somewhat disregarded in it. He draws attention to the fact that in Bulgarian there is a separate word for every type of relative, whereas in English the comprehensive concept of ‘in-laws’ blurs all differences. Hadhikosev claims that Bulgarian is unique in this respect, as in no other Slavic, Romance or Germanic language is there such a linguistic diversity and abundance as in Bulgarian, and it is the duty of every translator to make use of it. As he claims, every language is the unique spiritual wealth of a nation, which has to be protected and developed. He goes on to say that unfortunately Bulgarian people are not very vigilant and protective owners, and consequently the Bulgarian vocative form, which has been kept for thousands of years and is typical of most Slavic languages, is on the way to disappearing under the impact of foreign influences. In this study, SM is comparatively briefly discussed, but R is analysed at length. As Hadgikosev points out, his personal commitment to the cultural problems of the Renaissance intensified his interest in R, usually undervalued and neglected by English critics. His discussion is placed within the context of English and West European historical novels. He first defines the work as an ambitious one, in which the author’s aim is to extend Walter Scott’s achievements in the field of the historical novel by rendering the colour, language and spiritual atmosphere in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century. He further argues that the portrayal of the historical period is the novel’s highest achievement. In his opinion the most impressive scenes in R are those of carnivals, revolts and executions, in which Eliot stands out as the master of the historical novel. According to Hadgikosev, the novel is so authentically Renaissance and Italian that the reader can easily believe that it was written by an Italian novelist. He therefore compares it with an Italian classical work by Manzoni. As he claims, R has no equivalent in Victorian literature; he relates it to Flaubert’s Salammbô – in his opinion both works minutely recreate the past with remarkable erudition. However, it is pointed out that Salammbô could not have had any immediate influence on Eliot, because the two works were published almost simultaneously. Hadhikosev further offers some criticism of R and points out that the world of the characters and fictive events are not as powerful as the portrayal of the historical period. Thus, he outlines a certain disproportion between

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298   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe a macroplot and a microplot as a result of which the historical and cultural background outweighs the fictive aspects of the novel. Nonetheless, he concludes that R is one of the best historical novels in English. In his discussion of FH, Hadhikosev first comments on various contradictory interpretations of the novel. However, what is really intriguing for the Bulgarian reader in Hadgikosev’s analysis is that he draws a parallel between Eliot’s novel and the well-known volume of humorous stories by our great writer Aleko Konstantinov, where a powerful caricature of the typical Bulgarian is presented. The juxtaposition between two election scenes from the respective works is particularly impressive. Though Hadgikosev points out the panoramic aspect of M, he also sees it as a family novel, because of the intricate web of relatives in it. In his opinion its greatest merit is the balanced alternation of tragic and comic scenes. He further applies the Aristotelian interpretation of tragedy, and argues that Eliot’s phrase ‘tragic failure’ in the Prelude corresponds directly to the Aristotelian term megale hamartia. He also places the novel in the context of Victorian fiction. For instance, he treats John Raffles as a Dickensian character, taken, say, from Martin Chuzzlewit. However, he defines Dickens’s characters as types, and by contrast emphasizes Eliot’s focus on inner space. Therefore, he concludes that Dickens is closer in spirit to the Enlightenment, whereas Eliot is closer to Modernism. A valid comparison is also made between Rosamond Vincy and Mrs Gibson in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. The critic’s approach to Mary Garth is interesting, as he definitely treats her as the actual narrator in the novel, and provides some convincing arguments to support his view. In his analysis of DD he argues that with some of its innovative techniques, the novel anticipates the emergence of Modernism in the twentieth century. Finally, it should be said that Hadgikosev’s study of George Eliot is the only one in Bulgarian criticism, which situates her fiction in the broad context of European literary traditions and draws parallels with Bulgarian culture. Another study where Eliot is a major figure is entitled Zhenskata traditsia v angliiskata literature: George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing (The female tradition in English literature: George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing) (2009), which I wrote. The central thesis is that though these three women writers belong to different literary periods, a great number of similar features stand out in their works. Besides, some of their novels provide essential links between the authors, and the subsequent continuity that is outlined enables the critic to claim that to a large extent these novelists form the backbone of the female tradition in English literature. The first part is entitled ‘Critical reception’, and in the chapter about Eliot it is argued that critical response to her often oscillates between devotion and rejection. Feminist critics, for example, have wavered a great deal in their approaches to her. However, in the 1980s they appreciated her specific departures from the literary norms established by male authors. The second part is called ‘Ideology, Society and Literature’, and the chapter on Eliot sets out to present her as the first renowned intellectual who turned to novel writing and presented an overall picture of the cultural and social climate in the Victorian age. By powerful literary characters and images, she manages to convey all philosophies and ideas characteristic of the age for which her

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George Eliot in Bulgaria   299 contemporaries viewed her as the conscience of the nation. An essential point here is that the three writers consistently present woman’s contribution to the advancement of civilization by depicting such monumental female figures as Romola, Orlando and Martha Quest. The general views of the three are based on ‘the religion of humanity’, sympathy and social love. In their pursuit of harmony they systematically attack social evils. When their political views are juxtaposed, the problem is to what extent such concepts as gradualism, meliorism and pacifism, usually applied to Eliot, can apply to Woolf and Lessing too. After a thorough analysis, the general conclusion is that although the three belong to different historical periods and are influenced by different doctrines, at a certain point they come close to one another in their views. In the third part of the study, entitled ‘Classical Realism and its Metamorphosis’, the major contention is that in a similar way Eliot, Woolf and Lessing begin their literary career with traditional realist works, but gradually depart from some realistic principles and offer various modifications of traditional realism. The chapters, devoted to each author, outline the trajectory in their individual artistic development. Thus it is argued that in Eliot’s first book, SCL, characterized by organic coherence, the voice of the omniscient narrator is quite intrusive, and melodramatic elements prevail in it. In AB, Eliot departs from the established rules of classical realism and incorporates a kind of manifesto of her artistic strategy, thereby introducing metafictional elements into the realist tissue of the novel. MF is a decisive step forward in the development of the Victorian novel, as the metaphoric discourse presenting Maggie is dominant in it. Traditional realism is further modified in SM, which, with its biblical associations, comes very close to fables and legends. R is a radically different, hybrid novel, permeated with the bright colours and strong sensuality of the Pre-Raphaelites. Further, FH is seen as a turning point in Eliot’s literary career because in it she re-examines the effectiveness of metonymic, inductive realism. In M, Eliot already gives up her former explicitness and begins to convey ideas mainly through symbols. The open ending of the novel is another challenge to conventional realism. Finally, in her last novel, DD, the writer breaks down various barriers – geographical, psychological, class, cultural and aesthetic. Subjectivity definitely prevails in it as the problems of the divided personality come to the fore. Thus DD provides the link with the next literary stage when Modernists such as Woolf will minutely examine the complex, contradictory nature of man. Next, a comparative chapter outlines the thematic and artistic contribution of these three eminent and prolific women writers. The final conclusion is that with such transitional works as DD (1876), Between the Acts (1941) and The Golden Notebook (1962), published at crucial points, Eliot, Woolf and Lessing decisively change the direction of the development of English literature by creating unique new works. The fourth part of the study, entitled ‘Feminism and Literature’, focuses on the three writers’ attitude to feminism as well as on the female characters in their works. In the chapter on Eliot it is again stated that though she was not a radical feminist, she shared many of the ideas of feminism. Undoubtedly the problems of womanhood are central to her fiction. It is further argued that despite the fact that the Madonna–harlot dichotomy pervades her fiction, in fact virtuous, selfless, spiritual heroines prevail in it. What they have in

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300   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe common is an insatiable hunger for knowledge and selfless labour for the community, but the patriarchal conservative society in which they live offers them no prospects for development or worthwhile activities. An analysis of conjugal relationships in Eliot’s fiction clearly shows that such intellectual, self-sufficient, aspiring heroines are unhappy in their family life because of the limitations of conventional marriage. The writer grants family happiness only to her conventional small-scale heroines such as Celia Brooke, Esther and Mirah. It is concluded that Eliot is concerned with universal values first, and then with women’s needs. The comparative chapter on feminism outlines the three writers’ contribution to the female literary tradition. What they definitely have in common is that they place women’s problems at the centre of their fiction. The survey of female characters in their works reveals a marked tendency in the development of women’s writing – the initial intense idealization of heroines gradually begins to drop away. The process first becomes obvious in Eliot’s fiction: her earlier female protagonists such as Dinah, Maggie, Dorothea and Romola are very different from Gwendolen, who is fallible and yet admirable. Besides, the three novelists are equally critical towards patriarchal society and the institution of marriage. Further, it is stated that the theme of woman’s vocation and her contribution to the progress of civilization, which the three often deal with, undoubtedly enriches not only the female tradition, but the English novel as a whole. Though Eliot, Woolf and Lessing belong to different ages, they create some resilient titanic women who appear very much alike – Romola, Orlando and Martha Quest as depicted in Lessing’s The Four-Gated City. Moreover, in most cases the three novelists give priority to female consciousness. At the same time a distinct tendency stands out in their fiction for balance and harmony between the sexes. In general, the analysis of the feminist issues in their novels highlights woman’s slow journey from patriarchal pressures to emancipation. What also emerges is the gradually expanding system of artistic devices by means of which the complex nature of woman can be effectively depicted. The fifth part of the study, ‘The Character of the Woman Artist’, discusses the creative heroines in the fiction of each author and then offers a comparative analysis of them. It is first emphasized that women artists in Eliot’s work are comparatively few, and all of them are musicians and opera singers, for which various reasons are suggested. In fact, there is only one truly dedicated woman artist in Eliot’s writings: the Alcharisi, the eminent opera singer in DD. This diva combines unique artistic gifts and the will to power. She is strong enough to resist the law of fathers and husbands. However, the novelist’s attitude to her is ambivalent. The comparative chapter on the women artists in the works of the three authors reveals the fact that the opportunities for the development of women have greatly increased since the mid-Victorian period. While in Eliot’s novels the creative heroines are, above all, singers, that is, performers of works by others, Woolf presents various types of artists: poetesses, a pianist, a painter as well as a producer/script writer. Finally, the novelist Anna Wulf, the most memorable woman artist in Lessing’s fiction, can be viewed as belonging to the group of intellectuals who embody not only the conscience of the nation, but of mankind. The comparative study of these heroines displays a general development in women’s fiction – the gradual

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George Eliot in Bulgaria   301 transition from one particular type of artist to a radically different one. The terms which the critic Lee T. Lemon uses to describe them are respectively a ‘Byronic artist’ and a ‘Wordsworthian’ one (1985). The first scorns the mob and creates elitist art, while the second is a democratic personality for whom art is an act of communication, accessible to a great number of people. Eliot’s heroine the Alcharisi definitely belongs to the first type. She is monstrously narcissistic and sees herself tragically alone. The artist figures in Woolf ’s fiction are of a transitional type, as they have characteristics of both kinds. However, after World War II the transition in literature to the Wordsworthian mould of artist becomes obvious in Lessing’s fiction – for the novelist and for her heroine Anna Wulf, art has social significance, above all, because it is a means of influencing people. The works of the three authors clearly outline the transition from one type of artist to another. In conclusion it should be said again that the comparative study of such outstanding, prolific writers enables the critic to trace the development not only of female fiction, but also of the English novel from the mid-Victorian period to the present. This Bulgarian study produced several offshoots in English. The major ideas in the first one of these papers, entitled ‘The Woman Artist as Viewed by the Woman Novelist – George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing’, have already been discussed above. The second article outlines the thematic and artistic contribution of the three women. It is stated first that their renovation of the English novel begins with the change of the value system, as they focus on themes which have been generally neglected in English literature: the beauty of everyday existence, of ‘little daily miracles’; the ability to identify with others and to show empathy; woman’s sense of identity and intellectual selffulfilment; and the feminization of history. They further renovate the novel artistically by unceasing experiments with structure, the voice of the narrator, the treatment of the subject and the use of doubles. The third article, with the title ‘From Confined Space to Global Worlds and Complex Techniques: George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing’, sets out to examine the gradual broadening of scope and artistic awareness in their respective fiction. In the part about Eliot it is pointed out that her early works offer faithful descriptions of restricted rural communities. Then in R (1863), the novelist moves from a narrowly provincial England to the cultural capital of Renaissance Europe, from a simple rural world to a complex one of Western culture, politics and trade, from a world of emotions to a public one of power and glory. The extensive broadening of scope invariably leads to more complex techniques. Accordingly, in R, Eliot experiments with non-realist strategies that derive from poetry, fable, epic, Utopia and romance. Then in M, Eliot presents the whole Victorian world with its different social strata. Reform is again a key word, as in FH, but now it is associated not only with changes to the parliamentary system but also with improvements in medicine, education and social relations. Consequently, the wide scope involves subversion of some conventions of classical realism. Finally, Eliot’s last novel, DD, is viewed as a breakthrough, because in it Eliot crosses a great number of borders. With its international setting, mythical elements, prevalent subjectivity and psychological split it provides the link with the next literary stage in English literature. Thus at this point the novelist broke the mould of the traditional realist novel

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302   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe and adopted new perspectives, which ultimately led to the renovation of English literature in general. In conclusion it should be said again that the publication of the translation of M in August 2012 caused something of a stir. In Literaturen vestnik (Literary newspaper) (14) it was presented together with several other titles as one of the most significant literary events of 2012 in Bulgaria. Accordingly, the revived interest in Eliot was followed by the publication of AB. The newspaper ‘Sega’ (25 July 2015) defined it as one of the best books of the week. Hopefully the interest in Eliot will continue in Bulgaria.

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16

‘An Unspeakable Journey’: Czech and Slovak Reception of George Eliot1 Zdeněk Beran

The position of George Eliot among Czech and Slovak readers, publishers and scholars has never been as prominent or secure as that of Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray or Thomas Hardy. The reasons are numerous and some are perfectly straightforward: in comparison to authors such as those mentioned, she was not so prolific, and, although she was able to produce both entertaining and deeply moving passages, her novels are not, generally speaking, as readable as those of her more popular contemporaries. She was perfectly capable of illuminating critically the most acute problems of her day – but somehow these issues, or her presentation of them, seem to lack the universality that characterizes the works of Dickens or Hardy. All this goes some way to explaining why there are relatively few editions of her work published in Czech and Slovak (with one very recent exception, no translation of her fiction has come out more than once as yet), and that among the scholars and critics who have paid attention to her work the one showing the most detailed and consistent effort was, symptomatically, not a native Czech or Slovak, but a New Zealander domiciled in Prague. However, in contrast with the comparative indifference of the publishing industry and academia, Eliot seems always to have been respected amongst Czech and Slovak writers and intellectuals. In their private correspondence and elsewhere, she is generally mentioned with high praise. Eliot is often taken as a paragon, particularly for Czech women writers, although her appeal is wider than this. For instance, in 1896 the Czech symbolist poet Otokar Březina, whose poetry is heavily laden with religious and cosmic

1

By 1918 the territory of today’s Czech Republic and Slovakia was part of the Habsburg Empire, with two different cultures existing simultaneously in both regions – Czech and German in the Czech Lands, and Slovak and Hungarian in Slovakia (or Upper Hungary). The present chapter does not include non-Slavonic reception of Eliot in what became Czechoslovakia in 1918, believing that this should be a matter of a separate study.

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304   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe visions, recommended her novels in correspondence to his penfriend, Anna Pammrová, as a work of ‘one of those great women, to whom even Nietzsche was unjust’,2 and he does not hesitate to speak of Eliot’s ‘genius’. He, like many others, read her novels either in English or, more probably, in German translation – a common practice. Eliot was far better known to Czech and Slovak writers and critics than Czech and Slovak publishing records would suggest – and to some extent she was also an influence on their work. That said, the deep incorporation of Eliot’s work into Czech and Slovak culture began belatedly, years after her death. This is striking when compared with, for example, Dickens’s reception history. This perhaps reflects the changed role of the realistic novel in the later decades of the Victorian era. The first Czech translations of Eliot appeared in the last years of the nineteenth century, while the Slovak translations had to wait until the late 1960s, and the rare instances of criticism of her work belong mainly to the second half of the twentieth century. Within her own lifetime, her reception of Czech culture is more significant than the reverse. Surprising as this might seem, it makes for an indispensable part of the story. While, for example, Eliot’s interest in Italian culture, and her visits to Italy to research material for Romola, are taken as read by literary historians, her experience of the Czech Lands has been consigned to the margins of scholarly concern. Yet it was her two brief visits to Prague that first prompted her to include an important aspect of contemporary Western life in her work: the problem of Jewish identity, as we find it reflected in her early tale LV (1859) and her last novel DD (1876). Though it can be argued that Eliot’s interest in Jewishness in DD is an outcome of a far more profound intellectual experience, fostered especially by her friendship with Emanuel Deutsch, it remains a fact that both works were published following her visits to Prague, both include a Prague scene and both refer to the Jewish part of the city. The first visit took place in the late 1850s, and in her letter of 28 July 1858, Mary Ann Evans wrote to Miss Sarah Hennell from Dresden: ‘First an attack of illness during our last week at Munich, which I reckon among my pleasures because I was nursed so tenderly. Then a fortnight’s unspeakable journey to Salzburg, Ischl, Linz, Vienna, Prague, and finally Dresden, which is our last resting-place before returning to Richmond, where we hope to be at the beginning of September’ (Cross 1885, 45). This note refers to her one-day stay in Prague on 16 July 1858, on a tour which she and Lewes were making of the German-speaking countries of central Europe, mostly by train. In Prague she enjoyed the Jewish district in particular, as the following entry in her diary reveals: ‘We saw a lovely dark-eyed Jewish child here, which we were glad to kiss in all its dirt. Then came the sombre old synagogue with its smoky groins, and lamp forever burning. An intelligent Jew was our cicerone and read us some Hebrew out of the precious old book of the Law’ (41). She also visited the Old Jewish Cemetery nearby, which she saw as ‘unique – with a wild growth of grass and shrubs and trees, and a multitude of quaint tombs 2

‘jedna z těch velkých žen, k níž i Nietzsche byl nespravedliv’ (Otokar Březina, Korespondence, vols 1–2 (Brno: Host, 2004), I, p. 396).

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‘An Unspeakable Journey’: Czech and Slovak Reception of George Eliot   305 in all sorts of positions, looking like the fragments of a great building, or as if they had been shaken by an earthquake’ (40–41). Her diary entry continues to give further impressions from Prague, including those of her visit to Prague Castle later in the day: After dinner we took a carriage and went across the wonderful bridge of St. Jean Nepomuck, with its avenue of statues, towards the Radschin – an ugly straightlined building but grand in effect from its magnificent site, on the summit of an eminence crowded with old massive buildings. The view from this eminence is one of the most impressive in the world – perhaps as much from one’s associations with Prague as from its visible grandeur and antiquity. The cathedral close to the Radschin is a melancholy object on the outside – left with unfinished sides like scars. The interior is rich but sadly confused in its ornamentation, like so many of the grand old churches – hideous altars of bastard style disgracing exquisite Gothic columns […] Close in front of us sloping downwards was a pleasant orchard; then came the river with its long, long bridge and grand gateway; then the sobercoloured city with its surrounding plain and distant hills. In the evening we went to the theatre – a shabbily ugly building – and heard Spohr’s Jessonda. (41–42)

Her words reveal the ambiguity of her experience – while she more or less exalts in the Jewish part of the city, she is quite critical of its Christian architecture (of St Vitus’ Cathedral and the theatre she uses such terms as ‘hideous’ and ‘shabbily ugly’), and she prefers the vistas from the summit of Hradčany (Radschin) to the architecture itself. The only exception to this is the Charles Bridge (called the bridge of St. Jean Nepomuck in her entry), which apparently fascinated her with its mystic aspect, just as the synagogue had done earlier that day. The second time she visited Prague was in 1870, and this visit was very similarly organized. Evans and Lewes travelled from Berlin to Vienna and their stay lasted two days, during which they visited ‘old places’. This time it is more difficult to locate the dates exactly, but some hints in Evans’s correspondence and diary suggest that the days were Wednesday and Thursday, 7 and 8 April. Like the first one, the second visit also focused most on what today is notably absent from the city – the Jewish ghetto, with all its squalor, magic and mysticism. It is clear that for both Evans and Lewes, Prague was synonymous with such mysticism, rather than being perceived as the capital of rapidly developing Czech national identity and culture. Apparently they made no attempt to contact Czech intellectuals, nor did they have much awareness of the character of Prague cultural and intellectual life. Lewes’s letter to John Chapman of 23 July 1858, in which he calls Prague ‘the most splendid city in Germany’, shows that he was hardly able to distinguish between Germany and the Habsburg monarchy, let alone between the latter and the historical Kingdom of Bohemia. Eliot makes Prague a locus of magic, in much the same way as the Italian professor Angelo Maria Ripellino does in his Magic Prague (Praga magica, 1973). This book demonstrates the same transformation, as for example in his description of the Old-New Synagogue, where he concentrates on how this focal point of Jewish identity resonated in the works and experience of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers:

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306   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Unlike the hats, the serrated triangle of the Old-New Synagogue spire did not roll; its grim, blackened, oblong quadrilateral, a storehouse of angelology, has stood firm since the late thirteenth century. The hero of the novel Gotická duše (A Gothic Soul, 1905) by Jiří Karásek takes a stroll one night along the dirty lanes of the Ghetto and happens to enter the synagogue, ‘dead as if buried under the mould of graves, a wan beam of light falling from the narrow Gothic windows like a weak glimmer of the present […] Through the oil lamps’ suffocating stench came the voice of the cantor singing in the almemar, his drawling voice like a lament for the dead past and a people living in vain. The congregation, heads bowed, dully bewailed the destruction of Jerusalem […] It was so desperate and mournful he had to leave to keep from choking in sadness […]’ Another visitor, Hans Christian Andersen, notes more prosaically in 1866, ‘The ceiling, the windows and the walls were filthy with smoke, and the smell of onions was so foul I had to go back to the open air.’ Today the synagogue bears the lifeless patina of a museum, but as late as the nineteenth century, buried between the crush of the surrounding hovels, it aroused fear with its ogee architecture, the mournful light filtering through its small windows, the Gothic grating enclosing its almemar, the dusty attic in which the remains of the Golem were said – yes, even then! – to lie, the grimy walls covered with stains shaped like morays or lampreys and spattered with the blood of Jews slaughtered as far back as the massacre of 1389, commemorated in the famous lament of Rabbi Avigdor Karo. (112–13)

Professor Ripellino, despite his compendious knowledge of the city, apparently did not know about Eliot’s visits, otherwise he would no doubt have observed that her alloyed rapture fits neatly between Karásek’s irresistible fascination of 1905 and Andersen’s matter-of-fact repulsion of 1866. The 1858 tour must have lodged itself firmly in Eliot’s mind as, during the following spring, she interrupted her work on MF to write LV, which was published in Blackwood’s Magazine in the same year. This tale is unlike anything she had written or was to write; its hero, events and ambience seem inspired by the fantastic tales of Edgar Allan Poe, with some scenes harking back to the earlier Gothic tradition, while the hero-narrator Latimer anticipates the enfeebled and effeminate neurasthenics of late nineteenth-century decadent literature. Prague appears twice in the story: immediately after Latimer’s father mentions his intention to take his son on a journey, the convalescent boy experiences a vision of the city which is so vivid that he fails to explain its nature; and then, at the end of Part One, Latimer, already in the real city of Prague, visits the Jewish synagogue and the Charles Bridge just in order to ascertain whether his vision was truthful, in which case his other visions might also correspond to his future life. The passage that takes place in the synagogue most obviously depends on Eliot’s diary entries, though the atmosphere she evokes now is more sober and somewhat bleak. The climax, however, comes when Latimer arrives upon the Charles Bridge and is confronted with the dizzying fact of a symbol already encountered in his vision: I had no sooner passed from under the archway of the grand old gate leading on to the bridge, than a trembling seized me, and I turned cold under the midday sun; yet went on; I was in search of something – a small detail which I remembered with

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‘An Unspeakable Journey’: Czech and Slovak Reception of George Eliot   307 special intensity as part of my vision. There it was – the patch of rainbow light on the pavement transmitted through a lamp in the shape of a star. (102)

There is no such lamp to be found on the bridge today; nonetheless, as Ian Milner points out in his article ‘George Eliot’s Prague Story’, there was just such a star-shaped lamp in front of the statue of John Nepomucene in the nineteenth century (as confirmed by Jaroslav Pešina, Professor of Art History at Charles University). Milner’s interesting article will be paid some attention later, since he provides an insightful interpretation of the actual experience of Eliot in Prague, and her artistic intention in LV. It is possible, however, that the Prague scenes in the tale were not inspired by Eliot’s visit alone, but also by her familiarity with Consuelo, a novel by George Sand published in French serially in 1842–43. Eliot was an avid reader of Sand, and, as Linda M. Lewis asserts, ‘Eliot not only admires her predecessor’s truthfulness, power, humor, moral instincts, and passion, but she also admires Sand’s strong, larger-than-life women, such as Lélia and Consuelo. For Eliot’s other great debt to Sand […] is her monumental female characters’ (Lewis 2003, 142). Consuelo, an Italian singer, is one of them. Towards the end of the novel, while taking a night journey through Prague, her coach makes a stop in the middle of the Charles Bridge, just in front of the statue of St John Nepomucene. The heroine, reminded of the saint’s tragic fate, and of the accompanying legend, becomes fascinated by ‘one of the most poetic places in the world’, as well as by the fact that the Prague poor come by day and night to adore the saint’s statue. Moreover, the mystic character of the place is strongly suggested by the symbolical five stars inserted in the balustrade. It is perfectly possible that this short passage from Sand’s novel mingled with Eliot’s own experience to create the atmosphere of Prague in LV. Eliot’s second visit, in April 1870, revived her memories of the city to such an extent that she endowed Mirah Lapidoth with an exceptional clarity of vision which enabled her to flee from her tyrannous father soon after they came to the city during their journeys around the continent. In her later account, Mirah presents the event to her new friends, the Meyricks, in the following manner: It was dark when we reached Prague, and though the strange bunches of lamps were lit it was difficult to distinguish faces as we drove along the street. My father chose to sit outside – he was always smoking now – and I watched everything in spite of the darkness. I do believe I could see better then than ever I did before: the strange clearness within seemed to have got outside me. It was not my habit to notice faces and figures much in the street; but this night I saw every one; and when we passed before a great hotel I caught sight only of a back that was passing in – the light of the great bunch of lamps a good way off fell on it. I knew it – before the face was turned, as it fell into shadow, I knew who it was. Help came to me. I feel sure help came to me. (DD, 168)

In this passage Prague is described in a similar mode as in LV, with its strangely illuminated streets and people passing like shadows. It is again rendered as a semi-hallucinatory scene, a liminal space between the world of the living and the dead, the magical nature of which, in this case, helps Mirah to achieve

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308   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe freedom from tyranny. Once again Eliot transforms Prague into a specific psychological projection, a mental image of urban space where the present merges into the past in a seamless ribbon; Mirah, too, encounters Praga magica. In the mid-1860s another Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope, visited Prague. His experience resulted in a short novel, Nina Balatka (1867), which is a story of the star-crossed love between the eponymous heroine, the beautiful daughter of a bankrupt merchant, now fully dependent on his rich relatives, and a son of his former Jewish partner, Anton Trendellsohn. Trollope claims in his Autobiography that in spite of the fact that the novel was written very quickly, ‘Prague is Prague’ (205), meaning that his picture is realistic. However, it seems obvious that even his conception of the city has some features of an enchanted or magic place. This is especially true of his description of the part of the city in which Nina and her father live – Kleinseite, or the Lesser Town, with its old houses surmounted by the massive, looming edifices of Prague Castle towering high above them, and the Charles Bridge with its statues of the saints (and in particular that of St John Nepomucene, whom Nina takes for her patron saint). The crossing of this bridge is a kind of ritual by which the lovers oppose the narrow-mindedness and prejudice that oppress them. Whether Trollope reflected, in this way, merely his own experience of the place, or whether he also took some inspiration from Eliot’s LV, is a matter of speculation. What we know for certain is that Prague as a magic locus was an outcome of late Romantic sensibility, still very resonant in the time of the two Victorian writers’ visits. Some legends connected with the Prague Jewish Ghetto, such as the popular one about the Golem, appeared for the first time towards the middle of the nineteenth century in the writings of Klutschak, Tendlau or Weisel, and especially in the collection of Jewish legends and anecdotes Sippurim, published in German by Wolf Pascheles in 1847–64 (see Ripellino 1995, 134). This certainly contributed to the popular imagination of Prague as steeped in myth, legend and magic. Eliot’s second visit to Prague, regrettably, passed as unnoticed as the first. It was as late as 1879 that Czechs came to hear about her. In ‘George Eliotová’, the leading article of the January issue of Ženské listy (Women’s magazine), Dora Hanušová introduces Eliot as a novelist little known to Czech readers since ‘very few of her excellent novels have been translated into Slavonic languages and none into our mother tongue’.3 In an extended description of Eliot’s work, Hanušová, herself an active organizer of women’s life and education, commends her for her sweeping erudition which enables her to achieve psychological penetration, and also for her unswerving masculine judgement. She quotes from German critiques to show how her concern with the detailed analysis of moral questions is appreciated on the continent, and uses Eliot’s own confessional writings to prove that she is a master of realism, observing acutely even the most sordid aspects of human life. Compiled from scanty, not wholly reliable, sources (because ‘George Eliot is very modest and 3

‘z výtečných románů jejích poměrně málo přeloženo do řečí slovanských a zejména – žádný do naší mateřštiny’ (Dora Hanušová, ‘George Eliotová’, Ženské listy, Prague, 7.1 (1879): 1).

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‘An Unspeakable Journey’: Czech and Slovak Reception of George Eliot   309 reserved in character and refrains from sharing the events of her life or her literary plans even with her best friends’),4 Hanušová’s article lacks complexity and is inaccurate in some data. Characteristically, it claims that Lewes was Eliot’s husband, and does not record his recent death. There are some slips in English orthography (Middlemarche). On the other hand, it attempts to show, in particular to women readers, how Eliot exceeds other, more popular, contemporary writers. One section of this eight-page article is then devoted to LV; here Hanušová expresses her genuine regret that Eliot’s image of Prague is so unfavourable and quotes her descriptions of ‘the dusty, weary, time-eaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their regal gold-inwoven tatters’, forgetting that the author’s intentions were not to portray Prague in realistic colours, but to represent Latimer’s hallucinatory state of mind. Yet she concludes poignantly that it is of the utmost importance to acquaint prominent foreign guests of Prague hotels, and especially writers, with the Czech intellectual and political situation – ‘with our history and our present aspirations’.5 This is what the late Dr Čejka6 did for George Sand (who immortalized Prague in Consuelo and its sequel La Comtesse de Rudolstadt), and this, Hanušová maintains, is what the young generation should do for new visitors. To understand the full import of Hanušová’s article we must briefly examine its social context. The magazine in which it was published, Ženské listy, was the most significant and influential periodical of the Czech women’s movement of the later nineteenth century. Issued by the Ženský výrobní spolek český (Czech Women’s Production Association) and edited by the poet Eliška Krásnohorská, it served from the early 1870s as one of the most effective organs of the rapidly developing programme of women’s education in Bohemia and Moravia. The ‘Spolek’ itself, founded in Prague in 1871, was inspired by similar associations in Vienna and Great Britain – such as the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, established in London in 1859. The fact that Czech women sought inspiration for organizing their own movement in Britain and the USA, partly due to the previously founded American Ladies’ Club of Vojtěch Náprstek, meant a radical distancing of the Czech organizations from the Prague German women’s associations, which were inspired by similar clubs in Berlin and Leipzig (see Bahenská 2005, 107–08). George Eliot’s life thus, in Hanušová’s article, stands out as an exemplary achievement of woman’s

4 ‘George

Eliotová jest povahy velmi skromné i zdrženlivé, zmiňujíc se i nejlepším přátelům jen málokdy o událostech svého činného života neb o záměrech svých literárních’ (Hanušová 1879, 2). 5 ‘našich dějin i našich nynějších snah’ (Hanušová 1879, 4) 6 The novelist Karolina Světlá believed that Dr Josef Čejka (1812–1862), a respected Prague dermatologist, musical and literary critic and translator (inter alia of ten plays by Shakespeare), had guided Sand during her and Chopin’s visit to Prague in 1845. Hanušová obviously refers to what she has learned from her friend Světlá. The story, however, has been disproved, and it is not even certain that Sand ever visited Prague.

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310   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe education in a country whose social, intellectual and cultural life was found to be so inspirational; not being bound by such strict contracts which forced, for example, George Sand to produce a novel per year, Eliot was able to bring her literary work to admirable perfection. The leading figure of the Výrobní spolek and the spiritus agens of its emergence was, however, another Czech writer, the novelist Karolina Světlá (Johana Mužáková, née Rottová, 1830–1899). Světlá was one of the most significant Czech women writers of the nineteenth century, who entered literature in 1858 when she was invited to contribute to Almanach Máj (May: an almanac), an anthology of poems and short stories by the youngest generation of writers grouped around the poets Jan Neruda and Vítězslav Hálek. Her career then flourished, like Eliot’s, mostly in the 1860s and 1870s, when she was also very active in Prague social life. She was president of the ‘Spolek’ until the late 1870s (in the following years, due to her serious health problems, she held the office only nominally, while her duties were actually divided between her two deputies, her sister Sofie Podlipská and Emilie Bártová). She vehemently defended its ambitious educational programme, difficult as it was to find any sponsorship. Her idealistic enthusiasm, like that of many of Eliot’s characters, was the force that kept the women’s movement alive; she was also one of the few members of the ‘Spolek’ who were intelligent enough to be able to negotiate with the authorities and important political figures such as F. L. Rieger. More importantly, Světlá was one of the best educated women of her time, though she was mostly self-educated. She was a voracious reader of both fiction and non-fiction; her younger friend, the novelist Teréza Nováková, recalls Světlá’s favourite authors, her ‘beloved ones’, including Hugo, Sand, Dickens and ‘Georges Elliot’ (cf. Špičák 1969, 46; the misspelling indicates that Nováková herself was not acquainted with Eliot at that time, i.e. in 1890). Thus it was probably Světlá who instigated Hanušová’s writing of an essay on Eliot for Ženské listy. That Světlá did know Eliot well is reflected, I believe, in the conception of her own characters. In her novels she often presents strong women endowed with a great deal of idealism which is put to the test in critical situations. Her optimistic belief in the abilities of women who are on a par with men, if not above them, distinguishes her markedly from her predecessor, Božena Němcová (1820–1862), whose heroines, as a rule, do not tend to challenge the traditional social hierarchy. Though Světlá came from Prague, where her father had his business, her best works are set in the countryside, around the village of Světlá itself, the birthplace of her husband Petr Mužák and the explanation for her nom de plume. Světlá’s ‘Ještěd’ novels (Ještěd is an imposing hill that dominates the North Bohemian region) excel in combining realistic representation of the local character with discussions of acute moral questions; Vesnický román (A rural novel) (1867), Kříž u potoka (A cross by the brook) (1868) and Frantina (1870) are in fact based on the same principles as the first three novels of George Eliot. Both writers, significantly, reveal the immense potential which they find in common rural people. Eliot discovers that human nature is loveable, imbued with deep pathos and sublime mysteries, a revelation achieved ‘by living a great deal among people more or less commonplace and vulgar, of whom you

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‘An Unspeakable Journey’: Czech and Slovak Reception of George Eliot   311 would perhaps hear nothing very surprising if you were to inquire about them in the neighbourhoods where they dwelt’ (AB quoted in Milner 1968, 6). In the preface to her last Ještěd novel, Nemodlenec (The atheist) (1873), Světlá also stresses the authenticity of her experience with common people, and the necessity to uncover what is not apparent at first glance: Who wants to know, understand and appreciate the people must not be intimidated by their coarse, callous hands, their sunburnt faces and bare feet or their lack of polished diction. You must sit by their hearth and look for the very kernel from which sprouts their family life, in which our national life is rooted. This is not handed to you; who wants to find it must reach deep and sometimes strain hard before the tough shell gives way.7

While in the first two above-mentioned novels women sacrifice their lives for the happiness and prosperity of others, thereby fulfilling what they see as their noble goals, Frantina presents the most complex portrayal of a female character. The titular protagonist, a child of nature, proves to be much stronger than her invalid older husband. With her innate intuition, she is able to save his farm from bankruptcy and later, as village mayor, to organize the life of the community with success. Not only this, but she also manages to stand up for her people in their conflicts with local squires and a destructive band of highwaymen, even at the cost of her private happiness and, finally, her life. Becoming a monumental, legendary figure, like Wordsworth’s Michael, she is however able to recognize that she, too, is subject to illusions, and eventually resolves to kill her criminal lover. The most critical moment of the story reflects the heroine’s psychological dilemma, something clearly inspired by such writers as Eliot. In one respect, however, they differ. Frantina’s intuitive common sense tells her that religion, so deeply rooted in common people’s life, is merely a tool of manipulation rather than a truthful interpretation of reality, and she confides this shocking view to the novel’s narrator, her best friend Bartolom. In this regard, Frantina and Nemodlenec represent the most radical critique of Christianity of all of Světlá’s works. Eliot might have suggested ways in which traditional Christianity was challenged by modern philosophy, but Světlá is more uncompromising: like Thomas Hardy, she sees Christianity predominantly in terms of institutionalized mechanisms of power and oppression, with the specific context of the political struggle for national sovereignty and greater social and political liberties under the Habsburg monarchy. 7

‘Kdož chce lid poznat, pochopit a ocenit, nesmí se toho zaleknout, že má ruce hrubé, plné mozolů, že je vedrem opálen, že chodí bos, že v jeho výrazech není hladkosti. Musí přisednouti k jeho krbu a hledati v něm to jádro, z něhož vyrůstá jeho život rodinný, kořen to života našeho národního. Nepodává je člověku na dlani; kdo je chce najíti, musí hodně hluboko sáhnouti a s ním někdy dost pracně zápoliti, než je ze sebe vyloupnouti dá’ (Quoted in Miloš Pohorský, ‘Karolina Světlá’, in Miloš Pohorský (ed.), Dějiny české literatury (Prague: Nakladatelství Československé akademie věd, 1961), p. 128).

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312   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Recent sources such as the Lexikon české literatury (The lexicon of Czech literature) (2008) acknowledge Eliot’s influence on Světlá’s thought. But Světlá also set an example for the succeeding generations of Czech women writers and in this way, if not directly, Eliot is present in the works of Teréza Nováková (1853–1912), Božena Benešová (1873–1936), Anna Maria Tilschová8 (1873–1957), Růžena Svobodová (1868–1920, notably in her earlier novels) and others. This fact of a continuing tradition is perhaps more important than the actual history of Eliot criticism and published Czech and Slovak translations of her works. Nevertheless, such a history does exist. Curiously enough, Hanušová’s pioneering attempt to introduce Eliot was not followed by any more substantial criticism for many decades. Readers of Eliot in the nineteenth century had to wait a further 15 years for more reliable information, in the form of an entry in the eighth volume of Ottův slovník naučný (Otto’s encyclopaedia of general knowledge) (1894) where, besides a detailed outline of her life and career, a brief concluding passage characterized her work as realistic, marked by a keen sense of observation and the tendency to present morals, manners, ideas and emotions as she herself had known and experienced them. Compared to the one and a half columns of the Eliot entry, Lewes receives about one half of this space in the 15th volume (1900), with Eliot erroneously described as his wife. Neither their visits to Prague nor LV are mentioned in Otto’s encyclopaedia nor indeed in the following Masarykův slovník naučný (The Masaryk encyclopaedia) (1926) or Komenského slovník naučný (The Comenius encyclopaedia) (1937), where their entries are shorter. Václav Emanuel Mourek, professor of German and English literatures at Charles University in Prague, probably the author of the entry in Otto’s encyclopaedia, mentions George Eliot’s name passingly in two of his books. In Historický rozvoj anglické novellistiky (Historical development of the English novel) (1888) he places her, with Anthony Trollope, among the writers whose names sound too strange to stick in the mind, and characterizes their works as realistic; in Přehled dějin literatury anglické (An outline of the history of English literature) (1890) he praises Eliot as an extraordinarily educated, professional writer. A few years later, in one chapter of his book Knihy a lidé (Books and people) (1898), Jan Váňa provides a different view to that of Mourek – for him, Eliot was close to Naturalism, since she used a purely analytical method in her work, thus reflecting the scientific concerns of the period: ‘The hero is not formed in a flash of constructive genius as in the great times of Shakespeare, but is put together piece by piece, with individual strokes and

8

In his monograph A. M. Tilschová (1959), Karel Krejčí argues that at the outset of her career Tilschová signed her contributions to Besedy Času as Anna Maria, to suggest that she was resolved to play the same role in this magazine that Mary Ann Evans had played in the Westminster Review. Eliot’s realism, together with that of Zola, Maupassant, Chekhov and Gorky, inspired Tilschová’s own method in representing the downfall of rich bourgeois families, which is the principal theme of her novels and short stories. See Karel Krejčí, Anna Maria Tilschová (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1959), pp. 5–6, 17–18.

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‘An Unspeakable Journey’: Czech and Slovak Reception of George Eliot   313 characterizations amongst an entire mass of reflections, just as it behoves the critical, analytical, transitional time.’9 This context of Naturalism had been suggested in the previous decade by the young critic Hubert Gordon Schauer. In his review of Emile Montégut’s Écrivans modernes d’Angleterre (Atheneum, 1886), Schauer makes use of the best essay in the book to present a brief portrait of George Eliot, and then continues to mention Eliot favourably in another ten critical texts of his, published in different magazines until his premature death in 1892. He understands Eliot as a Naturalist writer, who, however, differs from the purely objective, detached observations of the school of Zola by her genuine interest in the human mind and soul, and in what makes someone truly human. In this classification, however, Schauer and Váňa seem to be exceptional among Czech scholars and critics. The end of the nineteenth century also saw the first Czech translations of Eliot. The first one was MF, translated as Červený mlýn (The red mill) (1892). Interestingly, the translator commissioned for the work, Václav Patejdl, was the son of a miller and author of two collections of short stories populated by picturesque mill workers. How much this helped him to capture the atmosphere of Eliot’s novel is hard to tell, since there are no equivalent scenes there. This edition, as well as the other four editions of Eliot’s fiction published before World War II (SM, 1894; AB, 1903–04; R, 1914–15; MG, 1931), included no critical commentary, and such commentaries appeared only in some post-war editions. In his essay ‘George Eliotová, zpodobitelka anglického venkova’ (George Eliot, a portrayer of the English countryside) accompanying the 1955 edition of SM, Jaroslav Hornát emphasizes the fact that Eliot filled in an obvious thematic gap in the English realist novel – the depiction of the life of rural communities. She did so not from the condescending position of a philanthropist but as a fellow country person, and in her mental identification with villagers she was able to discover such features in them as qualified them to reflect her humanist vision. In SM, as in AB before, the moral integrity of the hero is closely connected with his social status, since upper-class conventions prevent both antagonists, Arthur Donnithorne and Godfrey Cass, from manifesting their humanity in full. Jiří Janda, in his afterword to a new translation of SM (1989), argues similarly; for him, too, Eliot excels as a writer capable of analysing the virtues of common people, in whom she seeks out the moral basis of her world. Moreover, Janda appreciates her mastery of characterization, in particular of negative or ethically dubious characters such as the Casses or Nancy Lammeter. His extended essay also gives more biographic data, which would have been especially valuable in those times when this information was not easily available. 9

‘Hrdina nyní nekreslí se bleskem konstruktivního genia, jako za velké tvůrčí doby Shakespearovy, ale staví se kus po kuse, jednotlivými tahy a charakteristikami uprostřed celé masy reflexí dle způsobu kritické, analytické, přechodné doby’ (Jan Váňa, Knihy a lidé (Prague: J. R. Vilímek, 1898), p. 42).

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314   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Zuzana Šťastná, for her 2006 translation of M, includes an afterword in which she gives biographic details using more recent sources. She also analyses the formation of Eliot’s artistic world – especially the influence of her three ‘masters’: Feuerbach, Spinoza and Goethe. Feuerbach not only reoriented her understanding of Christianity from abstract transcendental mysteries to the secrets of human nature, as when he argued God to be a projection of human desires and aspirations, but also led her to acknowledge the significance of the relationship between the individual and mankind, of human experience with the world. Spinoza accentuated the role of emotion in action, and most of all the key position of emotional imagination, man’s ability to feel with his fellow creatures – the idea that helped Eliot to define her concept of ideal humanity. Finally (Šťastná argues), Goethe inspired her as an artist through his ability to connect the world of ideas and the material world in the most natural way, without schematizing diagrams. In her analysis of M, Šťastná foregrounds Eliot’s mastery of composition, whose principle, according to her, consists in the effective pairing of characters, thus highlighting basic moral quandaries. There are three Slovak translations of George Eliot’s novels, all of them comparatively recent: an adapted version of SM, Vráť sa, Eppie (1969, the title means ‘come back, Eppie’), Mlyn na rieke (1976, MF), and Middlemarch (1981). To these we may add a Hungarian translation of AB published by Madách in Bratislava in 1978. This paucity of translations may be due to the fact that either the Slovaks read Eliot in Czech translation, or they were even tardier in discovering her than the Czechs. The most traditional and prestigious Slovak literary journal, Slovenské pohľady (Slovak views) (issued consistently since 1881), for instance, did not make a single mention of Eliot during the first half-century of its existence, a fact that is reflective of the prevailing silence characterizing the reception of Eliot in Slovakia. Almost the only exception to this lack of Eliot criticism is the afterword to M written by Verona Chorváthová, whose essay ‘Príklad anglického kritického realismu’ (An example of English critical realism) offers a thorough treatment of Eliot and her time. It opens with an outline of the political and economic situation in the 1820s, the period preceding the first Reform Act, which is the defining political moment of M. Delineating the historical background of Eliot’s masterpiece, Chorváthová considers Eliot’s aesthetic concerns, specifically the innovative features she brought to the English novel. Of note is the replacement of the carefree, blithe tone struck by her predecessors, with a tragic world-view which requires the characters to function in a different way. In Eliot’s novels, Chorváthová asserts, the character is no longer a mere vehicle of the story, but the opposite: the story is subjected to the narrator’s revelation of character. Determined by their social context, the characters as individuals struggle to resolve their moral dilemmas, a struggle in which they often fail. The latter part of the essay, and its critical forte, focuses on the process by which Eliot modelled her characters in M. Chorváthová succeeds in identifying crucial moments in the novel which elucidate the true roles of both major and minor figures, and her account is a fine example of close textual analysis. Of all the afterwords to Eliot’s novels mentioned in this chapter, hers is the most sophisticated and compelling.

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‘An Unspeakable Journey’: Czech and Slovak Reception of George Eliot   315 M also has the central position in the nine-page chapter on Eliot in Zdeněk Stříbrný’s two-volume Dějiny anglické literatury (History of English literature) (1987), and it is the only one of her novels to be included in the two-volume Slovník světových literárních děl (Encyclopaedia of the greatest works of world literature) (1988), which consists of commentary on the highlights of world literature. This fact is the more striking given that M was one of the few titles included that had not, by the 1980s, been translated into Czech. In his entry, Martin Procházka points out the unifying principles of the novel’s polyphonic form, which he sees in the attempts of the ironic narrator to seek the truth by recording the ambiguities of the phenomena in the characters’ consciousness and behaviour when confronted with the ever-changing system of beliefs and attitudes characteristic of the provincial setting. He also highlights the importance of the development of the emotional aspirations of the novel’s heroes, who tend to form vague, exciting ideas about themselves and their future. This results in two conceptions of being: on the one hand, a spherically structured conceptualization of the objective reality of historical processes and of the relations between the heroes, and on the other, of a psychological picture of the inner world of the characters, whose visions constantly clash with the intervening concrete conditions of their lives. M thus presents ‘a compromise between a positivist, analytical approach to reality and an idealising representation of the traditional structure of social consciousness’.10 All the foregoing texts constituted separate attempts to introduce to a Czech or Slovak readership an English writer whose position was not established as canonical. By contrast, academia produced one scholar’s lifelong devotion to Eliot – The Structure of Values in George Eliot (1968), and a number of collateral texts, by Ian Milner. Though not a Czech, Milner spent the second half of his life in Communist Czechoslovakia and published most of his scholarly works there. He also translated Czech poetry, and it is no little merit of his that through his agency such poets as Miroslav Holub became famous abroad. Born in New Zealand, Milner came to Czechoslovakia in 1950, after a few years spent in Australia where he fell under suspicion of espionage for the KGB. ‘The Milner case’ became a hot topic a few years after his death in 1991, when there were attempts to investigate whether or not he had continued to be an active agent of the Czechoslovak secret police or for the KGB. Books such as James McNeish’s Dance of the Peacocks (2003) attempted to discuss this at length. The question, however, has never been satisfactorily resolved since many of the relevant secret police documents were destroyed soon after the revolution of 1989, and there seems to be no direct evidence of Milner’s involvement or non-involvement. From the early 1950s to the late 1970s, Milner worked as a lecturer in English literature in the Department of English, Charles University, Prague. His first studies of Eliot appeared in the mid-1950s, and his sustained academic 10

‘[kompromis] mezi pozitivisticky důkladným, laboratorně analytickým přístupem ke skutečnosti a mezi idealizujícím zobrazením tradiční struktury společenského vědomí’ (Vladimír Macura (ed.), Slovník světových literárních děl, 2 vols. (Prague: Odeon, 1988), I, p. 242).

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316   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe research culminated in 1964 when he submitted his ‘habilitation’ thesis titled ‘The Heroic Pattern in George Eliot’, defended it successfully, and was appointed a Docent (a degree equivalent to Associate Professor). A revised form of this thesis came out in book form four years later under a new title. Besides this he continued publishing articles on Eliot in the 1960s and 1970s and undoubtedly became the best qualified Eliot expert in Czechoslovakia. The Structure of Values in George Eliot is a Marxist study of Eliot’s novels. Milner defines a primary constituent of the author’s moral vision as ‘“fellowship:” a recurring emotive word in the novels and the essays. By it is meant the mutual sympathy and solidarity of men and women joined in seeking the material and spiritual welfare of society as a whole’ (1968, 6). Yet this fellowship is not mere sentimental goodwill, Milner argues; it has meaning for Eliot only when applied in a concrete social context and as an emotional response to the controversies of socially stratified communities, which Eliot calls ‘partisanship’. Milner is at pains to nail this concept firmly, and he elaborates its implications thus: ‘There is no true fellowship, in her terms, without an active and principled taking sides in some cause related to increasing the sum of human welfare. In particular, a partisanship that struggles against the forces of selfishness, philistinism and exclusive social privilege’ (6). At the same time, however, it is evident that Eliot is aware of the opposite – of the emptiness of life without the invigorating and humanizing quality of fellowship, and in her novels she dramatizes the experience of alienation. These two key terms, fellowship and alienation, allow Milner to see Eliot’s concern with moral values as predominantly an instrument of social critique. Her goal as an artist is therefore to show ‘the moral consequences of a way of life which, like the alienation of labour, denies truly human values, which substitutes the cash-nexus or class privilege or conformity for truly human relationships’ (7). This conception enables Milner to analyse the characters’ moral attitudes and actions from the point of view of their class identity, and to examine to what extent morality and social status are interdependent. Besides bringing invaluable observations, Milner’s method belies its obvious limitations. However, although Milner seeks to avoid simplifications, he is not always able to guard himself against contradiction. For example, in his comments on AB he argues that ‘Mrs Poyser, though in fact a tenant farmer and employing agricultural labourers, speaks here for the whole rural working population’ (20) – while Adam, the incarnation of communal wisdom, is finally awarded ownership of a timber yard, becoming thereby a small capitalist who will from now on look at the world of labour from the stance of the employer, alienated from his own element. The limiting bias of Milner’s book was one result of the demands for precisely this kind of analysis under the Communist regime. More recent research applies more diverse interpretative strategies, and in this respect it is worth mentioning an as yet unpublished dissertation thesis by Ivan Lacko, a Slovak literary historian at Bratislava University, entitled ‘George Eliot’s Feminist Paradox: Antithetical Feminism in the Writing of George Eliot’ (2004), which opens a new field of research in the Czech and Slovak context.

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‘An Unspeakable Journey’: Czech and Slovak Reception of George Eliot   317 One of Milner’s last writings on Eliot was his aforementioned article dealing with LV (1973). Here Milner does not seem to be bound by a prescriptive Marxist methodology or even terminology, and his reading is detailed and sensitive. He demonstrates a keen attentiveness to literary texts, especially in the passages where he attempts to refute some critics’ suggestions that the story is no more than a ‘Romantic’ indulgence, or a pastiche of Poe. With his intimate knowledge of Eliot’s novels, he sees some motifs in the story which anticipate compelling images of Eliot’s later work. Latimer’s vision of Prague is interpreted not in terms of Marxist alienation but, both more attractively and accurately, as more generally symbolic, in a way that recalls Eliot’s namesake T. S. Eliot: Latimer’s strange vision is expressed in images resembling some used in T. S. Eliot’s poetry, particularly those of aridity and of a mechanical death-in-life. With single intensity it presents in cinematic clarity the bleak prospect of a dehumanized existence, a meaningless treadmill of experience. The ‘grand old city’ and ‘the wonderful bridge with its avenue of statues’ of the Journal have been viewed in quite another light so that they form, in George Eliot’s phrase, ‘a dark image on the retina.’ (76)

While in the late 1870s Dora Hanušová worried about misconceptions which foreign visitors to Prague might form, and recommended the greatest souls among the Czechs to take care of them and acquaint them with the brighter aspects of the nation’s material and spiritual being, one century later it fell to a Prague-based New Zealander to convince his readers (in the coda of his George Eliot criticism) that this might be possible with tourists but hardly, if ever, with imaginative artists. To which the novelist herself might respond, in the words of her last book: ‘No retrospect will take us to the true beginning’.

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17

The Reception of George Eliot in Poland Ilona Dobosiewicz

It is difficult if not impossible to begin a discussion of the reception of George Eliot’s works in Poland without giving some socio-political context. During Eliot’s lifetime Poland as a state did not formally exist; the country lost its independence when it was partitioned between its neighbours Russia, Austria and Prussia in three stages in 1772, 1793 and 1795, and regained its statehood only after World War I under the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. The policies of the Prussian and Russian governments, in particular, were aimed at eradicating a sense of national identity, and literary activity was inevitably affected by the political situation. Polish writers felt that it was their obligation to help maintain national identity by creating works that would strengthen a sense of belonging to a common Polish culture, despite the artificially imposed partition borders. Literature was perceived as a crucial factor in preserving Polish national identity. Eliot’s early reception was delayed by political tensions resulting in the January Uprising of 1863. The revolt was crushed by the Russians, and in the harsh reprisals which followed, thousands of Poles were exiled to Siberia and hundreds were executed. Eliot certainly had some awareness of the situation in Poland, for Lewes’s son Thornton, having failed his final Civil Service exam in the summer of 1863, had a ‘fixed idea of going to fight for the Poles against the hated Russians’ (Haight 1954–78, 4: 117). Yet she did not seem to have any special personal feelings for the Polish cause other than her worries regarding Thornie. In a letter to François D’Albert-Durade, she writes that they ‘felt that it would be a sin to allow a boy of nineteen to incur the demoralisation of joining [the] coarse men engaged in a guerrilla warfare, to say nothing of Thornie’s utter unfitness for military subordination and other inevitable hardships’ (Haight 1954–78, 4: 117). Eliot never directly voiced any support for nationalist causes, and her use of phrase ‘the hated Russians’ appears to be a reflection of public opinion with which she did not necessarily agree. Polish literature of the period was preoccupied with patriotic themes, had to cope with censorship, and in the aftermath of the failed uprising began to spread the idea of organic work leading to economic and cultural self-improvement. In such an intellectual climate there was little interest in foreign literature, thus few translations were published. Polish publishers felt

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The Reception of George Eliot in Poland   319 duty-bound to produce books that could benefit the nation by popularizing Polish history, describing lives of eminent Poles or providing knowledge about various areas of Poland (Słodkowska 1982, 36–37). Polish reviewers viewed literature mainly through the prism of its social and moral functions, devoting most of their attention to the works of their countrymen. Developments in European – mainly French and German – literature were usually presented in survey articles published in periodicals. Rarely did they focus on British novels, and those that did tended to concern Dickens, who was popular in Poland. An exception is a piece by Stefan Nekanda-Trepka entitled ‘Powieść w Anglii i powieściopisarze dni naszych’ (‘The novel in England and the novelists of our day’) which appeared in 1887 in the magazine Życie (Life), and pays attention to Eliot. In keeping with the period, Nekanda-Trepka discusses novels by Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot with respect to their social and moral dimensions, and pays tribute to Eliot’s depth of moral thought and breadth of knowledge. Yet the article had little impact, for it did not directly inspire any Polish translations of her novels. This chapter will first consider Polish translations of Eliot (of which the first was made in 1891) and then consider Polish critical responses to Eliot in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Translations The first translation of Eliot’s works appeared in Poland in 1891–92, when a two-volume selection entitled Wybór powieści Jerzego Eliota (Selected novels of George Eliot – the name George is given in its Polish version Jerzy with a masculine inflection) was published. Volume I contained AB translated by Waleria Marrené, who also wrote the Introduction, and Volume II contained Sceny z życia duchownych (SCL) translated by Maria Obrębska. The books were part of the series called the Library of the Outstanding European Literary Works1 issued by Salomon Lewental, a well-known Warsaw bookseller and publisher. English literature was represented in the series by the abovementioned two works of Eliot, by Dickens’s David Copperfield, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, three works of Byron (Don Juan, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari) and – somewhat surprisingly – several novellas by Bret Harte. Unfortunately, both the quality of the translation and the quality of the introduction to Eliot’s works leave much to be desired. Waleria Marrené (1832–1903), a Polish novelist, feminist and translator of Ibsen and Balzac whose novels often dealt with female emancipation, probably translated AB from the French version. This was a common enough practice, since French was the foreign language spoken by the educated elite in Poland, and many works of English literature found their way into Poland through France. In her introduction, Marrené offers no in-depth analysis of Eliot’s literary output, limiting herself to the general observation that she was a representative of realism in the novel. She claims that Eliot possessed a 1

Biblioteka Najcelniejszych Utworów Literatury Europejskiej.

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320   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe ‘realistic mind’, therefore ‘could successfully describe only those things which she perceived’2 and modelled her characters on people whom she had known. Marenné considers AB to be Eliot’s masterpiece, for it is the work in which the author is most faithful to her own principles of realism; she is critical of R and DD. Having noted that Eliot was the author of numerous essays, articles and reviews, Marrené claims that ‘she could rarely fully grasp the essence of the analysed author, she lacked the ability to fully understand his work’.3 Marrené devotes much more attention to the discussion of Eliot’s family life, her relationship with Lewes and her marriage with John Walter Cross. Sometimes she mixes fact with fiction: for example, she writes that: [F]rom the first years of her life [George Eliot] was characterized by an excessive sensibility; she cried easily, she kept to herself, she was ugly and completely deprived not only of any childlike charm but also any marks of youth. Her very frail body supported a huge head with the face of an old woman.4

Marrené’s introduction did little to encourage potential readers to reach for Eliot’s novels. Yet another reason for the lack of interest in the works of the author of AB is that the publication of the Polish translation coincided with the onset of Modernism in Polish literature, thus the early realistic works by Eliot were considered outdated. Cezary Jellenta, in his 1895 Modernist manifesto ‘Cieplarnia bezducha’ (‘The hothouse of spiritlessness’), juxtaposes Eliot with the French Modernists, claiming that ‘one can create womanish works, chatty and nosy, like the ones created by Eliot, but in the time of fortitude and stoic strength one can and should create man-like works, hiding the emotional face. This is what the Goncourts, Guy de Maupassant and Zola, do.’5 Interestingly, Władysław Jabłonowski – one of the very few Polish reviewers who knew and admired Eliot’s works – claimed in his 1897 article ‘Powieść angielska’ (The English novel), published in the weekly Głos (The voice), that Eliot was one of the most eminent European novelists. As though in a polemic with Jellenta, he attempted to represent her realistic mode of writing as ‘Naturalism’, which he compared to the mode of writing used by Emile Zola. Nevertheless, Polish readers were more interested in reading the works

2

‘była w stanie opisywać to co sama dostrzegła’ (George Eliot, Wybór powieści Jerzego Eliota, 2 vols, vol. 1, trans. Waleria Marrené, incl. AB with intro. Marrené, ‘Jerzy Eliot’s Adam Bede’ (Warsaw: Salomon Lewental, 1891), p. 10). 3 ‘rzadko potrafiła przeniknąć istotę rozbieranego przez siebie autora, brakło jej zmysłu do zrozumienia go w zupełności’ (Eliot 1891, 7). 4 ‘od pierwszych lat życia odznaczała się niezmierną wrażliwością, była płaczliwa, zamknięta w sobie, brzydka, pozbawiona zupełnie nie tylko dziecięcego wdzięku, ale i wszelkich cech młodości. Na bardzo wątłym korpusie miała ogromną głowę i twarz starej kobiety’ (Eliot 1891, 5). 5 ‘Można tworzyć po babsku, gadulsko i wścibsko jak George Eliot, można jednak i należy w okresie hartu ducha i siły stoickiej tworzyć po męsku ukrywając wzruszoną twarz. Tak czynią Goncourtowie, Guy de Maupassant i Zola’ (Cezary Jellenta, ‘Cieplarnia bezducha’, in Cezary Jellenta, Wacław Nałkowski and Maria Komornicka, Forpoczty (Lwów: self-published, 1895), p. 157).

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The Reception of George Eliot in Poland   321 of the French authors, and Eliot was only briefly mentioned in survey articles and textbooks. For example, she is listed in such works of reference as Walery Gostomski’s Historia literatury powszechnej (History of literature), published in 1898, or Roman Plenkiewicz’s Historia literatury powszechnej w zarysie (An outline history of literature), published in 1906. However, the entries are limited to enumerating her works and providing brief plot synopses of her novels. The Polish reader had to wait over 30 years for the next translation of Eliot’s work. Strangely enough, it was R, one of her less popular novels, which poses many challenges for the translator because of its complex language and almost encyclopaedic accumulation of historical detail aimed at recreating life in Renaissance Florence. Yet a two-volume edition of Romola: noce florenckie was issued by the Edward Wende publishing house in Warsaw. Neither the name of the translator nor the date of publication is given, but the National Library of Poland catalogue describes it as a work that appeared no earlier than 1925 and no later than 1928, and as translated from the English language (although the source of translation is not specified). It may be assumed that the publisher added the subtitle ‘noce florenckie’ (Florentine nights) to the title in an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the 1924 film based on Eliot’s novel. The American adaptation of R, directed by Henry King and starring Lillian Gish and William Powell, was shown in Poland under the title Noce Florenckie; the translation was published as a part of Biblioteka Filmowa (Film library), and a picture of Lillian Gish appeared on the cover. The anonymous translator of R took great liberties with the original text of the novel, focusing only on the elements that move the plot forward, excising the Proem and Epilogue, all fragments of the novel referring to the history and culture of Renaissance Florence, and entire chapters (XVI, XIX, XXXV, LI, LIV, LVII, LX, LXI, LXV, LXVIII). The vocabulary and syntax are simplified and all of the Latin and Italian expressions and quotations of poetry are removed. The translation in no way reflects Eliot’s style. For example, the phrase at the beginning of Chapter II, ‘After Bratti joined the knot of talkers, the young stranger, hopeless of learning what was the cause of the general agitation, and not much caring to know what was probably of little interest to any but born Florentines, soon became tired of waiting for Bratti’s escort,’ is rendered as (the Polish equivalent of) ‘The young stranger soon got tired of waiting for Bratti.’6 The above-mentioned translations led to no increased awareness of Eliot’s literary output among Polish readers. They were never reprinted, although short excerpts from Marrené’s translation of AB were included in the 1933 anthology of literature which constituted part of the seven-volume series Wielka literatura powszechna (Great world literature) published by the Warsaw house of Trzaska, Ewert and Michalski. The publications were not reviewed in literary journals, and only very few Polish libraries possess copies of these early editions. The National Library of Poland lists the 1891–92 Polish version of 6

‘Młodemu cudzoziemcowi wkrótce sprzykrzyło się czekać na Brattiego’ (George Eliot, Romola: noce florenckie, trans. anon. (Warsaw: Edward Wende, c. 1927), p. 12).

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322   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe AB and SCL and only the second volume of the c. 1927 edition of R among its holdings – whilst both volumes of the same edition of R can be found in the catalogue of the Jagiellonian University Library. It must be borne in mind that World War II wreaked havoc on Poland, whose cultural resources suffered staggering losses, yet the scarcity of copies may also be seen as a reflection of relatively small interest in Eliot’s works. The first of Eliot’s novels to appear in Poland after World War II was Młyn nad Flossą (MF), translated by Anna Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska. It was issued in 1960, the centenary of the novel’s original publication. Once again, it is Poland’s history that is responsible for such a late translation. After the war, Poland found itself ruled by the Communist Party, and politically reduced to the status of a satellite of the USSR. The years between 1948 and 1956, known as the Stalinist era, were marked by Communist state control of all literary activities. This was effected through the nationalization of printing works and paper production, the establishment of government agencies responsible for censorship, and the activities of the Ministry of Culture, the Komitet Upowszechniania Książki (Book-disseminating Committee, established in 1948) and the Centralna Komisja Wydawnicza (Central Publishing Committee, established in 1949). Each publisher was required to submit a list of books proposed for publication to the Ministry of Culture, which assumed responsibility for the centralized annual publishing plan. Literary criticism was reduced to being an exponent of the Soviet Socialist Realist doctrine, whilst readers were encouraged to read books that met strict ideological criteria, preferably by Russian or Soviet authors. The only writers from Western Europe whose texts were published at that time were those engaged in satire and social criticism, and therefore considered progressive. It is worth noting that in 1950, at the height of the Stalinist era, Eliot’s SM was published in Poland, not in translation but in an abridged and simplified English version. Wanda Peszkowa prepared a glossary and edited the text, which was an output of the Biblioteczka Angielska (English little library) published by Książnica-Atlas in Wrocław. The series was intended as an educational resource for Polish students of English. At that time, English departments of Polish universities still admitted students; the Ministry of Higher Education suspended them in 1951. SM did not offend the sensibilities of the Communist censors, for the story can be interpreted in terms of the class struggle between the simple weaver and the morally bankrupt members of the Squire’s family; the evangelical community of Lantern Yard is portrayed in a negative light, and the piety and prayers of William Dane hide his hypocrisy, jealousy and self-interest. More liberal publishing policies began to emerge in 1956, which was the year of transition for Poland. The death of Stalin in 1953 and the death of Polish Communist leader Bolesław Bierut in 1956 led to a considerable weakening of the Stalinist position. The events of October 1956 resulted in the reformers’ faction taking power, and the period that followed is frequently called a thaw. A varied cultural life began to develop, and a growing number of translations of books by Western authors appeared. At this time of relative cultural freedom the career of Anna Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska – one of the most distinguished translators of English and American literature in Poland

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The Reception of George Eliot in Poland   323 – begins to flourish. Born in 1927, a graduate of the English Department at the University of Warsaw, Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska devoted her professional life to familiarizing Polish readers with English and American literature. In addition to the works of Eliot, she translated novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad and Walter Scott and American novels by Jack London, William Faulkner and Ray Bradbury. In 1973, PrzedpełskaTrzeciakowska received an award from the Polish chapter of the PEN Club, recognizing her accomplishments as a translator. She also wrote an acclaimed biography of the Brontë family entitled Na plebanii w Haworth: Dzieje rodziny Brontë (At Haworth Parsonage: the history of the Brontë family), which was published by Świat Książki in 1990 and 2010. Issued by Czytelnik, one of the major Polish publishers at the time, Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska’s 1960 translation of MF is a very good, and on the whole accurate, rendering of the English into Polish. It adheres closely to the original text and there are no significant omissions. Expressions that would be difficult to understand for the reader unfamiliar with English history or culture are replaced by appropriate equivalents, for example ‘a Bedlam creatur’ (Book One, Chapter II) becomes ‘pomylona’ (mad/insane, 13). The translator is particularly skilful at providing Polish equivalents for English idioms. Thus, for example, the phrase ‘he might be up to the tricks’ (Book One, Chapter II) is translated as ‘he will not let anyone blow into his kasha’ (15) – a popular Polish idiom. It must be noted, however, that in the Polish version some linguistic nuances get lost, because the characters use a more standard language than their English counterparts. For example, in Chapter II of the novel, Mr Tulliver uses such expressions as ‘eddication’, ‘scholard’ and ‘raskill’, he drops his gs and his speech is characterized by non-standard syntax and non-standard phonetic elisions (e.g. ‘ud ha’). However, in translation his speech is elevated to a standard register, with just a few colloquial phrases. Some inconsistency may be observed in the treatment of characters’ first names. Some retain their English forms, for example Lucy, Bessy and Bob. In other cases, however, Polish equivalents are used: Maggie becomes Madzia, and Tom’s childish term of endearment for his sister, Magsie, is rendered as Madzinek; Tom is referred to as Tomek – a diminutive used in reference to children, which is therefore rather awkward-sounding in the later chapters of the novel, when Tom is a young man. Polish is a highly inflected language, while English has few inflections, which makes the rendition of English surnames and toponyms problematic, for the translator has to decide whether to domesticate them by giving them Polish endings. Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska is not consistent in this respect: some surnames are inflected and appear with Polish endings, for example ‘Chodźmy do Boba Jakina’ (548) (‘Let us go to Bob Jakin’s’, Book Seven, Chapter I) – while others retain their original forms. The effect is unfortunate, especially in cases when the first name is inflected and the surname is not, for example ‘z panem Stefanem Guest’ (Book Seven, Chapter I, 569). This is all the more the case since in the next chapter the surname is inflected, as in: ‘pana Stefana Guesta’ (Book Seven, Chapter II, 575). With regard to toponyms, the translator applied the Polish inflections to such place names as have established themselves in the Polish language. Thus the phrase ‘hurry on

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324   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe to York’ is rendered as ‘popędzić do Yorku’ (Book Six, Chapter XIII, 564), while the names of lesser-known or fictional places such as Mudport, King’s Lorton, Tofton or St. Ogg’s are not inflected. In another attempt to domesticate the novel for the Polish reader accustomed to an informal use of language in familial settings, Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska makes interchanges between various members of the Tulliver family more linguistically affectionate. This is particularly visible in the translation of the forms that Mrs Tulliver uses to address her husband. She calls him Mr Tulliver, and sometimes uses the phrase ‘Dear heart!’ as an expression of surprise at what her husband says. Yet in Polish translation she addresses her spouse in a much more familiar and affectionate way: the phrase ‘Mr Tulliver’ does not appear in the text, and in some cases it is replaced by the word ‘kochanku’ (‘my darling’) – the same word that is used to translate the expression ‘Dear heart!’, turning it into an endearment rather than an exclamation. In the Polish language it would sound artificial for a wife to address a husband using the honorific Mr, especially because it would also result in a change of syntactic structures, making the other language used by Mrs Tulliver excessively formal. The conversation between Tom Tulliver and his uncle, Mr Deane (Book Six, Chapter V, 487–95), provides another interesting instance of such heightened expressions of emotion, since in the original Tom addresses his uncle as sir, whereas in the Polish version he calls Mr Dean wujek or wujaszek, which are more affectionate than wuj, a neutral equivalent of uncle. In 2004, almost half a century after her first attempt to introduce Eliot to the Polish readership, Anna Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska published her translation Miasteczko Middlemarch (The little town of Middlemarch), with mottoes translated by Barbara Kopeć-Umiastowska. The edition contains a short introduction in which Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska suggests that the novel might be particularly relevant for the Polish reader, who lives in a country attempting to build a democratic system based on the concept of civil rights. Once again, Polish socio-political context has a bearing on the reception of Eliot’s novel: after the collapse of the Communist system in 1989, the country became a parliamentary democracy, and Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska maintains that there exists a parallel between the situation in England immediately before the passing of the first Reform Act of 1832 and the situation of the newly-democratized Poland. She points out that the vicissitudes of all the characters in the novel are inseparably connected with political and social events; she therefore sketches the historical background and explains the religious context, showing that at the time the Church of England was challenged by the Evangelical movement. She also draws attention to the fact that one of the major characters in the novel – Will Ladislaw – is of Polish origin. The subtitle, A Study of Provincial Life, does not appear on the title page, because the 1994 Penguin Popular Classics edition – the source for the translation – also omits it. However, the subtitle is invoked in the introduction, with Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska pointing out that in the novel: we see the whole complex world of provincial England – townspeople, merchants, doctors, lawyers, and also farmers and even hired agricultural labourers who, due

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The Reception of George Eliot in Poland   325 to the process of enclosing common pastures which ended about 1815, could not work on their own land.7

The introduction places the novel in the context of the canon of classic English literature, and calling George Eliot the English George Sand presents her as a novelist who raised the novel to the level of philosophic discourse, highlighting Eliot’s affinity with Henry James rather than Charles Dickens. It succinctly discusses the life of Mary Ann Evans, refers to her relationship with George Henry Lewes, sketches Eliot’s successful literary career and sums up her accomplishments, claiming that her ‘erudition and intelligence together with a great power of observation and a warm sense of humour gave English literature several excellent and unforgettable works of exceptionally noble moral tone’.8 Miasteczko Middlemarch was issued by the publishing house Prószyński i S-ka as part of its Classic Novels series. The edition consists of two volumes: Volume One comprises books one to four, and Volume Two follows with books five to eight. Once again, it is a very competent and accurate translation, which conveys the stylistic subtleties of the original version, and successfully renders the shades of the frequently ironic narratorial stance. The language of the translation is slightly old fashioned, with some archaic vocabulary – for example frywolitki, an archaic expression for a hand-made lace which the translator uses to render ‘tatting’ (315), inwencyja, an obsolete form of the word inwencja (invention), or the old-fashioned subiekt for ‘haberdasher’ (319). This time, Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska, recognizing the fact that the twenty-first-century Polish reader is well acquainted with British culture and English language, does not try to domesticate the novel by using Polish equivalents of English first names – therefore all the major characters with the exception of Rosamond, who becomes Rozamunda, retain their original names. Moreover, the honorific Sir, which indicates Sir James Chettam’s social status, is used in its original form in the Polish translation. The translator provides some footnotes to help the reader understand references to people, events or phenomena that may turn out to be obscure in the Polish context.

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‘Oglądamy cały złożony świat prowincjonalnej Anglii – mieszczan, kupców, lekarzy, prawników, a także farmerów, ba, nawet najemnych robotników rolnych, których zakończony około 1815 roku proces grodzenia otwartych pastwisk, uprzednio dostępnych każdemu, pozbawił możliwości pracy na własnej ziemi’ (George Eliot, Młyn nad Flossą, trans. and intro. Anna Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska, incl. ‘Od tłumaczki’ (Warsaw: Prószyński i S-ka, 2004), p. 6). 8 ‘Erudycja i inteligencja, połączone ze znakomitym zmysłem obserwacji i ciepłym poczuciem humoru przyniosły literaturze angielskiej kilka świetnych, niezapomnianych pozycji o wyjątkowo szlachetnej tonacji moralnej’ (Eliot 2004, 9).

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326   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Critical Reception Considering the relatively late introduction of Eliot to the Polish reading public, and the fact that only a few of her works were available in translation, it is not surprising that the critical reception in the first half of the twentieth century was scant. The Polish language journal articles, which appeared in the years 1918–39, usually mention Eliot in the context of developments in the Victorian novel. For example, in 1935 Roman Dyboski published a study entitled ‘Wielcy powieściopisarze angielscy XIX wieku z perspektywy dzisiejszej’ (‘Great English novelists of the nineteenth century from a contemporary perspective’), written under the influence of David Cecil’s Early Victorian Novelists (1934). Here he acquaints the Polish reader with a contemporary re-evaluation of Eliot’s position in the canon of the Victorian novel, expresses his admiration for the serious moral scope of her novels and considers her to be one of the most modern of the nineteenth-century writers. The only article that treats Eliot in a more than passing manner is a comparative study ‘Zagadka Jermoły: Kraszewski i George Eliot’ (‘The mystery of Jermoła: Kraszewski and George Eliot’), written by Julian Krzyżanowski and published in the 1939 Homage to J.I. Kraszewski.9 Krzyżanowski (1892– 1976), a professor of Polish Literature at the University of Warsaw, spent the years 1927–30 in England, where he was a lecturer in the History of Polish Literature at the University College School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Discussing the 1856 novel Jermoła, by the prolific and popular Polish writer Józef Ignacy Kraszewski (1812–1887), he notes some significant similarities between the Polish text and Eliot’s SM, published six years later, in 1861. Somewhat jokingly, he maintains that if both works appeared today, Kraszewski ‘would most probably sue one of the greatest English prose writers for plagiarism’, whereas Eliot would ‘respond with a lawsuit for libel’.10 Krzyżanowski carefully examines the structure of both novels and their main motifs, illustrating his points with selected fragments of SM in his own translation. He admits that there exist many similarities between the two novels, and explains their existence by the fact that both Eliot and J. I. Kraszewski may have been following patterns established by numerous moral tales (contes moraux) popular in European – especially French – literature. For example, they both developed the popular theme of the foundling child changing the life of its benefactor, using the motif of secret marriage. They also explored the contrasts between the life of the upper classes and the simple, loving and ethically superior life of the peasantry. It is worth noting that although Krzyżanowski’s text was published in a volume intended as a homage to the Polish novelist, its author makes it clear that he considers Eliot to be the

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Księga ku czci J.I. Kraszewskiego. ‘wytoczyłby proces o […] plagiat jednej z największych mistrzyń prozy angielskiej […] Eliot zaś odpowiedziałaby […] oskarżeniem o zniesławienie’ (Julian Krzyżanowski, ‘Zagadka Jermoły: Kraszewski i George Eliot’, in Księga ku czci J. I. Kraszewskiego (Lutsk: Wolynskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciol Nauk, 1939), p. 142); repr. 1961 in Julian Krzyżanowski, W świecie romantycznym (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie).

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The Reception of George Eliot in Poland   327 superior writer. He calls SM a masterpiece and claims that Kraszewski’s skill in structuring his story ‘pales in comparison with Eliot’s novel; while in Jermoła only the central part is flawlessly constructed, SM combines all the novelistic elements in a perfect and very attractive whole’.11 The reception of Eliot in post-World War II Poland has been shaped by the academy, as her works have been discussed mainly by scholars based in English departments of Polish universities. Although these departments reopened after World War II, they were soon closed by the Communist Ministry of Higher Education. They were allowed to admit students gradually amid a more relaxed political atmosphere resulting from the ‘thaw’ of 1956. However, Polish researchers had to cope with censorship, restrictions on foreign travel and a severely limited access to books and other source materials. The lifting of these restrictions which followed the overthrow of the Communist system in 1989 resulted in a whole range of research projects concerning English literature. Most of the post-1989 essays have been printed in academic journals or collections published by university presses, and many were written in English. However, the first post-World War II article discussing Eliot’s work was written in Polish. It was a 1948 essay on MF by Wacław Borowy (1890–1950), an eminent Polish literary historian and critic. In 1930 he was appointed lecturer in Polish Literature at the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies, where he taught until 1935. He returned to Poland in 1936 and worked as a professor of Polish Literature at the University of Warsaw, but his scholarly interests encompassed English literature. Familiarizing the Polish reader with the position of Eliot in the canon of Victorian literature, Borowy offers an insightful analysis of the novel, valuing highly Eliot’s mastery in presenting moral conflicts and her skilful psychological characterization. The text appeared in the Proceedings of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences,12 a highly respected scholarly publication with, however, limited circulation. The article therefore did not reach a large audience. Polish surveys of British literature had a more extensive readership. They were intended primarily for the educated reader and they have been used as textbooks in English departments and those departments of Polish language and literature offering courses in comparative literature. Roman Dyboski (1883– 1945), founder and first chair of the English Department in Cracow, wrote Sto lat literatury angielskiej (A century of English literature), the first substantial monograph on the history of English literature. This is a monumental work of over 900 pages, which, due to the political situation discussed above, was finished in 1945 but not published until 1957 in post-Stalinist Poland, 12 years after the death of its author. The book consists of 13 chapters and covers the period between 1832 and 1933. Chapter Four13 focuses on the literary output

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‘blednie w porównaniu z powieścią George Eliot; gdy bowiem w Jermole tylko część centralna zbudowana jest bez zarzutu, SM wszystkie elementy powieściowe łączy w znakomitą i bardzo efektowną całość’ (Krzyżanowski 1939, 148). 12 Sprawozdania Polskiej Akademii Umiejętności. 13 The chapter is entitled ‘Wielcy powieściopisarze wiktoriańscy’ (‘The great Victorian novelists’).

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328   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Eliot, the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Trollope. In the 23 pages devoted to Eliot, Dyboski treats her life and literary output thoroughly. He begins with a presentation of her family background and her relationship with George Henry Lewes. Lewes is identified as the author of the classic life of Goethe, a man who introduced Comte’s religion of humanity to Eliot, and the man who became Eliot’s lifelong companion and a ‘faithful and devoted servant to her talent’.14 Dyboski also notes Eliot’s marriage to John Walter Cross and his publication of Eliot’s biography. The ensuing discussion of Eliot’s works proceeds chronologically, familiarizing the reader with the themes, motifs, methods of characterization and narrative strategies of all of Eliot’s major novels, and also touching upon her poetry and such lesser-known works as LV and ITS. In the context of the nineteenth-century English novel, Dyboski considers Eliot to be ‘a shining star’15 equal to Dickens and Thackeray. He acknowledges her accomplishments as a female novelist, and points out that she: paved new ways for the women’s movement not just due to her literary output [...] but due to her high scientific and philosophic culture, which she acquired at a time when higher education for women was rare, and which made her the intellectual equal of the best male minds of her epoch.16

Yet it is Eliot’s intellectualism which makes her unpopular, especially among younger readers, who view her works as old fashioned. Dyboski finds this regrettable, and expresses hope for a revival of interest in her works, drawing on David Cecil’s view that Eliot is one of the most modern novelists of her era – less insular and more European than her male British contemporaries. In addition to her broad intellectual and moral scope, Dyboski particularly appreciates Eliot’s psychological insights, her ‘gift of vivid characterization’, and her ‘(rare in women writers) sense of humour’.17 Irena Dobrzycka (1909–2007) of the University of Warsaw contributed a detailed entry on Eliot to Mały Słownik Pisarzy Angielskich i Amerykańskich (A concise dictionary of English and American writers), published in 1971. Dobrzycka provides essential information concerning the most important facts of Eliot’s life, and outlines the development of her literary career, stressing Eliot’s profound knowledge, erudition and the broad scope of her intellectual interests. She succinctly discusses all the novels, and also mentions her poetic 14 ‘pełny

oddania i poświęcenia sługa talentu swej towarzyszki życia’ (Roman Dyboski, Sto lat literatury angielskiej (Warsaw: Pax, 1957), p. 196). 15 ‘gwiazda pierwszej wielkości’ (Dyboski 1957, 193). 16 ‘torująca ruchowi kobiecemu nowe drogi, to nie tyle przez sam fakt twórczości literackiej […] ile przez tę wysoką kulturę naukową i filozoficzną, którą zdołała nabyć w warunkach niesprzyjających wtedy jeszcze wyższemu wykształceniu kobiet, i która zrównała ją intelektualnie z pierwszymi męskimi umysłami epoki’ (Dyboski 1957, 193). 17 ‘dar żywej charakterystyki […] (rzadki u kobiet piszących) zmysł humoru’ (Dyboski 1957, 194).

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The Reception of George Eliot in Poland   329 work SG, which she considers inferior to her prose works. She points out that in her fiction she developed an ethical code based on the values of renunciation, sacrifice and dedication to duty, which was rooted in her ‘profound humanism and intellectual search for the moral meaning of life’.18 Noting the influence of Comte’s positivism on her writing, Dobrzycka draws attention to her realistic, objective and insightful descriptions of everyday life, and the social forces that shape it. She praises the depth of Eliot’s psychological analysis, her powers of vivid characterization and the ways in which she renders dialogue. Przemysław Mroczkowski (1915–2002), of the Jagiellonian University, is the author of Historia Literatury Angielskiej: Zarys (A history of English literature: an outline), a popular textbook published by Ossolineum in 1981. It had subsequent editions in 1986, 1993, 1999 and 2004. The six-page-long section devoted to Eliot was earlier published as an essay, ‘George Eliot: emancypacja a tradycja’ (‘George Eliot: emancipation versus tradition’), in Mroczkowski’s Dżentelmeni i Poeci: Eseje z Literatury Angielskiej (Gentlemen and poets: essays on English literature) (1975). Mroczkowski begins with biographical information, taking into account not just Eliot’s gender but also her appearance. His treatment of the material is somewhat sexist and patronizing: ‘we have all met such girls’, he writes: [S]he is rather unprepossessing, she lacks self-confidence, and she lives in the world of books, which separate her from the [...] ‘petit bourgeois’ surroundings […] She is ‘different’ and she fights for her difference – surely, she will describe it in a diary.19

Eliot’s work is treated as inseparable from its author. Mroczkowski rather condescendingly maintains that in her fiction one can always find echoes of the reflections that the young Mary Ann Evans – compared to an ‘idealistic’ young teacher – wrote in her diary. He assumes that it was Eliot’s intention to ‘open the minds and hearts of her contemporaries […] especially as concerns the opportunities for women and their role in life’.20 His discussion of the novels is rather sketchy and follows the biographical pattern. AB is treated as a work dealing with the problem of an extraordinary woman finding a place in life – the problem that Eliot herself had to face. MF is interpreted through the prism of relations between Maggie and Tom, which supposedly reflect those of Mary Ann Evans and her brother Isaac. Mroczkowski points out that Eliot’s fiction is constructed from material that she knew well from her own early life 18

‘głębokiego humanizmu i intelektualnego poszukiwania moralnego sensu życia’ (Irena Dobrzycka, ‘Eliot George’, in Anon. (ed.), Mały słownik pisarzy angielskich i amerykańskich (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1971), p. 161). 19 ‘Podobne dziewczęta spotykamy wszyscy – jest raczej nieładna, trochę niepewna siebie i żyje […] książkami, których murem odgradza się od […] ‘małomieszczańskiego’ otoczenia […] Jest ‘inna’ i walczy o swoją inność – pewnie powierzy ją pamiętnikowi’ (Przemysław Mroczkowski, Historia literatury angielskiej (Wrocław; Warsaw; Cracow: Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolińskich, 1981), pp. 360–61). 20 ‘otworzyć umysły i serca współczesnych […] zwłaszcza jeżeli chodzi o możliwości kobiet i ich rolę w życiu’ (Mroczkowski 1981, 366).

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330   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe in a small English town, and uses SM and M as examples of the novels where such a small-town, provincial setting plays a significant role. Not surprisingly, R, which cannot be treated in such a reductive manner, is never mentioned by Mroczkowski, who also overlooks Eliot’s poetry and her critical essays, representing her in a way that diminishes the range of her interests and the scope of her writing. Historia Literatury Angielskiej (A history of English literature) by Henryk Zbierski (1925–1995), of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, was published in 1982 as part of the Dzieje Literatur Europejskich (A history of European literatures) series, and reissued as an independent volume in 2002. The two pages devoted to Eliot are in the chapter devoted to early Victorian literature, which, in addition to Eliot, discusses Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, the Brontë sisters and George Meredith. Zbierski focuses on Eliot’s literary output rather than her life, claiming her as a novelist whose depictions of provincial England are controlled by her ‘high-class intellect’,21 and whose talent allows her to create vivid dialogues and detailed dramatic scenes, whilst also maintaining an ‘epic distance and ever-present sociological insight’.22 Zbierski considers Eliot one of the greatest epic writers in English literature, draws attention to her positivism (which he compares to the notion of ‘organic work’ popular in Poland in the second half of the nineteenth century), and stresses the depth of her psychological insights. Yet he believes that both the problems that she raised in her novels, and the novelistic techniques which she applied, were ‘so closely tied with the epoch in which she lived […] that it is difficult not to consider her a great writer of the past rather than of our times’.23 At this point Eliot’s works begin to be treated by Polish scholars as an inseparable part of the canon of English literature, thanks in large part to Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska’s competent translation of MF, which was reissued by Czytelnik in 1982. Eliot’s status as a classic realist novelist was solidified in 1991, when Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolińskich (known as Ossolineum, the oldest Polish publishing house, established in 1817, and a prestigious cultural institution in its own right) included Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska’s revised translation in its canon-making series Biblioteka Narodowa (National library). This series was begun in 1919, when Poland regained its independence, and is published to this day. Launching the series, the editors maintained that in a newly liberated country there existed a pressing need to acquaint the Polish reader with the most distinguished masterpieces of Polish and world literature. Each volume included in the series has been carefully edited, with extensive explanatory and background information provided in the form of scholarly

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‘wysokiej klasy intelekt’ (Henryk Zbierski, Historia literatury angielskiej (Warsaw: PWN, 1982), p. 180; repr. Poznań: Oficyna Wydawnicza Atena, 2002). 22 ‘epicki dystans i nigdy nie opuszczającą jej socjologiczną wnikliwość’ (Zbierski 1982, 180). 23 ‘Zarówno problematyka jak i metody pisarskie George Eliot były tak silnie związane z epoką, w której żyła, że […] trudno nie uznawać jej za wybitną pisarkę minionej epoki niż naszych czasów’ (Zbierski 1982, 181).

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The Reception of George Eliot in Poland   331 introductions and footnotes. The paratextual material in the Ossolineum edition of MF, prepared by Alina Szala (1927–2009), a distinguished professor of English Literature, comprises a 100-page-long introduction and numerous footnotes. The introduction is divided into four parts. Using Haight’s biography of Eliot as her main source, Szala begins with a presentation of Eliot’s life and the course of her literary career. Part Two contains a detailed outline of her oeuvre placed in the context of the development of the Victorian novel, publishing practices of the time, the role of the circulating libraries, and debates concerning the nature of realism. Szala notes that Eliot was well acquainted with various critical voices of the time, points out that her own views on realism were shaped under the influence of Lewes’s 1858 essay ‘Realism in Art: Recent Modern Fiction’, and quotes the famous excerpt from Eliot’s letter to Blackwood in which she sums up her views on art: ‘Art must be either real and concrete, or ideal and eclectic. Both are good and true in their way, but my stories are of the former kind.’24 Religion provides another context in which Szala places Eliot’s works, especially SCL and AB. Eliot’s loss of religious faith, and her interest in the philosophy of August Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach and Baruch Spinoza, are presented as factors shaping her early works. Part Three of the introduction focuses on MF, offering the reader a thorough discussion of the novel’s major motifs and a helpful delineation of the structure of St Ogg’s society. Drawing on the work of British scholars, such as Barbara Hardy, Graham Martin, Joan Bennett and others, Szala analyzes the function of the narrator in the novel, who: reflects on the events and characters, evaluates their motivations, or touches upon psychological and social problems of a more general nature. What makes him different from other narrators in the novels of that time is the more ambitious range of problems discussed [...] The narrator does not avoid abstract problems and conclusions that come close to scientific hypotheses.25

MF is called ‘one of the more original Victorian novels’;26 however, Szala notes that the novel was criticised for a certain inconsistency, because: in the first two volumes it follows the pattern of the Victorian social novel of manners, while the third volume focuses on the inner conflicts experienced by

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‘Sztuka musi być realna i konkretna, albo idealistyczna i eklektyczna. Obie są na swój sposób dobre i prawdziwe, ale moje opowiadania należą do tej pierwszej kategorii […]’ (Alina Szala, ‘Wstęp’, in George Eliot, Młyn nad Flossą, trans. Anna Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska (Wrocław; Warsaw; Cracow: Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolińskich, 1991), p. xxix). 25 ‘Narrator, który snuje refleksje na temat wydarzeń i postaci fikcyjnych, ocenia ich motywy czy też porusza problemy psychologiczne i społeczne bardziej ogólnej natury. Od narratorów w innych powieściach tego okresu odróżnia go jedynie ambitniejszy zakres poruszanej problematyki […] Narrator nie unika tematyki abstrakcyjnej i wniosków zbliżonych do hipotez naukowych’ (Szala 1991, lxxii). 26 ‘jedna z bardziej oryginalnych powieści wiktoriańskich’ (Szala 1991, lxxviii).

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332   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe the heroine, thus turning it into a psychological novel which resembles the works continuing the Romantic tradition, best exemplified […] by the novels of the Brontë sisters.27

The introduction’s final part deals with the critical reception of Eliot’s works in England and Europe, particularly in Germany and in France, with a brief (four-page-long) section devoted to Eliot’s presence in Poland. Szala observes that there is not much to be said about the Polish reception of her works, due to the very few translations available. She notes the poor quality of the early translations by Marrené and Obrębska, and is sharply critical of Marrené’s introduction to AB. It seems that she was unaware of the c. 1927 anonymous translation of R. She points out that the revival of interest in Eliot’s novels spurred by the 1934 publication of David Cecil’s Early Victorian Novelists went unnoticed in Poland, which soon found itself in the throes of World War II, and after the war became separated from the West by the Iron Curtain. Szala considers the 1960 publication of Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska’s translation of MF a major event, because for all practical purposes it remains the only novel that is available for the Polish reader. The value of Alina Szala’s introduction lies not only in the fact that it familiarizes the Polish reader with Eliot’s writings and with her position in the English literary canon, but also in the fact that it acquaints her audience with recent developments in English and European Eliot scholarship. She draws upon this in her own text, and references it in an accompanying bibliography. The numerous and extensive footnotes explaining cultural concepts that may be unfamiliar in the Polish context, and identifying historical characters and events referred to in the text, not only provide helpful information but contribute to the presentation of MF as a canonical novel worthy of such a scholarly apparatus. In her introduction to the 2004 translation of M, Anna PrzedpełskaTrzeciakowska also represents Eliot as a canonical author, arguing that she deserves the place in Westminster Abbey which was denied to her due to her unconventional private life. The publication of M in the Classic Novels series, which also contains the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Henry James – not to mention Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann and Lev Tolstoy – has been another significant step in establishing Eliot as a major author. A majority of the research articles on Eliot appeared in Poland after 1989. Different aspects of Eliot’s writings have been approached from a variety of critical perspectives. For example, Adela Styczyńska published two essays on R – one in Polish (1993) and one in English (1994) – interpreting Eliot’s text as a psychological novel, which explores the presence of evil in human nature. Styczyńska’s

27

‘przez pierwsze dwa tomy realizuje bowiem wzorzec wiktoriańskiej powieści obyczajowo-społecznej, by w ostatnim skoncentrować się na wewnętrznych konfliktach głównej bohaterki i stać się powieścią psychologiczną, zbliżoną bardziej do pisarstwa kontynuującego tradycje romantyczne, pisarstwa, którego najlepszym przykładem były […] powieści sióstr Brontë’ (Szala 1991, lxxxii).

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The Reception of George Eliot in Poland   333 interest in R resulted in one more essay, entitled ‘R as a Historical Novel’, in which she demonstrates that Eliot, an admirer of Walter Scott, structures the plot of the novel in terms of a struggle for power. She argues that Eliot follows the pattern for the historical novel proposed by Scott, but ‘does it in an individual and modern way’ since she ‘raises the question of the relation between politics and ethics’ (Styczyńska 1997, 60). Styczyńska maintains that by presenting the power struggle in relation to a moral problem, Eliot becomes a forerunner of the political novel of the twentieth century. Anna Gutowska (2005a) juxtaposes R and Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, discussing both writers’ fictional representations of revolutions; focusing on the melodramatic elements in Gwendolen Harleth’s story, she proposes a way of reading DD as a sensational ‘bigamy novel’ (2005b), and examines the presence of sensation motifs in Eliot’s fiction (2007). Ilona Dobosiewicz discusses the realistic grounding of the revivification experiment in ‘LV’ (2003b) and examines the Gothic and oneiric aspects of Eliot’s novella (2011). She analyses the poem ‘Armgart’ as an expression of the conflict between the artistic vocation of the heroine and the conventional Victorian conception of female destiny (2004). Eliot’s portrayals of Jewish characters and her sympathetic presentation of the cause of a Jewish national homeland in DD and ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ have also been discussed (Dobosiewicz 2007). In 2008 there appeared an interesting comparative study whose author, Małgorzata Grzegorzewska, juxtaposes Eliot’s MF and the Polish 1894 novel Emancypantki (Emancipated women) by Bolesław Prus. Influenced by René Girard’s mimetic theory, Grzegorzewska focuses on notions of imitation, and examines the ways in which female protagonists of both novels, Maggie Tulliver and Madzia Brzeska, read, interpret and engage with the text of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. M also attracted the attention of scholars in Poland, although, somewhat paradoxically, it was an American researcher, David L. Smith, who investigated the question of the family roots of Will Ladislaw – the only M character of Polish ancestry – in a 1992 article published in Polish Anglo-Saxon Studies. Smith claims that Ladislaw is ‘Polish by design’. Embodying the spirit of Polish Romanticism, he serves as an antithesis to ‘the stolid Anglo-Saxon virtues of practicality, earnestness, and Puritanism’ (Smith 1992, 57). He draws attention to the fact that, due to Thornton Lewes’s desire to fight for Poland, Eliot was aware of the Polish struggle for independence which culminated in the January Uprising of 1863. She was also impressed by the Polish patriotic journalist Julian Klaczko, whom she met in Vienna in April 1870, and who may have been a model for Ladislaw. Examining the themes of marriage and money in M, Artur P. Kmiecik finds that they play a significant role in the plot and structure of the novel and reflect ‘the reality of the Victorian England’ (Kmiecik 1993, 319). Maintaining that in M Eliot shows the crucial role of science in Victorian society but at the same time reveals the limitations of a purely scientific world-view, Dobosiewicz (2012) examines references to scientific methodology, analyses metaphors deriving from physics and evolutionary biology and discusses the characters engaged in different kinds of scientific pursuits. The only Polish monograph on Eliot to appear so far, Dobosiewicz’s Ambivalent Feminism: Marriage and Women’s Social Roles in George Eliot’s

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334   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Works, was published in 2003. Inspired by feminist scholarship, she examines Eliot’s representations of marriage and women’s social roles in relation to the dominant ideology of womanhood, and Eliot’s attitude towards feminism. She begins with an analysis of Eliot’s views on the Woman Question as expressed in her essays and reviews, and proceeds to a discussion of Eliot’s heroines, who are divided into three groups: the ones who refuse to marry and thus reject orthodox femininity; those who offend marital pieties and thus misuse and exploit traditional female roles; and the idealistic heroines whose marriages become stages of their moral growth. Dobosiewicz maintains that the narrative treatment that Eliot’s heroines receive is shaped by the author’s allegiance to the view that traditional female virtues contribute to the improvement of society. Such qualities as affection and sympathy, maternal emotions, tenderness, selfabnegation and willingness to serve others become a source of the heroines’ strength. She claims that Eliot’s feminism, ambivalent as it might be, rests on her recognition of the validity of female experience and on her valorization of values traditionally associated with femininity. In December 2011, Gutowska defended the only Polish doctoral dissertation on Eliot to date, in which she examines the role of popular literary conventions in Eliot’s fiction and demonstrates that the novelist used them in order to enhance the realism of her works. ‘Heroizm codzienności’ (‘The heroism of everyday life’) may be viewed as an article that attempts to bridge the gap between academic and general audiences, and introduce Eliot to readers outside of the academy. Written by Jerzy Jarniewicz, Professor of British Literature at Łódź University, it was published in Tygodnik Powszechny (The Catholic weekly) in 2005 on the occasion of the Polish translation of M. Jarniewicz calls M the ‘masterpiece of literary realism’,28 and convincingly demonstrates that Eliot’s representation of provincial life acquires a profound moral dimension. The article also contains a short biographical note and an enumeration of Eliot’s major works. Conclusion When compared to such nineteenth-century novelists as Austen, Dickens or the Brontës, Eliot has a rather limited presence in Poland. Only two of her novels are currently available in translation, and her readers form a fairly circumscribed circle. A significant majority of articles on Eliot have been intended for a highly specialized readership of above-average interest in literature. Her position as a canonical realist novelist is recognized by the academy, and at least one of her novels (usually MF) appears in the syllabi of survey courses of the history of English literature, which form part of the core curriculum of English departments at Polish universities. M is often discussed in elective courses on realism and the English novel. It must be noted, however, that in the most recent turn in Eliot’s reception in Poland, Gutowska (2012) took up 28 ‘arcydzieło

literackiego realizmu’ (Jerzy Jarniewicz, ‘Heroizm codzienności’, Tygodnik Powszechy, Cracow, 21 (2005): 12).

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The Reception of George Eliot in Poland   335 the challenge of promoting Eliot, publishing an article entitled ‘George Eliot – a woman writer in a man’s disguise’29 in a popular women’s weekly, Wysokie Obcasy (High heels). The text focuses on the unconventional private life of the Victorian writer, whose relationships with men are presented in rather melodramatic terms. Her works do not receive much attention, although Gutowska points out that they were admired by Eliot’s contemporaries and still influence the British popular imagination through the BBC adaptations of M and DD (none of which aired on Polish television). It seems that Eliot’s oeuvre still remains relatively unknown in Poland, although her position as a canonical realist novelist is firmly acknowledged.

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Anna Gutowska, ‘George Eliot – pisarka w męskim przebraniu’, Wysokie Obcasy, Warsaw, 17 August 2012, p. 17.

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18

The Hungarian Reception of George Eliot Mihály Szegedy-Maszák

It is a curious fact that sometimes the authors of reception studies have a tendency to imply that the popularity of literary works is relatively independent of political changes. They seldom spare a word for historical circumstances. Here, however, I shall take the liberty of defying that convention. Sometimes the reception of works written in English precedes the translation of these works in countries in which English is not the most common or national language. Following the lead of Count István Széchenyi (1791–1860), who fought as a soldier in the war against Napoleon, visited Britain on a regular basis from 1815 onwards and collected books in English, numerous Hungarian aristocrats and prominent members of the upper middle class regarded England as a model for the civilized world. When Bernhard Tauchnitz (1816–95), the owner of a printing and publishing firm, started his Collection of British and American Authors in Leipzig in 1841, this reprint series made English novels available to Hungarian readers in inexpensive editions. British (and to a lesser extent North American) literature became fashionable in upper middle-class urban families that put particular emphasis on reading not only in German but also in English and French. The relatively high number of copies of Tauchnitz publications that survive in public collections (for example in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) and private libraries would suggest that the bourgeoisie of the rapidly developing capital was eager to read contemporary British fiction. The example of Géza Barkassy (1849–1922), the son of a Hungarian lawyer of noble origin and of the daughter of a wealthy German entrepreneur, may indicate that reading Eliot in the original was not limited to men of letters. Having studied law at the University of Vienna,1 he became a civil servant who by the end of the century was raised to the high rank of a ministerial adviser and one of the organizers of the world exhibition held in Budapest in 1896. As a bachelor with a high salary, he could afford to assemble an extensive library. He systematically ordered the volumes of the Tauchnitz collection. His nephews and nieces constantly used his library; this meant five to ten potential readers in the case of most of his books. 1

leveltar.elte.hu/databases.php?ekod=1 (date accessed 8 September 2015).

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The Hungarian Reception of George Eliot   337 The list of the works sent from Leipzig to Hungarian libraries and individuals is as follows: SCL (vols 462–63, 1859), AB (vols 482–83, 1859), MF (vols 509–10, 1860), SM (vol. 550, 1861), R (vols 682–83), DD (vols 1617–20, 1876), LV and JR (vol. 1732, 1878), ITS (vol. 1828, 1879), Essays and Leaves from a Note-Book (vol. 2229, 1884) and George Eliot’s Life as Related in the Letters and Journals (vols 2318–21, 1885). Copies of these volumes still exist with notes made by contemporary readers. In view of the fact that much of Géza Barkassy’s library was destroyed after World War II (when some members of his family were deported to labour camps as ‘class aliens’), it cannot be taken for granted that he read them all. Still, since all the books of his that have survived (among them several multi-volume works) contain his notes, it can be assumed that he may have read most of them. The internet records his support of Hungarian publishers,2 and the surviving part of his library reveals that he was eager to read the translations of works known to him in the original. Copies of the first Hungarian versions of AB, SM and M still exist. After the Compromise of 1867 between the Habsburg dynasty and the Hungarian political leaders, Liberalism stamped on Hungarian culture, and Darwinism made its influence felt, especially among the prominent members of the Protestant intelligentsia. Both paved the way for the early reception of the works of Eliot. The first translation of AB was done by a friend of Géza Barkassy, the Transylvanian Ferenc Salamon (1825–1892), and published in 1861–62. It was due to the high prestige of Eliot that the Hungarian version of her first major novel was done by a distinguished historian and literary critic, who by 1859 was elected to the Hungarian Academy as a corresponding (and in 1871 as a full) member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in 1870 was given a chair at the University of Budapest. His translation proved to be of lasting value; in 1888 it was republished in a highly popular series edited by Pál Gyulai (1826–1909), poet, short-story writer and critic, another member of the Academy and one of the most influential Hungarian authors of the period. In the 1860s the rules of domestication or naturalization were different from the principles of appropriation followed in the later twentieth century. Numerous proper names were translated by Salamon. Molly has become Máli, Hetty was rendered as Eszti. It would be unjust to dismiss this practice as a whole. Eliot’s first Hungarian translator seemed to be fully aware that the distinction between proper and class nouns was open to question. In the chapter entitled ‘The Games’, the nickname of Wiry Ben became ‘Dorót Bence’ (Eliot 1888, 1: 415). In the translation done more than a century later the character is called Ben (Eliot 1978, 321). Without exaggeration it could be argued that the heterogeneity of the novel’s language is more perceptible in the first translation than in the version published more than a century later. In many cases, Salamon proved to be a creative interpreter. In Chapter 53, entitled ‘The Harvest Supper’, Kester Bale is mentioned as one of the labourers of Martin Poyser. In the Hungarian text this old man is called Bordás Péter (Eliot 1888, 2: 370). His surname refers to ‘the network of 2

www.friweb.hu/iratok/tudomány/PART1895.HTM (date accessed 8 September 2015).

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338   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe wrinkles on his sun-browned face’. In Chapter 24, after the 21-year-old Captain Arthur Donnithorne has proposed his grandfather’s health, Mrs Poyser makes the following remark: ‘he’d better not ha’ stirred a kettle o’ sour broth’. Salamon has succeeded in finding a proverbial expression in the target language: ‘jobb lett volna föl nem keverni azt a romlott tejes bögrét’ (Eliot 1888, 1: 396). Appropriation may involve not only replacement but also addition. Occasionally small changes were necessary for the sake of clarification. At some stage in ‘The Harvest Supper’ the conversation takes a political turn. Mr Poyser calls the French wicked and Mr Craig insists that he is ‘in no fear o’ Bony, for all they talk so much o’ his cliverness’. In the Hungarian version Bonaparte is mentioned (Eliot 1888, 2: 375). The lower-class characters of AB do not speak standard English. The incorrect usage is missing in Salamon’s text. He reduced the dialectal components of the English novel, but introduced some adjectives with the aim of distinguishing the language of the lower classes from the discourse of the landowners. ‘Why, Hetty, lass, are ye turned Methodist?’ says Mr Poyser to Miss Sorrel. Salamon adds an almost proverbial expression: ‘Lánchordta leánya, bizony methodista lett’ (Eliot 1888, 1: 336). In some respects his translation is almost more nuanced than the source text. Repetitions are fewer. At the end of the above-mentioned Chapter 24, in the description of the health-drinking at the celebration of Arthur Donnithorne’s 21st birthday, the hero merely bows to Hetty. ‘The foolish child felt her heart swelling with discontent.’ In the Hungarian version she is called ‘együgyű’ (Eliot 1888, 1: 404), a word with multiple meanings, ranging from ‘focused on a single issue’ and ‘self-centred’ to ‘simple-minded’ and ‘naïve’. The immediate context confirms that Salamon’s interpretation is based on a careful reading of the novel. His adjective suggests that the 17-year-old girl lives in a world of illusions. Omissions may shed even more light on the difference between the source and the target cultures. Some of these concern details of no great significance. In Chapter 19 (‘Adam on a Working Day’), no distinction is made between ‘ale’ and ‘beer’, since the Hungarian language has but one word (‘sör’). Far more important is that the first Hungarian translation of AB does not contain Chapter 17. The title of this section is ‘In Which the Story Pauses a Little’. Ferenc Salamon was one of the first interpreters of the fiction of Zsigmond Kemény (1814–1875), another Transylvanian Protestant. At the time he was translating AB, in 1861–62, he published a significant essay on the last novel of this author in the periodical Szépirodalmi Figyelő, edited by János Arany, the most important Hungarian poet of the second half of the nineteenth century. In addition to being an outstanding novelist, Kemény was also a highly original theoretician. In Eszmék a regény és dráma körül (Ideas on drama and the novel) (1852), originally published in instalments, he predicted an increasing objectivity in narrative fiction. Salamon, himself a fine essayist, valued Kemény’s attempt to create an autonomous fictional world. It can be assumed that he decided to translate AB because he saw some parallel between this English novel and Kemény’s fictional world. He might have seen fundamental similarities between the British author’s first full-length novel and A rajongók (The fanatics), a work Kemény published in 1858–59. Both

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The Hungarian Reception of George Eliot   339 novels quote the preaching of a religious visionary at the outset, deal with predestination and highlight the interior world of the characters. The most conspicuous difference between the two works is the narrator’s frequently addressing the reader in the English text. In The fanatics the characters seem to be independent of the storyteller’s discourse. Following his master, Salamon regarded this relative autonomy as a distinguishing feature of narrative as a sophisticated form of art, liberated from the legacy of popular fiction. While he could not suppress the constant intrusion of the storyteller’s voice in AB, he eliminated the chapter that seemed purely essayistic. Whether or not he was justified in doing so, he undoubtedly identified a characteristic component of Eliot’s fiction. The use of the first-person singular and plural gave considerable opportunity to make general statements and tended to blur the distinction between the world of the novel and that of the narrator and the narratee. The narrator’s strong involvement in the fate of the characters was at odds with Salamon’s ideal of the novel based on his reading of Kemény’s narrative fiction. The reason for the omission of an entire chapter was his dislike of overinterpretation. A far less substantial omission can be found at the end of Chapter 52 (‘Adam and Dinah’). The narrator is addressing a personified abstraction (Leisure). The final words state that ‘he never went to Exeter Hall, or heard a popular preacher, or read Tracts for the Times or Sartor Resartus.’ The Hungarian version excludes the specific reference to the two texts. Since Carlyle’s work was well known to some Hungarians, it is likely that the reason for this omission was that the translator believed that intertextual allusions were out of place in a tale about provincial life. In Chapter 38 (‘The Quest’), Seth Bede recites two stanzas of one of his favourite hymns. They are omitted by Salamon. In a similar way, when Dinah sings one of Charles Wesley’s hymns in Chapter 50 (‘In the Cottage’), or a drinking song is cited in ‘The Harvest Supper’, the verses cannot be found in the Hungarian text. Yet it would be incorrect to conclude that Salamon left out all the verses. In the opening chapter the text of the song sung by the title hero is quoted twice, in accordance with the source text. The most probable explanation is that in this case, verse is used as a mode of characterization. In the other cases the translator may have regarded the citations as less functional. All in all, he tried to eliminate the markers of the narrator’s presence. That is why he left out the adjective when the Poysers’ housemaid is called ‘poor Molly’, and skipped a whole chapter in a translation that must nevertheless be called very successful. The high quality of Salamon’s work becomes quite obvious in comparison with the rather careless translation of FH by Mária Dominkovics, whose only other work known to me is a collection of short stories published in two volumes in 1867. More important is the first Hungarian version of M, published in four volumes in 1874–75. Its translator was an assimilated Jew who changed his original surname Hechtl to Csukássi. Having studied law in Vienna and Pest, József Csukássi (1841–1891) was active as a journalist, published verse, short stories and articles, and translated works by Burns, Hugo, George Sand, Tennyson, Mrs Gaskell, Wilkie Collins and others. Since the first translations of AB and M were published by the Kisfaludy Society, founded in 1837, its members got them free of charge. That meant

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340   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe about 400 potential readers (Pallas 1895, 593). Unlike AB, M was published for an educated public. Accordingly, the inscriptions in Italian and French were not translated. Géza Barkassy, for instance, whose copy (given in 1892 to her niece Cécile Tormay, who later became a successful novelist and shortstory writer) has survived, read not only Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Locke and Gibbon, but also Dante, Goethe and Musset in the original. Some of the norms of translation had changed between the early 1860s and the mid-1870s. English Christian names were no longer replaced by Hungarian ones. Most of the characters of M belong to the middle class. Mr Dagley is an exception. His son Jacob has been caught killing a leveret. At the end of Chapter 39, Mr Brooke, Dorothea’s uncle, tells Dagley that the young boy has been locked up in an empty stable. The father answers him using harsh words. Dagney’s English is substandard. Such class distinctions can rarely be perceived in the language of the Hungarian version. Still, there are a few exceptions. In Chapter 24, for instance, Mrs Garth is teaching correct pronunciation. One of her students mocks those who say ‘A ship’s in the garden’. In the Hungarian text people who use ‘kő’ instead of ‘kell’ are ridiculed (Eliot 1874–75, 2: 32). In the nineteenth century, Hungarian translators paid scarcely any attention to the signifier. In Chapter 86 there is a pun. ‘It will be a sad while before you can be married, Mary,’ says Mr Garth to his daughter. The girl’s witty response is as follows: ‘Not a sad while, father – I mean to be merry.’ The link between the three words – the adjective ‘merry’, the verb ‘marry’ and the Christian name ‘Mary’ – has no equivalent in the translation. Csukássi’s translation has a short introduction by Ágost Greguss (1825–82), a celebrated essayist who, aside from translating works ranging from Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens and Le Cid to works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Schiller and George Sand, wrote theoretical works on aesthetics and a monograph on the ballad that is still considered a standard work by specialists of both literature and folklore. In his two-page text, Greguss states that the translation has been corrected by Arthur Patterson and Ágost Pulszky (1846– 1901), a sociologist and philosopher who studied in England. One cannot help but conclude that the first translation of Eliot’s most important work had been carefully prepared. In addition, it may have drawn attention to some authors unknown in Hungary. It was thanks to the chapter headings of this novel that the first Hungarian translations of poems by ‘Dr. Donne’, Samuel Daniel and Sir Henry Wotton appeared. The fact that M was published separately and not as part of the inexpensive series mentioned above may suggest that, unlike AB, it was thought to be for a more limited readership. If we turn to the first Hungarian version of SM, we find our surmise confirmed. Published in the popular series edited by Pál Gyulai in 1885, it had a second impression in 1898. The translator Géza Kacziány (1856–1939) was a prolific journalist specializing in music and the visual arts, as well as the author of short stories, plays and poems. Like Salamon, he was attracted to the works of Eliot because of his Protestantism. First he taught in the main secondary school of the Reformed Church in Budapest; in 1903–04 he travelled in Britain and the United States; and in 1909–12 he served as the Presbyterian clergyman to Americans of Hungarian

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The Hungarian Reception of George Eliot   341 origin. His translation of The Corsair and his German versions of 130 poems of Petőfi attest to his interest in verse, and his translation of SM suggests that he regarded this work as a poem in prose. No less prestigious was the first translator of MF, published in the same inexpensive series in 1897. Unfortunately, this has to be called a somewhat pedestrian version. János Váczy (1859–1918) was the author of literary biographies and the scholarly editor of important literary works. He saw Eliot through the eyes of a positivist. In sharp contrast to Salamon, he looked for the impact of contemporary science and the ideas of George Henry Lewes in her works. MF was the only novel he ever translated. His version is no more than a historical document, as is Béla Pataki’s version of R, published with the support of the Kisfaludy Society one year later. One of the signs of Eliot’s high reputation in Hungary in the late nineteenth century was that her works were cited even in reviews of narrative fiction written by Hungarian authors. A prime example is the discussion of short stories by the minor author Sándor Baksay, in an article published in 1887 by Jenő Péterfy (1850–99), by far the most original Hungarian critic of the period. The inferior quality of the short stories is analyzed in comparison with the British author’s approach to her world. While Baksay’s narrator is part of the provincial life he presents, Eliot’s ‘horizon is wider than that of her characters’3 (Péterfy 1903, 424). The critic does not deny the melodramatic element in Eliot’s narratives, but he suggests that it is the mark of a more refined art that in her works ‘harm is not done by evil but by narrow-mindedness, dullness, provincialism when confronted with more sophisticated things and human beings’4 (Péterfy 1903, 426). A well-trained critic not only of literary but also of musical works, Péterfy advocated a theory of the tragic (not the genre but the aesthetic quality) based on a theory of value. In his view the tragic was an immanent quality of human existence incompatible with moral justice. Because of this, he regarded the art of Kemény and Flaubert as superior to that of Eliot, whom he viewed as a novelist who overemphasized moral values. Salamon’s work as translator and Péterfy’s criticism represented a position similar to that of Henry James, expressed in his review of The Life of George Eliot, written by her husband J. W. Cross. Both Hungarians appreciated the fiction of the British woman writer, but preferred novels with a more objective narrative perspective, in a manner similar to James, who in 1885 argued as follows: [T]he ‘artistic mind’ [...] existed in her with limitations remarkable in a writer whose imagination was so rich. We feel in her, always, that she proceeds from the abstract to the concrete; that her figures and situations are evolved, as the phrase is, from her moral consciousness, and are only indirectly the products of observation. (James 1984, 1003)

3

4

‘láthatára messzebb rerjed, mint alakjaié’. ‘nem a fekete gonosz okozza a legfőbb bajt az életben, hanem a korlátoltság, butaság, köznapiság, mikor olyan dolgokkal s emberekkel kerül össze, kik fölötte állanak’.

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342   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Despite the reservations of Salamon and Péterfy, Eliot was one of the most celebrated British authors in Hungary at the end of the nineteenth century. This is clear from the 64-line article in the most important encyclopaedia, published in 18 volumes between 1893 and 1900 (Pallas 1894, 40). Its author, Gyula Theisz (1855–1939), a literary historian and translator of German origin born in the northern region known as Zips, focused on AB, MF, SM, R, FH and M, but in the spirit of positivism, he also mentioned the translation of Das Leben Jesu, the stories in SCL and the novel DD, and even the most memorable poems. The objectivity of the approach is further strengthened by reliable biographical and bibliographical data. An article in an encyclopaedia is not expected to aspire to originality. All the major works are mentioned. Although rather too much emphasis is placed on R, the cautious value judgements are justifiable, especially in view of the quality of the translations: AB is called a masterpiece, and the significance of M is duly recognized. After 1900 the lustre of Eliot was diminished. For more than half a century no new translations were carried out. First the crude social determinism of the Naturalists, and somewhat later the aesthetic movement, made her fiction unfashionable. The influence of the latter can be detected in Az európai irodalom története (A history of European literature) by Mihály Babits (1883–1941), poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist and translator, one of the most respected figures in the literature of the period. The passage on Eliot in what was originally published as volume 2 of his highly personal outline history in 1935 is clearly based on the early translations: ‘I read some of her works when I was a student and was surprised to learn that their author was a woman […] Eliot’s world is dark and almost mechanically tragic. Individual lives are destroyed by petty weaknesses. Regrettably, this sense of life led to the education of the world […] Far from being an apostle, she was a school teacher. Since she was eager to instruct, she also published historical novels’5 (Babits n.d., 603–04). AB is the only novel mentioned – probably because Babits respected Salamon. When he drafted a plan of an anthology of European literature, he included a section of AB in the translation first published in 1861–62 (Babits 1978, 221). The error in the last sentence quoted suggests that he relied on his vague memories; in his later years he did not read anything by Eliot. International projects are easy targets for those who look for oversights. The series entitled The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe has an excellent volume on Virginia Woolf that includes no chapter on the reception of her works in Hungary. Because of this, I must make a digression. One of the reasons for the decline in Eliot’s reputation was the (mistaken) belief that the activity of the so-called Georgian women writers made the Victorian George Eliot fade into oblivion. Antal Szerb (1901–1945), who in many respects accepted the approach to literature represented by Babits, died in a labour camp. When assessing his activity, it is virtually impossible not to remember 5

‘Én diákkoromban olvastam néhány könyvét, s meglepetés volt, hogy ezeket nő írta […] De nem apostol volt ő, inkább csak tanító néni. Leckéi érdekében történeti regényeket is írt.’

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The Hungarian Reception of George Eliot   343 his tragic end. In 1935 he published a book entitled Hétköznapok és csodák (Weekdays and wonders). The title may have been inspired by a reading of Lady into Fox and Orlando. The book is based on a comparison of Victorian values with the outlook of such writers as Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay, Rebecca West, Sylvia Townsend Warner and others. Much emphasis is placed on the fact that George Sand and George Eliot used masculine pen names. ‘Their novels are similar to those written by men; they had masculine features. Their intention was to look at the world in the way men saw it’6 (Szerb 1971, 559). With his usual disregard for details, Szerb ignored the fact that Virginia Woolf highly esteemed Eliot. His somewhat one-sided approach was probably inspired by Virginia Woolf ’s attack on Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy and by Rose Macaulay’s Told by an Idiot (1923), which has four sections entitled ‘Victorian’, ‘Fin-de-siècle’, ‘Edwardian’ and ‘Georgian’. Szerb persisted in his partially negative attitude towards Eliot when writing his A világirodalom története (A history of world literature), first published in 1941. The single paragraph on this author is based on three comparisons. ‘The reputation of the Brontës has never declined since their deaths; their works went into numerous editions, even Emily’s poems became widely appreciated. Travellers often visit Haworth, where they lived as hermits. By contrast, the once immense popularity of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819–1880) seems to have evaporated’7 (Szerb 1980, 558). The second comparison is with Dickens and Thackeray. Szerb admits that in contrast to these two novelists, Eliot was an intellectual with a storehouse of knowledge and someone who took a serious interest in Darwinism, the rise of science and the crisis of religious faith. The last parallel is drawn with Zola, revealing the decisive influence Babits exerted on Szerb. Positivism is mentioned as Eliot’s main source of inspiration, and her works are interpreted as representing a realism that verges on Naturalism. MF and M are characterized as her most significant achievements. The former is appreciated for its treatment of the status of women in Victorian society, the latter for its portrayal of the life of the bourgeoisie. ‘Her meditations are rather strenuous’8 (Szerb 1980, 559). This conclusion indicates that by the middle of the twentieth century, didacticism became regarded as a burden incompatible with the art of the novel. As is well known, a radical change occurred in the approach to literature in the European countries occupied by the troops of the Soviet Union in 1945.

6

‘A regényeik is olyanok, mintha férfiak írták volna őket, aminthogy egyéniségükben is sok volt a férfias vonás. Írásaikban arra törekedtek, hogy úgy lássák a világot, mint a férfiak látják.’ 7 ‘A Brontë nővérek írói hírneve nem csökkent haláluk után; műveik egyre újabb kiadásokban jelentek meg, gyönyörűséggel olvassuk Emily költeményeit is, és Haworthot, remeteségük színhelyét sűrűn látogatják az áhítatos kirándulók; fiatalabb kortársnőjük, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819–1880) egykor óriási népszerűsége enyészőben van.’ 8 ‘Elmélkedései eléggé fárasztóak.’

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344   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe During the subsequent decades, György Lukács was regarded as the greatest authority in literary studies. In view of his interest in realism and the novel, it is somewhat strange that he never seems to have read works by George Eliot. Her name appears neither in the non-Marxist works written before 1919, nor in his late aesthetics Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen (The special quality of the aesthetic) (1963). Since Lukács and his immediate disciples, working in Budapest, focused on German philosophy and literature, the University of Debrecen became the centre of English studies. The only full-length study of the works of Eliot was written by Anna Katona (1920–2005), who joined the English Department of that university in 1956. Born in Debrecen, she was interned in 1944 during the German occupation of Hungary. Like many Holocaust survivors, she joined the Communist movement and published essays that represented dogmatic Marxism. Favoured by the political establishment, she was able to visit Britain and the United States with various scholarships. In 1975 she decided not to return to Hungary. Claiming that she had been persecuted in Hungary, she got US citizenship and a visiting position in Charleston (South Carolina). The title of her book, A valóságábrázolás problémái George Eliot regényeiben (The issues of the representation of reality in the novels of George Eliot) (1969), reflects the spirit of an age duly forgotten today. The British author is praised as ‘the faithful chronicler of the reality of the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s’9 (Katona 1969, 198). The homogeneity of the novels is overemphasized: ‘The novels formulate the same conclusion in different ways’10 (Katona 1969, 157). The charge of pessimism is dismissed and didacticism is treated as inseparable from great art: ‘In her novels tragedy is not the reflection of a tragic outlook; it serves a didactic purpose […] Her characters fall to let others learn from their weaknesses’11 (Katona 1969, 167). The reason for the great significance of Eliot’s works is that they ‘tackle almost all the political issues of her age’12 (Katona 1969, 49). In this interpretation, novels are social documents, verdicts ‘against a parasitic way of life and its consequences’,13 attacks on ‘exploitation’14 and representations of ‘class conflicts’15 (Katona 1969, 119, 38, 14). ‘No working man is evil in her fiction’,16 Katona affirms, and she ascribes the value of SG to ‘a humane treatment of Gipsies’17 and insists that with her vision of Zionism in her last novel ‘she anticipated the future’18 (148, 174, 35). Reiterating the clichés of the so-called Marxist criticism of her age, Anna 9

‘az 1850-60-70-es évek valóságának hű krónikása’. ‘Az egymást követő regények ugyanazon tanulság más-más megfogalmazásai.’ 11 ‘A tragédia nem tragikus világkép tükröződése műveiben, hanem nevelési eszköz [...] Hősei azért buknak el, hogy mások okuljanak hibáikból.’ 12 ‘kora szinte valamennyi politikai kérdését érinti’. 13 ‘a parazita életmód és következményei ellen’. 14 ‘kizsákmányolás’. 15 ‘osztályellentétek’. 16 ‘Nincs egyetlen dolgozó ember gonosztevője sem.’ 17 ‘az emberséges bánásmódot a cigányokra terjeszti ki’. 18 ‘előtte járt korának’. 10

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The Hungarian Reception of George Eliot   345 Katona also expressed her impatience with the class limitations of Eliot. While admitting her belief in ‘progress’, she regretted that she ‘failed to become a materialist’,19 was ‘unable to recognize the historical mission of the working class’20 and ‘could not arrive at the conclusion that society has to be transformed by revolution’21 (46, 73, 107, 60). The shortcomings of the book hardly need explanation. Das Kapital, The Condition of the Working Class in England, the works of Ernst Fischer, Raymond Williams and Arnold Kettle, together with a collective work entitled Istorija Anglijskoj Literaturi (History of English literature) published in Moscow in 1956, are used as keys to the understanding of Eliot’s works, and her fiction is treated as an illustration of ideas formulated in her letters and the articles she published in the Westminster Review in the 1850s. The ‘split between Mary Ann Evans and her brother is reflected in the fates of Maggie and Tom’.22 ‘Klesmer is probably Franz Liszt, whom she met in Weimar’;23 ‘Will Ladislaw may be Lewes and Dorothea the author herself ’24 (Katona 1969, 133–34, 159). Such details suggest that no distinction is made between autobiography and fiction. The structure of the plot, narrative perspective, temporality and style are virtually ignored. The overemphasis on ideology leads to the neglect of generic qualities. A distorted vision of The Waste Land as ‘a representation of the world of the bourgeoisie, in which injustice reigns, giving rise to evil’25 (Katona 1969, 140) makes Eliot the forerunner of the American-born poet T. S. Eliot. The focus is on the characters evaluated according to the stages in the evolution of human society as suggested by Marxists. Dinah Morris, the Methodist preacher in AB, for instance, ‘represents progressive industrial society’26 (Katona 1969, 82). All such comparisons seem to be questionable. Not realizing that the tradition of starting in medias res goes back to Homer, Anna Katona believes that Eliot is a modern novelist on account of ‘her departure from chronological narrative’27 (Katona 1969, 190). Echoing the essays written by György Lukács on realism in the interwar period, she regards such ‘omniscient authors as Balzac, Dickens or Tolstoy’28 as the greatest novelists, because they ‘present the extreme complexity of the world as a whole in an epic panorama’,29 and the assumption is that Eliot is also one such novelist (Katona 1969, 9). In her 19

‘nem jutott el a materializmusig’. ‘nem jutott el a munkásosztály történelmi hivatásának felismeréséig’. 21 ‘nem jutott el a társadalom forradalom útján való megváltoztatásának gondolatáig’. 22 ‘a Marian Evans és fivére között történt szakadás tükröződik Maggie és Tom sorsában’. 23 ‘Klesmer valószínűleg Liszt Ferenc, akivel Weimarban találkozott.’ 24 ‘Will Ladislaw valószínűleg Lewes, Dorothea pedig maga az írónő.’ 25 ‘ábrázolta a polgári világot, melyben igazságtalanság uralkodik, ez pedig gonoszságot szül’. 26 ‘a progresszívabb ipari közösség képviselője’. 27 ‘egyre kevésbé ragaszkodik a kronológia bevett sorrendjéhez’. 28 ‘A mindentudó író, legyen az Balzac, Dickens vagy Tolsztoj’. 29 ‘a világ egészének bonyolult és mérhetetlen sokoldalúságát ábrázolja széles epikai tablóban’. 20

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346   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe view, The Portrait of a Lady is weaker than Eliot’s last novel because ‘it lacks the character of DD’30 (Katona 1969, 121). In her introduction, Katona defined the position of Eliot as lying between her contemporaries who focused on the surroundings of their characters, and the ‘subjectivist’ (szubjektivista) authors of the twentieth century (Katona 1969, 8). In the sixth and final section she dismissed the ‘bourgeois’ interpretations of Eliot’s works made from the perspective of ‘the technique of experimental novels’, drew a sharp distinction between the vision of the author of M and ‘the chaotic worldview’31 of such ‘decadent’ writers as Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and expressed her hope that the fiction of such authors as Doris Lessing, Angus Wilson, Pamela Hansford Johnson and others would revive Eliot’s legacy (Katona 1969, 201, 205). Whenever citing from the novels discussed in her book, Katona used her own translations, arguing that new Hungarian versions were needed, since the old ones were outmoded. In 1969 only one new version existed, the work of Tivadar Szinnai (1894–1972), a minor novelist, who translated about 100 works and made his fortune with adaptations of works by Karl May. In 1976 a new version of M appeared. Tibor Bartos (1933–2010) was arguably one of the best translators from English of the later twentieth century; his Hungarian versions of works by such authors as Poe, Thackeray, Mark Twain, Jack London, John Dos Passos, Henry Miller, William Styron, Thomas Wolfe, Ralph Ellison and Jack Kerouac have won praise from both the critics and the general public. He was a sophisticated interpreter of stylistic nuances who collected synonyms in the course of his working with English texts, and summarized the results of this work in two volumes, published in 2002. Despite its considerable merits, his version of M is one of the very few Hungarian prose translations that have met with serious criticism. An eminent Hungarian scholar, well versed in both literary theory and linguistics, pointed out that Bartos ‘places the narrator in the wrong social context’, ‘creates misleading intertextual connections and connotations’, turns ‘the theoretical aspects of the original into something more concrete’, and ‘demolishes the metaphorical structure’ of Eliot’s novel (Bezeczky 2001, 115, 117, 118). Even less satisfactory is the translation of AB by Tibor Szobotka (1913–82), novelist, short-story writer and essayist, since it fails to do justice to the different sociolects used in this novel: uneducated farmers and upper-class characters speak in the same elevated, slightly artificial style. The new translations were not accompanied by any longer study on Eliot’s works. The seven pages devoted to her in the short book I was commissioned to write on nineteenth-century British literature for a popular series reflect a shift in values. Having written my PhD dissertation on Virginia Woolf, and published my first essay on Henry James, my reading of Eliot was marked by a bias opposed to that of Anna Katona. Although I praised M, I saw a serious flaw in DD, and regarded didacticism and the relative absence of poetic

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‘Deronda alakjával szegényebb’. ’kaotikus világkép’.

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The Hungarian Reception of George Eliot   347 language as shortcomings that make her art ‘inferior to that of Emily Brontë’32 (Szegedy-Maszák 1982, 276). After the collapse of totalitarianism in 1989–90, Hungarian translators, critics and readers turned to works neglected or banned in the so-called Communist decades. The (re)discovery of works unknown to the general public went together with a falling-off in the interpretation of most nineteenth-century Western novelists. Although feminist criticism made its influence felt in recent decades, relatively little attention was paid to the works of Eliot. It might be taken as symptomatic that the two-page discussion of her activity in the most recent history of world literature, a collective work of close to 1,000 pages, published in 2005, is a rather low-key appreciation. Written by Ágnes Péter (b. 1941), a professor at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) and a specialist in English Romanticism, this summary emphasizes that Eliot was ‘the co-editor of the progressive theological and philosophical Westminster Review’33 and her works ‘anticipate the modernist turn’34 (Pál 2005, 652). While no overview occurs in the brief characterization of MF, R, FH, M and DD, the evaluation of Eliot’s activity still echoes the Marxist ideas on realism. A market-oriented economy has changed the attitude to literature of the Hungarian public. Recently the George Eliot Collection of the BBC gave an impetus to a Hungarian publishing house to bring out earlier translations of her works and commission new versions. Paradoxically, there seems to be a kind of return to greater freedom in adaptation. The 1966 version of MF has been rebaptized as Büszkeség és ártatlanság (Pride and innocence), indicating that in the early twenty-first century the more popular Jane Austen can help the promotion of a novel by Eliot. The title of the new version of SM is Kései boldogság (Late happiness), an interpretive decision that may have been inspired by the film industry, suggesting that today publishers believe that the visual media may help them to find potential readers. It would be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to draw any conclusion from the Hungarian reception of Eliot’s works. They won an early recognition in the nineteenth century. One cannot help but think that the decline in her reputation was at least partly caused by the monograph on her written in a spirit that seems outdated today. It remains to be seen if the impact of visual media can lead to a reappraisal of her work.

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‘művészete elmarad Emily Brontë teljesítménye mögött’. a haladó teológiai és filozófiai folyóiratnak, a Westminster Review-nak’. 34 ‘a modernista fordulat előzményeinek tekinthetők’. 33 ‘társszerkesztője

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19

George Eliot in Romania Adina Ciugureanu

Romanian writers and critics1 turned to Western literature in the first decades of the nineteenth century in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the rise of a new class of landowners and townspeople opened up new opportunities for education. Periods of studying in France, Germany or Switzerland made young people aware, on the one hand, of Western literary movements such as Romanticism and realism, and on the other of the importance of possessing a national literature on a West European model. In this context, the works of the most noted English writers were purchased and disseminated to the reading public (as limited as this was until the second half of the nineteenth century, when literacy grew considerably). They were received mainly through translations, and of these many were made from French or German versions. The works translated into Romanian were generally poetry, short fiction and excerpts from novels, because it was easier to publish them in periodicals and, therefore, to sell them. The longer forms of fiction by British writers were generally read either in the original, or in translations into another West European language, by an elite who would be fluent in the languages concerned.2 1

In the early nineteenth-century, Romanians lived in three distinct regions: Moldova, Wallachia and Transylvania. The principalities of Moldova and Wallachia joined in 1859 under the name Romania, obtaining their complete independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1877. Transylvania had been part of the Habsburg Empire, and then the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, since the seventeenth century, and joined Romania in 1918. Although over the centuries the Romanians living in these separate regions had preserved their language almost intact, literature and criticism in Romanian developed mainly in Moldova and Wallachia, because in Transylvania the official languages were Hungarian and German. Periodicals in Romanian arose especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, but focused either on Orthodox Christianity or on promoting the Romanian language literature published in the unified country. This chapter concerns the Romanophone reception of Eliot in Moldova and Wallachia prior to 1918, and also that of Transylvania after 1918. 2 French was the most popular foreign language for the Romanian aristocracy and bourgeoisie, followed by German, the language largely spoken in Transylvania (which was, at that time, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). English

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George Eliot in Romania   349 The second half of the nineteenth century in Romania witnessed an unprecedented rise of literature and literary studies. The young generation of the 1860s and 1870s showed a great interest in opening the newly-constituted country to European and world literatures. A crucial moment in the formation and launch of the national literature in Romania was the foundation by leading intellectuals in Iași in 1867 of a literary society called Junimea (the young writers). Their literary views, innovative ideas and encouragement and criticism of Romanian writers and their work were disseminated in a bimonthly periodical called Convorbiri literare (Literary dialogues), which was to become one of the major periodicals with a continuous publishing activity until 1944. It was then discontinued for 25 years, before being revived, during the Communist period, in a different format. The journal Convorbiri literare quickly won over the large and diverse parts of the public eager to broaden their culture, and was instrumental in the rise of the national Romanian culture, which sought guidance at that time. The journal’s remit was broad, covering literature, science and criticism. In the September 1884 issue of Convorbiri literare, Eliot was first mentioned in an article by Alexandru Grigore Suţu3 entitled ‘Studii asupra romanului realist ȋn zilele noastre’ (On the realist novel of our time), in which he expressed his views on what a good novelist should be concerned with when writing fiction, and gave a few examples of exceptional novel writers, among whom he ranked Eliot the highest. Suţu’s article is pioneering in comparative literary studies in Romania, and reveals a wide knowledge of the Western European novel, a deep understanding of the novel per se and a refined critical sense. The article’s declared purpose was to distinguish between the major currents of the time (Naturalism, materialism and idealist realism), as found in the works of Balzac, Flaubert, Mérimée, Dickens, George Sand and Eliot.4 Suţu also aimed at enhancing the public taste for novel reading and at encouraging Romanian writers to use what he considered to be the best novelistic genre – idealist realism, which Mérimée, Sand and Eliot so successfully produced (1884, 232). What distinguishes these writers from other realist novelists, according to Suţu, is that they start from reality, which they transfigure into art, thus ‘bringing to light through subjectivity reality’s undeniable beauty’5 (Suţu 1884, 232). This is what Eliot did during her prolific life (Suţu is aware that she has passed away, and laments her death);6 what makes her an outstanding writer became more popular at the turn of the century, when wealthy families would employ English governesses to educate their children. 3 Alexandru Grigore Suţu (1837–1899) was a leading Romanian intellectual, publisher, writer, critic, translator, painter, and teacher of French and Greek, holding a doctorate in Philosophy and Law, who published mainly in Convorbiri literare (Literary dialogues). 4 In the original article, Suţu spells Eliot’s first name as ‘Georges’, derived probably from the French versions of her novels, which he would have read. 5 ‘sǎ deie la luminǎ subiectivitatea frumuseţii netǎgǎduite ce ea conţine’. 6 Suţu ascertains that Eliot died ‘two years before’ (‘acum doi ani de zile’) (1884, 237) – that is in 1882, which is wrong. He either made a mistake or wrote the article earlier, but did not manage to publish it until 1884.

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350   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe is that she shows ‘deep sympathy for the miseries and sufferings of mankind’7 (Suţu 1884, 237). She surpasses Flaubert because ‘in the novel, the heart and the talent must be joined’8 (Suţu 1884, 237), and because, unlike Flaubert who ‘loved art better than mankind’9 (Suţu 1884, 237), she loved mankind at least as much as art. She possessed such broad knowledge that those who met her were stunned, and raised realism to perfection. Whereas ‘in England, [most of] the masters of the novel treat reality with scorn and superficiality’ (238), as ‘a subject that produces both laughter and indignation which calls for reprimand and punishment’10 ((Suţu 1884, 238), for Eliot ‘sympathy is the moral and social principle par excellence’11 (Suţu 1884, 238). Thus she follows the Scripture in caring for the meek and the humble. She opposes ‘theological doctrines which are directed exclusively toward the mind without any mixture with the life of the heart’, since to her ‘religion is the highest expression of human sympathy’12 (Suţu 1884, 238). Through this creed, ‘she identified the existence of the peoples with religion and the country in which they are born’13 (Suţu 1884, 238), which would actually make her not only a moralist but also a patriotic writer. How much of Eliot’s private life Suţu was aware of is hard to tell. He concludes that ‘heart and talent’14 (Suţu 1884, 238) are the two words which describe Eliot who, at her death, ‘left behind a vacant place which no realist writer could ever fill’15 (Suţu 1884, 238). To Suţu, and by extension to most Romanian critics and writers of the time, Eliot was a realist writer who managed to combine intellect with emotion in her sympathetic inclination towards the lower classes. The critics of the 1880s and 1890s strongly encouraged Romanian writers to take the Romanian lower classes – and especially the peasants – as credible, realist subjects in their fiction. They made Eliot’s works a case in point. In his otherwise excellent article, Suţu never mentions any of Eliot’s novels individually (in contrast to his treatment of certain other writers) – yet one assumes that he had read sufficiently in order to have been inspired to a six-page eulogy. The rise of Naturalism in France inevitably affected a country in which the aristocracy was Francophone. However, Suţu, I. A. Rǎdulescu Pogoneanu (another supporter of Junimea) and other Romanians made their own interpretation of the movement. They adapted to it the Romantic view of a deep feeling for nature seen both as a complete, Pantheistic communion between

7

‘simpatia obşteasca pentru mizeriile şi suferinţele omenirii’. roman, inima trebuie sǎ se uneascǎ cu talentul’. 9 Flaubert ‘a iubit arta, mai puţin omul’. 10 ‘In Anglia, meşterii romanului trateazǎ realitatea cu dispreţ si uşurinţǎ […] un subiect de râs şi indignare, pentru toţi ea cheamǎ dojenire şi pedeapsǎ’. 11 ‘simpatia este principiul moral şi social prin excelenţǎ’. 12 ‘doctrine teologice care se ȋndreptau exclusiv cǎtre inteligenţǎ şi nu fusese niciodatǎ amestecate cu viaţa inimii […] religiunea era cea mai ȋnaltǎ espresiune a simpatiei omeneşti’. 13 ‘ea a identificat existenţa popoarelor cu religiunea şi patria’. 14 ‘inima unitǎ cu talent’. 15 ‘a lasǎ un loc dezert pe care nimeni nu l-a mai putut ȋnlocui’. 8 ‘ȋn

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George Eliot in Romania   351 man and nature, and as a passive, Stoic attitude towards fate and death.16 To this they added realism, not in the photographic sense, but with a view to revealing ‘a fine sense of the ironic, a quality characteristic of Romanian folk literature’ (Perry 2001, 49). It is clear that folk literature, in a period in which it was still collected and published, influenced the use and meaning of Naturalism and realism in Romanian fiction. A discussion on the distinction between the Naturalist writer Zola and the realist writers of the nineteenth century, in which Eliot’s name is also mentioned, was held by two prominent critics at the turn of the century: G.N. Costache, in the 1904 article ‘Genul literar ȋn teatru’ (‘The literary genre in the theatre’), and Barbu Constantinescu, in his 1906 ‘Arta naturalistǎ şi estetica lui Taine’ (‘Naturalist art and Taine’s esthetic’). In the former, Zola is compared to Ibsen, Eliot, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bjørnson, Gorky and Sienkiewicz, while in the latter Eliot is contrasted with Zola and Maupassant. Both critics distinguish between the French Naturalists and the European realists, strongly preferring the latter, and mentioning Eliot’s deep realism as a standard. Some of Eliot’s work reached the Romanian libraries and bookshops in Iaşi and Bucureşti in the very year in which they were published by Bernhard Tauchnitz. Thus, in 1860 the 1859 Tauchnitz edition of AB arrived in the Romanian principalities, followed by MF in 1860 and SM in 1861. The last two novels could also be found in German translation (Die Muhle am Floss (Berlin: Verlag, 1861); and SM (Berlin: Franz Duncker, 1861) – both first editions). There is no mention of R, FH and M as early acquisitions in Romanian libraries, but in Bucureşti one could find the English copy of SG, ‘The Legend of Jubal’ & Other Poems Old and New, published by William Blackwood & Sons (London and Edinburgh), while in Cluj there were LV and BJ (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1878), ITS (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1879), Essays and Leaves from a Note-Book (Leipzig: Bernard Tauchnitz, 1884) and the French version of DD (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1886). The reading public interested in English literature could get acquainted with Eliot’s fiction both in the original and in translation (French and German). There is an early acquisition of an English copy of SG and ‘The Legend of Jubal’ & Other Poems Old and New (published by William Blackwood & Sons, London and Edinburgh, 1874), although it is unlikely that these two works influenced Suţu in his description of Eliot’s work as ‘realist’ (1884, 238). It is, however, known that at least Eliot’s early works were read by the leading Romanian writers, critics and intellectuals (such as Titu Maiorescu and Liviu Rebreanu); they later donated their copies of Eliot’s novels to the National Library in Bucharest. The broad Romanian public was first introduced to Eliot’s fiction in translation as early as 1893, when a very short excerpt from MF was translated and published in the literary supplement of the Romanian newspaper Adevǎrul (The truth). This weekly literary supplement would introduce a passage from 16

This view, considered to a be a peculiar Romanian concern, is particularly illustrated in Romanian folk poems and ballads, amongst which the best known is ‘Mioriţa’ (‘The little ewe’), discovered in the 1880s in Transylvania by Vasile Alecsandri, a famous Romanian poet.

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352   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe a Romanian or foreign writer’s work which exemplified, in the editors’ view, ‘art with a purpose’ – that is, realism infused with morality and politics, in contradistinction to ‘art for art’s sake’17 (Hangiu 1996, 13). Once again, Eliot is chosen to represent the former concept. At the end of his article, Suţu makes a prophetic pronouncement, claiming that ‘art from now on is meant to live only through psychology’18 (1884, 247). A large majority of Romanian writers of the 1890s through to the 1920s seem to have followed Suţu’s advice, as they focused on the psychological profiles of their peasant and bourgeois characters. For example, Duiliu Zamfirescu (1858–1922) was a Romanian novelist and poet who worked as a diplomat in Rome between 1888 and 1906, and read Eliot’s work in the original (1969, 295). In 1894 he published, in the same periodical (Convorbiri literare) in which Suţu had written about Eliot’s ‘idealist realism’, the novel Viaţa la ţarǎ (Sasha),19 which was influenced by Eliot’s fiction in at least two ways. He describes reality ‘as it was’, along the lines of Dickens, Eliot, Turgenev and Tolstoy; and he portrays his characters through close psychological analysis (Sǎndulescu 1969, 295). The intensification of nationalism, characteristic of Europe in the nineteenth century, led in Romania to the production of historical novels intended to fictionalize glorious moments of the past. One of the most outstanding Romanian novelists at the turn of the twentieth century, with a career reaching until the late 1950s, was Mihail Sadoveanu,20 who in 1904 published the historical novel Soimii (The eagles). Analyzing the birth and rise of the historical novel in Romania, the critic Henric Sanielevici21 published ‘Romanul istoric’ (The historical novel) in 1906 in the Galaţi journal Curentul nou (The new trend). Here he criticizes Sadoveanu’s recent publication of Soimii, arguing that the novelist wrote about a crucial Romanian historical moment not in a realist manner, but as ‘patriotic idealization’22 (Sanielevici 1906, 221), which would place the novel in the line of Walter Scott. This is seen as inferior to the line developed by Eliot in R, Dickens in The Tale of Two Cities and Thackeray in Henry Esmond. The three titles mentioned are viewed as ‘realist historical novels’23 (Sanielevici 1906, 221), in the sense that their authors had done serious research on the periods concerned, which they represented impartially – which was not what the Romanian writer was thought to have done. The historical novel was less popular in Romanian literary culture than the novel focusing on traditional peasant life. Thus, one of the major literary 17 ‘artǎ 18 19

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21 22 23

pentru artǎ’. ‘arta de acum ȋnainte este menitǎ de a trǎi numai din fenomenul psihologic’. Zamfirescu’s novel was translated into English as Sasha in 1926. Mihail Sadoveanu (1880–1961) was a leading Romanian short-story and novel writer who turned into a supporter of the Communist regime after World War II. His work ranges from traditional, folkloric topics to mythological symbolism, Romanian history and Socialist Realism after 1950. Henric Sanielevici (1875–1951) was a journalist and literary critic, founder of the journal Curentul nou (The new trend) in 1905. ‘idealizare patriotica’. ‘romane istorice realiste’.

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George Eliot in Romania   353 trends at the end of the nineteenth century was poporanismul (ruralism), which encouraged writers to dwell on Romanian national culture, to present peasants as its true representatives, to present country life as more natural and spiritual than town life and to identify the latter with artificial art imitative of the Western model. Poporanism, related to the similar Russian trend narodnichestvo, was, in fact, another form of idealist realism. The writers and critics supporting this trend considered that the only way for Romanian literature to attain a universal status was by drawing on the specificities of Romanian culture, which meant solid and traditional country life. From this perspective, drawing-room characters such as those created by Richardson in Pamela and Clarissa were seen as dull and not having survived the test of time, unlike the vivid and challenging Sancho Panza and Vicar of Wakefield, who are foretold a perennial life. The reason is not only the outstanding portrayal of reality in Don Quixote and The Vicar of Wakefield, but also the excellent representation of the lower classes in those novels (Maiorescu 1882, 370). One of the major Romanian writers who kept to the ‘ruralist’ requirements, in the critics’ view, was Duiliu Zamfirescu, the novelist whose fiction work was described above as having been influenced by Eliot. When, on becoming a member of the Romanian Academy in 1909, he made an honorary speech in which he denied belonging to the ruralist trend, Henric Sanielevici published the article ‘Duiliu Zamfirescu şi “poporanismul”’ (‘Duiliu Zamfirescu and “ruralism”)24 in the May number of the journal Viaţa Româneascǎ (Romanian life).25 Sanielevici revealed his utter surprise at hearing of the novelist’s rejection of the ruralist movement and its alleged influence on his work. If this were true, he claims, then Zamfirescu would be in conflict with Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dickens, Tennyson, George Sand, George Eliot and even with himself, as, in Viaţa la ţarǎ, he had created ‘the admirable figure of Florea, the shepherd, the Romanian prototype, a dreamer and a contemplater of nature’26 (Sanielevici in Adam 1976, 250). A view which could easily associate Eliot’s realism with that of Dickens, Turgenev, Tolstoy, George Sand, and even Tennyson, was still very strong in the Romanian reception of her work at the beginning of the twentieth century. Moreover, her influence on Zamfirescu’s writings conformed with the general perception of Zamfirescu’s work by Romanian criticism as affiliated with poporanism. From this perspective, Eliot could have been an excellent representative of the poporanist movement in literature if she had lived in Romanian territory; likewise, Florea the shepherd might be seen as the Romanian alter-ego of Eliot’s Adam Bede. The works by Eliot which probably most influenced Romanian critics in their conception of her as a realist novelist were AB, SM and MF. The last

24

The article may also be found in Ioan Adam (ed.) Duiliu Zamfirescu (antologie, studiu introductive, tabel chronologic, note, bibliografie) (Duiliu Zamfirescu: anthology, introductory study, chronology, notes, bibliography), published in 1976. 25 Viaţa Româneascǎ (Romanian life) was the official periodical of the Romanian Writers’ Union, which appeared in the periods 1906–16 and 1920–40, first at Iaşi, then after 1930 in Bucharest. 26 ‘admirabilul personaj Florea, tipul pǎstorului român visǎtor şi contemplative’.

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354   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe two could be found in 1907 and 1908 English copies respectively, while AB was available in older editions too. Moreover, in 1909 one could also find Pages choisies de George Eliot (the Emile Hovelague edition, Paris: Armand Colin, 1909), which was in fact the French translation of the American version of Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings (1873) and SCL (the English edition published by Cassell). The French version, Scènes de la vie du clergé, published by Hachette, Paris, in 1911, reached Bucharest and Iaşi the same year as did the 1919 English edition of SCL. As regards the reception of Eliot’s works in Cluj, the number of copies held increased after the union with Romania, with a particular focus on SM, of which six editions were acquired between 1917 and 1939.27 It seems that Eliot was really famous in Romania at the turn of the century, and her work was given as a worthy example to follow by the rising Romanian writers. Sanielevici, who must have widely read and enjoyed Eliot’s fiction (he spent a few years in Germany, which would explain his exposure to Eliot’s work being larger than that of other critics), returned to Eliot again in his 1920 article ‘Ce a însemnat “Curentul nou” de la 1906’ (What “the new trend” of 1906 was). This was published on the front page of the new version of the literary journal Curentul nou, which he restarted in the same year, the journal having been discontinued for a while.28 In the article, Sanielevici criticizes maudlin romantic fiction and supports a moral, healthy kind of literature which presents ‘ordinary, persistent work, tranquil family life, honesty, economy, sobriety, diligence, sensitivity and delicate feelings’ – in other words, ‘the classical realism’ which may be found in its ‘most accomplished form’ in Dickens’s and Eliot’s fiction (Sanielevici 1920).29 The only Romanian writer who, like Eliot, ‘managed to raise ordinary people’s life to an ideal, by means of a deep understanding of life and deep love for humankind, without falling into conventionality or giving up social criticism’30 was Duiliu Zamfirescu (Sanielevici 1920). Zamfirescu is once again seen as walking in Eliot’s footsteps. The turn of the century also witnessed the beginning of the feminist movement in Romania. Young ladies who were fortunate enough to do their studies in France or Germany were eager to spread their freshly acquired 27

SM, Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1917; Berlin: Internationale Bibliothek, 1921; New York, London, Toronto: E. P. Dutten, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1925; London, Toronto, New York: E. P. Dutten, J. M. Dent and Sons, 1928; London, Toronto, New York: Longmans, 1936; Paris: Nelson, 1939 (in French). 28 Curentul nou (The new trend) was a literary periodical first published in Galaţi in 1906, and then, after a period of interruptions, in Bucureşti in 1920 (Editura Librariei H. Steinberg). Sanielevici’s article was issued in the first number of the periodical in 1920. 29 ‘o literaturǎ sǎnǎtoasǎ care sǎ propage munca regulatǎ şi stǎruitoare, viaţa liniştitǎ de familie, cinstea, economia, sobrietatea, hǎrnicia, sentimentele delicate […] realismul classic […] ȋn forma desǎvârşitǎ’. 30 ‘Dickens şi Eliot, cari printr-o largǎ ȋnţelegere a vieţii şi printr-o adâncǎ iubire de oameni au reusit sǎ ridice la rangul de ideal viaţa obicinuitǎ a oamenilor simpli, fǎrǎ a cǎdea ȋn convenţionalism şi fǎrǎ a renunţa la critica socialǎ’.

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George Eliot in Romania   355 feminist views on their return to their country. They struggled for equal opportunities, education for peasant girls and poor women, and for the emancipation of women in general. To these ends they used the writings of John Stuart Mill and the English suffragettes, among whom Maria Rosetti (born Mary Grant, 1819–93), the wife of an important Romanian politician, had been a leading figure. The young feminists at the turn of the century, including Constanţa Dunca Schian, Eleonora Stratilescu and Elena Bogdan, also looked for inspirational iconic women writers from Western European literature, whose life and work they used to support their ideas. In this context, Eliot became the symbol of freedom of mind, intelligence, creativity and a successful career led in spite of the strict limitations of Victorian England in this regard. Feminism in Romania was seen as an example of modernity, ‘the most important social issue’, and ‘a life and death question’31 for the progress of the country (Dunca Schian 1904, 9).32 Eugenia Scriban’s ‘Femeia ȋn literaturǎ’ (Women in literature), published in two parts in Revista idealistǎ (The idealist review) in 1907, introduces the reading public to short biographies of famous women writers. Among the women presented, along with Mme de Lafayette, Mme de Sevigné, Mme de Staël and Elizabeth Browning, is Eliot. It is no wonder that, spurred by the rising feminist movement, Eleonora Stratilescu, a Romanian woman who had obtained her PhD at the University of Berlin, in 1914 published an entire book on the life and works of Eliot. In writing it she used the 14-volume edition of Eliot’s work (‘The Warwick Edition’) published by Blackwood in 1907 (Stratilescu 1914, 7), as she acknowledges in her introductory chapter. This means that, although her first encounter with Eliot had been through the French translation (6), she eventually managed to read her novels in the original. She also claims that her study on Eliot’s work was the first of this kind, which may hold true as far as the European reception of the author is concerned (7).33 Stratilescu’s study discusses Eliot’s life, the nature of her talent, her themes and characters, and her treatments of the woman issue, religion and Zionism. It describes Eliot as a writer with a deep sense of reality (35) who shows exceptional psychological insight in depicting her characters (30), and manifests strong sympathy for the poor, ordinary people on whose life she focuses (34). She is aesthetically superior to Dickens (6), and, generally, singular in her knowledge and treatment of religion, philosophy, science and politics. Her way of representing the truth is accurate and scientific, without

31

‘cea mai important chestiune socialǎ’, ‘o chestiune de viatǎ şi de moarte’. Constanţa Dunca Schian graduated in pedagogy from the Sorbonne and was a teacher at a renowned high school in Bucureşti. She held conferences on feminism and wrote about it, claiming to have brought feminism to Romania (28). In reality, feminism had been brought to Romania as early as the mid-nineteenth-century by Maria Rosetti (born Mary Grant), who married a Romanian political leader (C. A. Rosetti) and then lived in Romania for most of her married life. 33 The first biographical study of Eliot was George Willis Cooke’s George Eliot: A Critical Study of her Life, Writings and Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1883). 32

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356   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe either dwelling too much on the ugly side of life, or embellishing it in a non-realistic manner (36). Stratilescu divides her study into two parts: the first describes Eliot’s life and work; the second discusses the novels. After a reference to Eliot’s major themes and characters, she analyzes in detail the themes of love and marriage, feminism and social problems. The first two topics represent an important part in her study, because they give Stratilescu the opportunity to link Eliot’s fiction and feminism with her own views on the topic, and to emphasize the extent to which feminism was understood and accepted in Romania at the time. For instance, Stratilescu uses the character of Maggie Tulliver to support Eliot’s and her own view that equality between man and woman is nothing other than reciprocity in love and mutual respect. Stratilescu shows the superiority of Eliot’s treatment of the theme of love and marriage since, according to her, she reveals the spiritual and psychological side of love, whereas many male writers and philosophers of the time (for example Ruskin and Schopenhauer) concentrated on the sexual attraction of the people concerned (Stratilescu 1914, 57–58). In contrast to Maggie, whose dilemma between love and duty is ‘solved’ at the end by her tragic death (74–75), Romola is the dutiful wife who rebels because she misses her husband’s trust and respect (78–79). In creating this character, Eliot is compared to Ibsen, whose Nora is described as having much in common with Romola (Stratilescu 1914, 80). After pointing out Eliot’s admiration for the feminist women of her time (Margaret Fuller-Osolli, Mary Wollstonecraft, Fredrika Bremer, Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale and Rosa Bonheur, 81), Stratilescu summarizes the writer’s own views, as reflected in her novels, articles and letters, which she herself shares. Thus, women’s emancipation cannot be effective without the guarantee of economic independence, a proper understanding of true values and, especially, without a suitable education (82). Stratilescu stresses Eliot’s wish to see the projected colleges for women open in Cambridge and London, as well as her mistrust of such major social changes for women as obtaining the right to vote (88). Eliot’s major and minor female characters are analyzed with regard to their observance of house duties, their unfulfilled desire to be better educated and their imperative drives towards independence and freedom of mind (89–98). Eliot’s portrayal of the English social classes is described as accurate. The examples taken from her novels are correlated with the social problems existing in Romania at the turn of the century, Stratilescu’s purpose being to encourage the Romanian public to read the kind of fiction which offers an excellent portrayal of society, as Eliot’s does. The last part of the study presents Eliot’s use of, and approach to, religion and the sensitive topics of Judaism and Zionism. Stratilescu acknowledges that Eliot’s religious beliefs were influenced by Auguste Compte, and showed great ‘freedom of mind’34 (111) – but she also discusses Eliot’s deep knowledge of the Bible and her faith in honesty, morality, love of humanity and the continuous struggle to reach perfection (112–13). It is well known that Eliot was evangelical in adolescence, but grew more and more detached 34

‘libertatea minţii’.

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George Eliot in Romania   357 from Christianity, until she became an atheist. Stratilescu does not perceive her transformation as being from a believer to a non-believer; she considers that Eliot’s religious creed is more authentic in her later novels and articles because, although she was a free thinker, she religiously believed in the highest moral values, which are more important than any declared creed. In this regard, Eliot’s treatment of Judaism in DD is seen as substantiating her belief that there is no reason why the Christians should hate Jews, and why the latter should not be entitled to have their own country like any other nation (116). Although Stratilescu praises DD, and is particularly moved by the ending of the novel (when Daniel goes East to look for the country which could become his home, 116), she shares Eliot’s views on Judaism only up to a point. She rejects Eliot’s criticisms of the Romanians for denying citizenship to Jews for religious reasons, claiming that they did their best to solve the Jewish problem. In her essay ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ in ITS (1879), Eliot tackles the Jewish problem and discusses questions of citizenship, Zionism and the possible effects of any limiting clauses concerning the Jews’ rights to live in an adopted country or to have their own land. Towards the end of the essay, Eliot claims that ‘the Roumanians are thought to have shown an enviable wisdom in giving them [the Jews] as little chance as possible’ (Eliot 1879, 146). This assertion – the only reference to the Romanian people in Eliot’s work – proves that the writer was very much familiar with the Jewish problem and, in particular, with the Romanian constitution, which in an earlier form gave citizenship rights only to Christians. Her mention of the Romanians was generated by a specific historical fact: when in 1859 Moldavia and Wallachia joined to form Romania, the European central powers approved of the union on a few conditions. One such clause was the new country opening its gates to a large number of emigrating Jews, which the government accepted. As the newcomers were literate, unlike most of the local people, they were offered jobs in the administration, and a large majority were employed as land tenants. This led to a growing tension between the peasants and the newly-appointed tenants, which ended in the peasants’ uprising of 1907. Eliot’s information about the Romanian post-union constitution was only partially correct, as the article concerning citizenship rights was repealed in 1878, a year before the essay’s publication. This may be why Stratilescu directly contradicts Eliot’s statement and passionately explains how open the Romanians were, having agreed to support the Jews as best they could. Eliot’s assertion about the Romanians is the only point in Stratilescu’s study with which she strongly disagrees. Eliot’s novels had not been translated into Romanian before 1940, the only exception being the excerpt from MF published in 1893. In this context, Stratilescu’s monograph is indeed exceptional. MF and SM were translated by G. Dem Curteanu in 1942 and 1943 respectively, bringing Eliot to the attention of what was by that time a far larger reading public. Besides the Romanian version of her two novels, there were new acquisitions of her work in English in the libraries: R (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), SM (Leipzig: Paul List, 1957) and SM and LV (London: Oxford University Press, 1958). M entered the libraries in 1961 together with the

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358   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe new edition in English of MF (1961), both published in London by Oxford University Press. The next important period for Eliot’s reception was 1960–80. MF was given a new Romanian version in 1964 by Catinca Ralea and Eugenia Cȋncea. This was published in the most prestigious literary series, Classics of World Literature, under the title Moara de pe Floss. The novel was prefaced by Sorin Alexandrescu, a leading Romanian academic who also wrote a comprehensive, well-documented introduction. In 1969 a new translation of SM (by Mihai Radulescu) was published; FH was translated in 1973 (by Al. Pascu and St. Avadanei under the title Felix Holt Radicalul); and AB and M were rendered into Romanian in 1977, the former by Dana Crivǎţ and the latter by Eugen Marian. All of the Romanian versions of Eliot’s novels stick closely to the original text and manage to render both the content and atmosphere of her period. The language used corresponds to literary and spoken Romanian at the turn of the twentieth century, with its various registers indicative of the characters’ social status. The major focus of the translators was to preserve the Englishness of the texts as much as possible; the names and place names are in the original, and footnotes to explain historical or cultural information are used. However, to make the novels easier to read and understand, the translators also at times used Romanian phrases and sayings as the equivalent of English ones. Unlike Stratilescu’s study, which focuses on recurrent themes, the characters’ psychological profiles, social problems and feminism, Sorin Alexandrescu’s ‘Preface’ to MF (Moara de pe Floss) offers the Marxist perspective that was officially required at the time. Alexandrescu’s analysis is based on the books to which he had access at the time, besides Eliot’s novels in English. In his criticism of Eliot’s work, he disregards Stratilescu’s study, considering it ‘superficial and naïve’ (Alexandrescu 1964, 28),35 and points out Auguste Compte’s positivism as an important influence on Eliot’s work. Eliot is described as being intellectually rooted in her time, with extensive philosophical readings, a deep understanding of provincial life and the lower classes, and as preaching a kind of ‘religion of the heart’ or ‘religion of humanity’36 (10), which replaces limited Christian dogmas in her work. Yet, indebted as she was to Compte’s positivism and, also, to Bentham’s and Mill’s utilitarianism, she also believes in the individual and his work, ‘the major stimulus of human actions and progress’37 (9). According to the accepted Marxist approaches of the 1960s, the writers viewed as exceptional and ahead of their time were those who saw that the only solution to the social conflicts depicted in their fiction was revolution. Anything short of this was looked upon as moderate and limited. That is why Eliot’s approach to life is described as fitting a moderate capitalist doctrine (9) – understandable in her time, but a limitation of her work (10). In Alexandrescu’s view, although Eliot was seen as a free thinker and a 35

‘superficial şi naiv’. ‘religie a inimii,’ ‘religie a umanitǎţii’. 37 ‘stimul principal al acţiunilor umane şi al progresului ȋn genere’. 36

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George Eliot in Romania   359 non-religious woman (a highly positive thing for the Marxists), she failed to be prophetic and revolutionary. In other words, she only partially fitted the pattern of Socialist Realism: her heroes are positive and idealistic, but lack a convincing rebellious drive. The French bibliography used by the critic makes him describe Eliot as a realist writer, more in the line of Balzac, with Naturalist nuances (Alexandrescu 1964, 10). Eliot’s discussion of the mirror technique in AB is explained not as her individual perspective on dealing with her characters, but as related to the French Naturalist novel (12). However, what saves Eliot from strong Naturalist features, according to Alexandrescu, is her love of her fellow-beings and tolerance of their shortcomings. Eliot is concerned with reflecting the life of ordinary people, whom she observes in an impartial, objective way, whilst also showing deep sympathy for their sufferings (13). This view coincides, up to a point, with Stratilescu’s, and opposes Costache’s and Constantinescu’s, which separates Eliot from Naturalist doctrine as understood at the time by Romanian critics. Alexandrescu presents Eliot as much softer and less ardent in her overtones in comparison to Dickens and Thackeray, more in the line of Meredith and Hardy (9). However, by continuing ‘the strong tradition of the English critical realism’38 (11), Eliot consolidates the realist movement with conviction and passion, which brings her closer to Dickens than to Zola, the French Naturalist. In his description of Eliot’s novels, Alexandrescu focuses on the key points of the Marxist approach, discussing the texts in relation to the capitalist mode of production, and to the existence or otherwise of class struggle. Thus, SCL prefigures a rural, patriarchal, pre-capitalist world (14); AB and SM reveal ‘the deep moral deficiencies of the aristocracy […] placed in contrast with the purity and honesty of ordinary people’39 (17); MF fails in pursuing a consistent critique of the social dimensions of the society, being more interested in illustrating its moral dimensions (23); R is untrue to life; and DD is even more confusing and unrealistic than R (25). FH is preferred to all the novels listed above since, although it is less well written (due to its intricate plot, impossible situations and excessive mystery), it is ‘critically dealing with the major social problems of her time’40 (26). Contrary to Eliot’s intention of making Felix Holt a man in revolt, she only succeeded in delineating moderate beliefs and conduct. He is not a revolutionary like Stephen Blackpool (in Dickens’s Hard Times) or John Barton (in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton). Nonetheless, he is evidence of Eliot’s genuine belief in the betterment of the human soul and mind (Alexandrescu 1964, 26), which places her alongside Dickens. Finally, M is described as well written, its fundamental merit being its organization on ‘four narrative levels with as many character couples surrounded 38

‘puternica tradiţie a realismului critic englez’. ‘deficienţele morale ale nobililor […] puse ȋn contrast cu puritatea şi onestitatea unui om simplu’. 40 ‘exprimarea atitudinii critice a lui George Eliot faţǎ de marile probleme sociale ale epocii sale’. 39

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360   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe by numerous other secondary or episodic characters’41 (Alexandrescu 1964, 26–27). With regard to theme, M takes the reader back to recent history and provincial life, reminding one of AB and SM. This time Eliot looks back to the past with the wisdom of someone who has lived through it. Eliot’s work is again seen as ‘a landmark in the development of the English critical realist novel’, with the writer managing ‘a minute and clear description of British society […] with its painful contradictions’42 (Alexandrescu 1964, 27). There are a few weak parts in her work, but these are looked on as minor aspects which cannot overshadow the main message: ‘a strong plea for people’s happiness, a goal which should not be held back by any social or moral impediment’43 (27). She is also praised for ‘her refined sense of observation, her deep knowledge of human responses in the most diverse situations, her ability to create characters typical of a certain period of the English society, her serious, yet gentle lyricism’44 (27). She is praised too for her psychological analysis and narrative technique, although these last two seem to be left suspended because they are not further discussed in the preface. To complete Eliot’s reception in the 1960s, there is a two-page entry concerning her life and work in the Dicţionar al Literaturii Engleze (Dictionary of English literature) (1970), coordinated by a group of Romanian academics and published in Bucharest in 1970 (124–26). This time the emphasis is on the psychological and moral dimensions of Eliot’s novels (126). R, FH and DD are given particular credit, while M is presented as her masterpiece, with a narrative flow comparable to that of Lev Tolstoy (125). For the first time, Eliot is discussed primarily as pioneering the psychological novel and as having had a strong influence on both Henry James and Marcel Proust (125–26). The latest introduction to Eliot’s novels of which this author is aware is that by Eugen Marian, who translated M in 1977. To his ample preface he added a detailed chronology, which not only reintroduces Eliot to the public but places her in the social and political context of her age. Influenced by the general view on Eliot in the 1960s, Marian does not deny her ‘all-encompassing realist vision’45 (Marian 1977, xviii), but also describes her as a precursor of Modernism (xvi) – especially in M, which he considers to be her best literary work. He also discusses Eliot’s attacks on Dickens’s artificiality and Gaskell’s sensationalism as proofs of her genius. The very publication of this translation singled out M as Eliot’s masterpiece, which may be why no more new translations of her work have been made since then. The 1977 Romanian version of

planuri narrative, cu tot atâtea cupluri de personaje, ȋnconjurate de numeroase altele, secundare sau episodice’. 42 ‘un moment semnificativ ȋn dezvoltarea realismului critic englez,’ ‘o cercetare atentǎ şi lucidǎ a societǎţii britanice […] cu contradicţiile ei dureroase’. 43 ‘o adevǎratǎ pledoarie pentru puritatea şi fericirea oamenilor, ce trebuie realizate ȋn ciuda oricǎror piedici sociale sau morale’. 44 ‘fineţea observaţiilor, cunoaşterea profundǎ a reacţiilor sufleteşti ale omului ȋn situaţiile cele mai diverse, capacitatea de a creiona personaje tipice pentru o anumitǎ fazǎ a soicetǎţii engleze, lirismul grav şi duios’. 45 ‘viziunea realistǎ a tot cuprinzǎtoare’. 41 ‘patru

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George Eliot in Romania   361 AB (trans. Dana Crivǎţ) was republished in 1993, followed by second edition in 1996 by a different publisher under the title Pasiune şi destin (Passion and destiny). Eugen Marian’s version of M, first printed in 1977, was republished in 2010. At the turn of the twenty-first century there was a sudden increase in academic interest in Eliot’s works, which materialized in the publication of three studies in English. The first two were included in a series of studies in nineteenth-century British literature published in Cluj and dedicated to students of English: Sanda Berce’s George Eliot: Character as Plot – A Study in Narrative (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1986) and Ileana Galea’s George Eliot: The Lucid Reflector (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 2000). The third was Ioana Iacob’s Otherness and the Quest for Identity: An Epitome of George Eliot’s novels (Iaşi: Lumen, 2007). The Romanian reception of George Eliot is, therefore, both contributory to and dependent on the literary movements and critical approaches operating at various times in the territories concerned. Her work has always been praised, but also used to support certain literary tendencies, and movements such as poporanism, feminism and socialist, critical or idealist realism. Her works have been read mainly by an intellectual elite. The one novel of Eliot’s which has brought commercial profit in recent decades is AB, largely due to its publication, under a different title, by a publishing house focused on popular literature. Besides the fact that R, DD and ITS have never been translated into Romanian, none of her other novels besides M has been republished in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

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20

The Reception of George Eliot in Greece Georgia Farinou-Malamatari

If by reception we mean translation and extended critical discussion, then Eliot’s presence in Greece up to the 1980s is almost non-existent. In fact there is only one translation, of ‘Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story’, published in the eminent literary periodical Estía in 1887 and in book form under another title in 1930. Ten other translations have been published since the 1980s, and concentrated at the beginning of twenty-first century. These comprise two translations of SM, by Yannis Spandonis (1980) and Grigoris Kondylis (2007c); one of MF, by Elli Philokyprou (O neromylos ston Floss, 1988); three of LV, by Argyro Mandoglou (To peplo, 1997), Alina Paschalidi (Anasikonondas to peplo, 1998) and Yorgos Barouxis (To anypsomeno peplo, 2007d); two of M, both with substantial introductions, notes and bibliography, by Evie Georgouli (2003) and Cleopatra Leondaritou (M: Mia meleti tis eparchiakis zois, 2007b); one of AmB (Oi kakotychies tou aidesimotatou Amos Barton), by Kaiti Oikonomou (2006); and one of ‘Evangelical Teaching’ (‘Evangeliki Didaskalia’), by Aris Berlis (2012). Almost all the translators are professionals who have extensively translated canonical and/or popular novels from English. Some of them are themselves novelists, having written Modernist (Mandoglou), sentimental (Oikonomou) or historical (Spandonis) novels. Two of them are poets (Paschalidou and Georgouli), one is an academic (Philokyprou) working on twentieth-century Greek poetry, and two others (Berlis and Leondaritou) have written essays or studies on Odysseas Elytis and Nikos Kazantzakis respectively. In 2013, Kondylis translated into Greek Peter Mackridge’s Language and National Identity in Greece 1766–1976 (2009). From the above we can draw certain conclusions. On the one hand, even today, SCL has not been translated in its entirety; neither has AB, not to mention Eliot’s late novels. On the other hand, almost all the translated texts have been translated more than once. The lack of translations of Eliot in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is in accordance with the generally low percentage of translations into Greek of English texts (9.42 per cent) in comparison to French texts (64.94 per cent), due to insufficient command of the English language (Kasinis 2006, xxiii). The recent increase in translations of Eliot is part of the general boom in translation over the past decade. M and LV seem to be the most favoured texts, apparently because the former

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The Reception of George Eliot in Greece   363 is considered Eliot’s masterpiece and the latter (apart from its size) her least typical book, one prone to various interpretations and allegorization. In the rest of this Chapter I limit myself to Eliot’s reception in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 This study will examine both some scattered references to and short articles concerning the author and some more extended critiques, together with her indirect presence in Kostis Palamás’s criticism of the Greek short story output at the time. What is surprising is that although AB has never been translated into Greek, it was read in the original or in French translation by several Greek authors and critics – certainly Dimitrios Vikélas, Kostis Palamás and C. P. Cavafy, who also owned a copy of R (Karampini-Iatrou 2003, 61; 2012, 280). Most significantly, even if there is no direct proof that a wider literary circle (including Emmanuel Roḯdis, Grigorios Xenópoulos, Nikolaos Episkopópoulos and Kallirhoe Parrén) read Eliot’s novels, it is certain that all of these were informed about the French criticism of her work and refer to it directly or implicitly. Episkopópoulos later made a career in France under the name Nicolas Ségur, and was an avid reader of French newspapers and periodicals with good, though not always deep, knowledge of French criticism. He reads Eliot (between 1894 and 1900 in Asty) sometimes as a writer of moeurs de province – exercising an influence on Argyris Eftaliótis, a Greek author who lived in England – and sometimes as a writer of novels in the climate of positivism, in order to prove Comte’s theory (Episkopópoulos 2011, 146, 661 and 295 respectively). As a result, Eliot figures in representative lists of the European canon (‘The great art is still the art of Cervantes, Walter Scott, Elliot [sic], Dickens, Balzac, Sand, Dostoevsky and Daudet’,2 as Xenópoulos stated in 1899 (2002, 138)), and of the realist canon, together with Stendhal, Balzac, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (Palamás [1936], 14: 354), and of women writers. In the last case she coexists sometimes with Madame de Staël and Madame de Noailles (Palamás [1925], 14: 158), and at other times with Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Gaskell or Harriet Beecher Stowe (Xenópoulos, in Rizaki 2007, 93). Most often, though, she is mentioned together with George Sand, also a popular author in Greece, five of whose novels had been published in book form by the end of nineteenth century (Lalagianni 2005). 1

There are also a few articles containing references to George Eliot later in the twentieth century, such as N. B. Nikoletopoulos (‘Φιλολογικαί Χρονολογίαι: 22/9/1856: Το πρώτο διήγημα της Γεωργίας Έλιοτ’, Νέα Εστία, Athens, 28 (1940): 1228), or issues devoted to women writers in whose life and work the impact of Eliot has been noted (e.g. Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Πώς έγινα συγγραφέας’, trans. Kostas Poletis, H λέξη, Athens, 69–70 (1987): 912–13 (first published as ‘Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée’ in 1958)), as well as Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou’s study, ‘Aquatic Spaces and Women’s Places: A Comparative Reading of George Eliot’s MF and Alexandros Papadiamandis’s Η Φόνισσα’ (BMGS, Birmingham, 29.2 (2005): 187–202). 2 ‘Η μεγάλη τέχνη εξακολουθεί ακόμη να είνε η του Κερβάντη, του Βάλτερ Σκωτ, της Έλλιοτ, του Δίκενς, του Βαλζάκ, της Σάνδης, του Δοστογιέφσκη και του Δωδέ.’

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364   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Apart from a simple mention, there are some short reviews of Eliot (almost always spelt as Elliot, and sometimes in Montégut’s French way as Elliott) in which the opinions of French critics are cited. Starting from vague mentions of the critics’ names or from quotations I came across that lacked an exact reference to a book or article, I have attempted to identify the source of the quotations. The research brought up some interesting points regarding the selective use and the recontextualization of the foreign sources. In an anonymous article (almost certainly written by the editor Kalirrhoe Parrén) in the feminist Efimeris ton Kyrión (Newspaper of the ladies) of 27 April 1897, under the title ‘Georgia Eliot’, there is an extended comparison between George Sand and Eliot. It is first noted that both write under male pseudonyms which are nevertheless rendered in Greek by the feminine form ‘Georgia’, and then their similarity is pointed out. This similarity lies in ‘the sincere and characteristic sympathy which Eliot, similar to Sand, exhibits in the psychological study of the simplest and commonest types of human life’3 (Parrén 1897, 1). From this point onwards they differ because each of them follows the characteristics of her own nation which are related or derive from the characteristics of the respective religious dogma. George Sand is considered as a Catholic, Eliot as a Protestant, and for this reason Eliot exerts ‘a moral supervision’ on the characters who have a strong sentiment of morality, ‘a developed inner life […] They examine their conscience most frequently, they repent and they become better’4 (Parrén 1897, 2). The article concludes with the wish ‘that more works of English literature be translated into Greek because their educational power, without being scholastic, is immensely more salutary than the French’5 (2) which dominated the Greek reading public. The article turns out to be a selective translation of a certain part of Jules Lemaître’s ‘De l’influence recénte des littératures du Nord’ (‘The recent influence of northern literature’) (1896, 229–31, 260) whose main (nationalist) thesis was that what the French were currently admiring in Northern literatures (Scandinavian, Russian and English as represented by Eliot) had long been part of their own literary tradition. Lemaître’s article exerted a significant influence in France on the debate between literary cosmopolitanism and ‘literary chauvinism’ (Barry 1973, 548). On the other hand, Parrén’s article was written a year after a controversy in Greece which started with a provocative article by Emmanuel Roḯdis under the title ‘Ai grafousai Ellinides’ (‘Greek women who write’) – pointedly avoiding the phrase ‘women writers’ or ‘women authors’. There the author of Pope Joan, who generally held women writers in low esteem, suitable only

3 ‘εις την ειλικρινή και ιδιάζουσαν συμπάθειαν, ην αύτη [Eliot] ως και εκείνη

[Sand] επιδεικνύει εις την ψυχολογικήν μελέτην των απλουστέρων και συνηθεστέρων τύπων της ανθρωπίνης ζωής’. 4 ‘ηθικήν επίβλεψιν’ […] ‘ενδόμυχον τινά ζωήν ανεπτυγμένην’ [...] εξετάζουν συχνότατα την συνείδησίν των, μετανοούν, γίνονται καλύτεροι’. 5 ‘Να μεταφράζωνται περισσότερα Αγγλικά παρά γαλλικά μυθιστορήματα εις την γλώσσαν μας [...διότι] η μορφωτική δύναμίς των, χωρίς να είναι σχολαστική, είναι απείρως ευεργετικωτέρα της Γαλλικής’.

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The Reception of George Eliot in Greece   365 to write children’s books, appreciated those women who wrote in a woman’s style without envying men’s laurels, amongst whom he included Eliot. He contrasted these to ‘androgynaikes’ (masculine women) – presumably correspondent to Blue Stockings such as Madame de Staël and Dora d’Istria – who cherished male ambitions and attempts at grandiloquence and dogmatism (Roḯdis 1978, 5: 121–31). In the discussion that followed in various periodicals and newspapers, Eliot appeared at least twice. The first occasion was in a comment by the journalist and art critic D. I. Kalogerópoulos about her large masculine face proving Lombroso’s theory of the female genius as ‘in fact a kind of man in disguise’ (cited in Rizaki 2007, 191–92). In the second she appears as a specimen of the female canon: according to Parrén’s immediate and ironic reply in her article ‘Mr Roḯdis and Greek women who write’, Roḯdis ‘does not tell us what heights male literary production has reached, how many Goethes and Shakespeares and Renans and Balzacs […] there are in Greece [...] in order to have the right to lament and despair because the female writing Greeks are not all Elliot and Sand and Madame de Chevigné’6 ([1896] cited in Rizaki 2007, 224). After this attack one would expect that Parrén’s 1897 article, entirely dedicated to Eliot, would move along the same lines and give more information on Eliot’s (female) eminence. Instead, the brief portrait of the English author and the more extended but still fragmentary comparison to George Sand on Christian dogma leaves the whole matter in a state of uncertainty. It neither enters into discussion on the woman-writer (the controversy of the previous year in Greece), nor joins the debate on ‘voreiomania’ (‘nordomanie’, i.e. the strong interest in Northern literature) which had also started in Greece in 1895 and intensified some years later (Palamás [1895], 2: 374–78). In May 1903 a second short article appeared in the same periodical under the title ‘George Eliot’. It was written by the learned and apparently Englishspeaking Eirini Nikolaḯdou, with the reference at the end ‘According to Edmond [sic] Gosse’. This is almost a gist translation of two pages from Gosse’s Short History of Modern English Literature (1897, 369–70). Eliot is praised for her early work, in which she stages ‘bygone provincial manners’, but the praise diminishes when it comes to MF and SM, in which there is a split of the author into two personae: on one hand, the close observer of nature and human sentiment, and on the other, the philosopher and moral teacher who imposes her ideas with a sophisticated and ornate rhetoric. She receives much less praise for her last novels, in which the emphasis on the second persona (the philosopher) outweighs the provincial first. Citing Gosse’s unflattering opinion of Eliot, indicative of the indisposition of a certain group of Modernists towards Eliot at the beginning of twentieth century, Nikolaḯdou and the ‘feminist’ periodical exhibit an awareness of the contemporary criticism without a full understanding of it. ποίον σημείον ευρίσκεται σήμερον η ανδρική φιλολογία, πόσους Γκαίτε και Σαίκσπηρ και Ρενάν και Μπαλζάκ [...] αριθμεί αύτη, όπως έχει το δικαίωμα να θρηνή και να απελπίζεται διότι αι γράφουσαι Ελληνίδες δεν είναι όλαι Έλλιοτ και Σάνδαι και Σεβινιέ’.

6 ‘εις

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366   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Let us move to the three more extended approaches to Eliot’s work, starting with the aforementioned translation of the second story in SCL: MG. This was translated from the French and introduced by the educationalist and man of letters Aristotelis Kourtídis in 1887 under the less scandalous title ‘O efimerios Gilfil’ (‘Pastor Gilfil’); the French title was ‘Le roman de M. Gilfil’. When the translation was published in book form in 1930, in slightly simplified language, the title changed, apparently in order to meet the expectations of a new readership. The new title, Prin profthasi n’ anthisi! (Before it could put forth blossom!), comes from a phrase in the last chapter before the epilogue: ‘in the struggle to put forth a blossom [it died]’. We cannot know for certain the criteria for this selection but we can assume some of them. The first is external: the French translation, Scènes de la vie du clergé: Tribulations du révérend A. Barton; Roman de M. Gilfil, by A.-F. d’Albert-Durade, had been published in the same year (1887b). The second belongs to the history of literature and the particular appeal that the term scenes (in literary and non-literary texts) exerted in Greece at that time. The term bears not so much the theatrical connotations as the Balzacian meaning of ‘the studies of morals which form the general history of Society, what our ancestors would have called its chronicle’ (Balzac 1972, 150).7 The title of this collection creates the expectation that it will present the life of provincial priests in combination with a sentimental melodrama. That is why the translator in his short preface maintains that, quite apart from showing the writer’s genius, the story matches the self-containment of the descriptive parts with action which unfailingly maintains the reader’s interest. It is fair to assume that the Greek readership was moved by the melodramatic love story rather than by the personality and the sentiments of the provincial priest, who did not resemble his Greek Orthodox counterpart concerning love affairs.8 The change of title after 43 years marks a shift of emphasis in the direction of the melodramatic element. The same translation was published with a different preface on each occasion. The short introductory note in the journal Estía, entitled ‘Georgia Elliot’, refers to the author’s erudition, good reading knowledge of six languages, translations from the German and the Latin, and articles in the Westminster Review. Her turn to literature is vaguely attributed to the ‘encouragement of a friend who was dubious about the success of her attempt’9 (1887a, 655). Only the titles of her first three novels are mentioned, which place Eliot in the realist school and differentiate her from Dickens and Thackeray (Montégut 1883, 92)

7

For a discussion of Eliot and Balzac, see John Rignall, George Eliot: European Novelist (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 67–84. 8 Although village priests are expected to be married in Greece, Greek fiction does not describe them in their personal relations but always in their contact with their flock. The Greek Orthodox clergy, especially the rural ones, share some of the qualities of George Eliot’s rural clergy: they are tolerant, undogmatic and interested in the anthropological rather than the theological aspect of religion. 9 ‘κατά προτροπήν φίλου αυτής, και τούτου αμφιβάλλοντος περί της ευδοκιμήσεώς της’.

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The Reception of George Eliot in Greece   367 because she is the only one who faces reality with a gaze full of sympathy – as the long quotation from the seventeenth chapter of AB, cited by Kourtídis, proves: ‘I find a source of delicious sympathy […] the precious necessaries of the life to her […] There are few prophets […] rarities. […] Neither are the picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals half so frequent as your common labourer, who gets his own bread, and eats it vulgarly but creditably with his own pocket-knife’10 (Eliot 1859, 1: 236–38). The last paragraph is dedicated to the conjectures that were put forward when she published her first two works pseudonymously. When the translation was published in book form, the eight-page preface carried the title ‘Georgia Eliot: Kritiki viografia’ (‘Georgia Eliot: A critical biography’) and included the narrative of Eliot’s relation with G. H. Lewes (Montégut 1883, 88–89). Kourtídis mentions the scandal from the point of view of Victorian society, but he outlines the moral dimension of Eliot’s choice. He pointed to her female need for affection and protection, which she herself recognized, comparing herself to ivy (Schérer 1891, 257). On the other hand, emphasis is given to Lewes’s crucial contribution to the realization and exercise of her talent. It is worth noting that, as a member of the panel of judges of a short story competition in 1895, Kourtídis said that he considered such competitions as a catalyst of and external occasion for the manifestation of genius. Among other examples he mentioned Eliot: What else would Miss Mary Ann Evans have published other than a lot of indigestible essays in erudite English reviews, if she had not met this idiosyncratic philosopher and critic George Lewes? Without him she could never have written novels and would not have assumed a position as the most pre-eminent novelist of the century, and the world would not have a Georgia [sic] Eliot to admire.11 (cited in Papakostas 1982, 202–03)

In both prefaces, Kourtídis relies heavily on the studies of two French critics who praised Eliot’s work in more than one lengthy study. The first was Emil Montégut, especially in his ‘George Eliot: L’âme et le talent’ (1883). The second was Edmond Schérer in his 1878 article ‘George Eliot: “Daniel Deronda”’, and in his long essay of 1885, ‘George Eliot’, written on the occasion of Eliot’s first biography by her second husband (both in Schérer πηγήν θελκτικής συμπαθείας [...] άτινα είνε πολυτιμότατα εις αυτήν δια τας ανάγκας του βίου [...] Ολίγοι προφήται [...] σπάνια όντα. Οι γραφικοί λαζαρόνοι και οι δραματικοί εγληματίαι [in French: criminels dramatiques] δεν είνε τόσον συχνοί, όσον ο συνήθης γεωργός [laboureur ordinaire], όστις κερδαίνει εντίμως τον άρτον του και τρώγει αυτόν πεζώς [prosaïquement] κόπτων με το μαχαίριόν του.’ 11 ‘Η δε μις Μαρία Άννα Ήβανς τι άλλο ή σωρόν δυσχωνεύτων essays θα είχε δημοσιεύσει εις τας σοφάς αγγλικάς Επιθεωρήσεις, αν μη συνήντα τον ιδιότυπον εκείνον φιλόσοφον και κριτικόν Γεώργιον Λιούις; Άνευ αυτού ουδέποτε θα έγραφε μυθιστορήματα, και δεν θα καθίστατο η πρώτη μυθιστοριογράφος του αιώνος, ο δε κόσμος δεν θα είχε μίαν Γεωργίαν Έλιοτ να θαυμάζη.’ 10 ‘Ανευρίσκω

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368   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe 1891). What is interesting in these studies is the fact that both critics appreciate and highlight Eliot’s early work, which combines the sympathetic approach to the provincial community with the qualities of the thinker. Montégut attributed this kind of realism to the author’s Protestant origins (Montégut 1859, 876–77), while Schérer maintained that her success as a realist author was due to the fine combination of art and philosophy. ‘George Eliot,’ he writes in his article on DD cited by Kourtidis, ‘has created a kind in which she will have no successor, because we shall never again see the qualities of the thinker so combined with those of the artist. Hers is the novel of moral analysis’12 (Schérer 1891, 55, cited in Kourtidis 1887, 665). Let us shift the focus of our discussion to Dimitrios Vikélas, who was the first to read AB in the original. Vikélas is a representative type of the Greek diaspora, ‘unaccomplished businessman and man of letters’ as he modestly described himself (Vikélas 2001, title page), whose name is associated today with the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896. He spent a part of his life in England and France, and during his stay there kept in Greek ‘Notebooks of his readings’ (1854–70) which have recently been published. There, the first – among the few – novels to enthral him was AB. He reads it as soon as it is published in August 1859 and immediately writes down his impressions (Vikélas 2001, 197–203), before he reads the review in his favourite Edinburgh Review (‘Adam Bede’ (1859); cited in Vikélas 2001, 203). He begins his commentary by referring to the rumours and conjectures about the author’s sex, but excludes the possibility of the author being a woman because he does not think ‘that a woman can probe deeply into human character and dare examine so thoroughly and accurately human weakness’13 (197). He also makes some acute observations about the famous Chapter 17, writing that, despite its potential as an introductory chapter, this section contributes much more to the novel in its actual position. He additionally comments that the puzzling figure of the Magistrate at the beginning and end of the novel could be seen as an author-figure included as a painter might include himself in a painting. He also realizes that the novel invites a double reading: a forward-looking one to meet the demands of the plot, and a backward-looking one for reflection on certain ideas expressed in it (201). Although Vikélas is enthusiastic in his comments – ‘the best novel I have ever read’14 (197) – he wavers in his opinion. He likes the novel for not being Romantic (it does not cause ‘abstract surges towards the imaginary

Γεωργία Έλλιοτ”, γράφει ο επιφανής κριτικός Schérer, “εδημιούργησεν είδος εν ώ δεν θα έχη διάδοχον, διότι ουδέποτε πλέον θα ευρεθώσιν ούτω συνηνωμέναι αι έξοχοι αρεταί του φιλοσόφου μετά των εξόχων αρετών του καλλιτέχνου, όπως παραγάγωσιν το μυθιστόρημα της ηθικής αναλύσεως.”’ 13 ‘γυνή να ημπορή τόσον να εμβαθύνη εις τον ανθρώπινον χαρακτήρα και να τολμήση να εξετάση τόσον λεπτώς και να περιγράψη με τόσην ακρίβειαν τας αδυναμίας του ανθρώπου’. 14 ‘το καλήτερον μυθιστόρημα όπου ποτέ ανέγνωσα’. 12 ‘“Η

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The Reception of George Eliot in Greece   369 […] and a kind of feebleness’15 (197–98)) but for being ‘healthy, robust and vigorous’16 (198). This happens because ‘the author belongs to Wordsworth’s School which describes man as he is and not as he should be’.17 He claims that he himself belongs to the same school, and characterizes the novel as ‘Realistic’, to the extent that it does not ‘despise the usual phases of human life, everyday scenes, even common people as characters’18 (197). However, he raises his objections: he believes that, as in painting and drama, ‘scenes of an eminent character and exceptional men’19 (197) are through their virtue or vice technically more effective than common characters, since the outstanding also epitomizes the usual. In fact, although he admires AB, he proposes the reverse course of the one followed by Eliot: not the observable everyday reality and its idealization through sympathy, but the outstanding type which also includes the common. According to this reasoning, Vikélas admires ‘the characters which are so true and natural […] that one forgets that he is reading a novel’20 (202), but he reads them out of their provincial context. Even the rustic Mrs Poyser ‘with her colourful brand of homespun wisdom and proverbial wit who is felt to capture a mode of thinking representative of the rural past’ (McDonagh 2001, 41) is perceived by Vikélas as similar to his bourgeois mother with respect to the authority she exerts and the high esteem she enjoys. Three months later, Vikélas read Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi (The betrothed) in the Italian original (this time). He liked it, although it falls behind AB: Manzoni is more artificial than the pseudonymous George Eliot. They both have poetic sentiment and fertile imagination, but Manzoni does not have […] that truth which inspired me when I read AB. I Promessi Sposi is most sweet and attractive reading but one never forgets that one is reading a novel. AB on the other hand is the story of people that one knows.21 (2001, 209) οργασμούς προς το ανύπαρκτον [...] καχεξίαν τινα’. θαλερόν, εύρωστον’. 17 ‘Ο συγγραφεύς είναι της σχολής του Wordsworth, της σχολής, ήτις περιγράφει τον άνθρωπον ως είναι, και όχι ως έπρεπε να είναι’. Vikélas admired Wordsworth as ‘the true poet of the century’ (184) and used verses from ‘The Ruined Cottage’ (B 227–29) as an epigraph to one of his early poems, ‘Para ton Tamesin’ (‘By the Thames’, 1861). I suggest that Wordsworth’s ‘Realism’, which Vikélas discerns in relation to AB, lies both in the content of his poetry (‘nature’s unambitious underworld’ with its customs, sense of community, dialect, and beauty of life in its humblest aspect), and in the mode of its representation (honesty and faithfulness). It has been aptly remarked that the only template for the critics of her time ‘against which to test the truth of George Eliot’s depiction of rural life’ was ‘its timeless universality’, and in particular the ‘primacy of feeling’ (Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 155–56). 18 ‘να καταφρονή ο συγγραφεύς τας συνήθεις φάσεις του ανθρωπίνου βίου, τας καθημερινάς σκηνάς, τους χυδαίους έτι τύπους’. 19 ‘σκηναί εξόχου χαρακτήρος, άνθρωποι άνω του σωρού’. 20 ‘οι χαρακτήρες όλοι είναι τόσον αληθείς, τόσον φυσικοί [...] ώστε λησμονεί τις ότι αναγιγνώσκει μύθον’. 21 ‘Ο Manzoni βεβαίως είναι πλέον επιτηδευμένος από τον ψευδώνυμον George 15 ‘αφηρημένους 16 ‘υγιές,

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370   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Twenty years later Vikélas wrote his own novel, Loukis Laras, which is considered an emblematic text marking the transition in modern Greek literature from the Romantic historical novel to the realistic short story. He also wrote a few short stories with gentle selfless characters who struggle to improve themselves in their relations with others. Critics have pointed out his opposition to Romantic excess (both of heroism and eroticism), the emergence of the median man as a hero, the praise of family life and domestic virtues, and the kindness of feeling as well as the author’s inclination to extol the beneficent side of things. All these features have been attributed to the ethics of Protestantism and of bourgeois ideology (Athanasopoulos 1997, 303–08). If Vikélas read AB in the original, Kostis Palamás, a famous poet and distinguished, erudite critic, read it in French translation. In many ways, Palamás is an exception and a surprise. He owned (as can be seen in the printed catalogue of his library) four books by Eliot in French translation: the three early novels AB (trans. F. d’Albert-Durade, 1913) MF, La famille Tulliver ou Le moulin sur le Floss (trans. F. d’Albert-Durade, 1881) and SM: Le tisserand de Raveloe (trans. Auguste Malfroy, [1905?]), as well as DD (trans. Ernest David, 1882).22 In response to the classic question ‘what books would I take to a desert island?’ he included AB in his reply ([1922], 14: 117). In his articles and interviews, Palamás always declared that he was Eliot’s admirer, even after the advent of the Modernist novel ([1936], 14: 354) or when compared with other English women writers (2002, 3: 62). He also at times considered her equal to the great Russian authors, if at other times just behind them ([1928], 10: 84; 2002, 3: 63). This comparison seems to draw on Vogüé’s Le roman russe (The Russian Novel) (1886), in the introduction to which Eliot, representative of the English realist novel, is aligned with the Russian realists. This is because all of them, ‘by the virtues of naturalness and emotion succeed in turning the most banal stories into tranquil epics’ (Vogüé 1967, 337). This happens because, regardless of their personal detachment from the Christian doctrine, in their work they keep its strong stamp and ‘communicate to [realism] a superior beauty, which was due to the same moral inspiration: compassion, filtered of all impure elements and raised by the evangelic spirit’ (336). This is another attack against French Naturalism from a Catholic point of view, which joined forces with Ferdinard Brunetière’s similar attack against Zola and Flaubert in his 1881 study ‘Le Naturalisme anglais: Étude sur George Eliot’ (‘English Naturalism: a study of George Eliot’) (Brunetière 1896, 205–51).

Eliot. Και οι δύω έχουν ποιητικόν αίσθημα και φαντασίαν εύφορον, αλλ’ ο Manzoni δεν έχει [...] εκείνην την αλήθειαν, ήτις μ’ ενθουσίασεν, όταν ανεγίγνωσκα το Adam Bede. Ι Promessi Sposi είναι γλυκυτάτη και ελκυστικωτάτη ανάγνωσις, αλλά δεν λησμονεί τις ποτέ ότι είναι μυθιστόρημα. Το AB νομίζει τις ότι είναι ιστορία ανθρώπων τους οποίους γνωρίζει.’ 22 Almost all of these, apart from AB, date from the 1880s. This means that his quotations from Chapter 17 in the 1890s (discussed below) come indirectly via the French or via Kourtidis (Yannis Xourias, Κατάλογος της Βιβλιοθήκης Κωστή Παλαμά (Athens: Idryma Kosti Palama, 2010), pp. 332–33).

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The Reception of George Eliot in Greece   371 If for Montégut in 1859 AB represented ‘Le roman réaliste en Angleterre’, in 1881 Eliot’s early novels became the exemplars of the English Naturalist novel. Eliot for Brunetière describes faithfully and with ‘a fibre of [intellectual not sentimental] sympathy’23 (219) the monotonous everyday existence of her fellow mortals, particularly of the rural community. Opposed to Flaubert and Zola, who describe only pathological, indecent incidents with the pitiless precision of the human sciences (‘impassibilité’) (217–18), albeit using perfect forms (242–43), Eliot manages, despite her relatively imperfect forms, to make the common interesting and to unveil the mysteries of the human heart. Such an art exerts a moral influence on the reader to the extent that it fulfils the purpose of art, which according to Eliot is ‘the extension of our sympathies’ (Eliot 2001, 29). Brunetière, as Montégut before him, makes extended use of AB’s Chapter 17. I think that this argument, which predominated in the critical discourse of the mid-1880s and the 1890s in France, influenced Palamás’s criticism when he dealt systematically around the mid-1890s with the Greek short story and its most celebrated authors, namely G. M. Vizyinós, Andréas Karkavítsas and Aléxandros Papadiamándis. All of these wrote short stories which refer to rural or provincial societies in the recent past, which usually happen to be the authors’ birthplaces, where they spent their childhood (Beaton 1999, 71–84). In his study ‘To ellinikon diigima: Vizyinós’ (‘The Greek short story: Vizyinós’) ([1896a]), contrasting the earlier Romantic novel to the short story, Palamás insists that the short story: needs to be grounded or to renounce its pointless wanderings and return to the fatherland; and then to seek inspiration in the truth of nature and the lives of the humble who are bone of the bones and flesh of the flesh of this nature, and according to the words of the Englishwoman Elliot [sic], the great novelist of the century, to find ‘a source of delicious sympathy in the faithful representation of a monotonous homely existence […] than in the narration […] of tragic adventures or of world-stirring actions’; to love not the rare but the commonplace and instead of dramatic criminals the common labourer, who ‘gets his own bread, and eats it vulgarly with his own pocket knife’.24

23

‘non pas cette sympathie banale qui fait larmoyer […] mais cette sympathie de l’intelligence éclairée par l’amour’. 24 ‘ότι το διήγημα [...] πρέπει πρώτον να κατέλθη από τα νέφη, ή να παραιτήση τας ασκόπους περιπλανήσεις, και να επιστρέψη εις την γην της πατρίδος· κ’ έπειτα πρέπει να αναζητήση την έμπνευσιν εις την αλήθειαν της φύσεως και εις την ζωήν των ταπεινών, οίτινες είναι ως οστούν εκ των οστών και σάρξ εκ της σαρκός της φύσεως ταύτης, και κατά τους λόγους της Αγγλίδος Έλλιοτ, της μεγάλης συγγραφέως του αιώνος, ν’ ανεύρη “πηγήν θελκτικής συμπαθείας μάλλον εις την πιστήν αναπαράστασιν των μονοτόνων υπάρξεων ή εν τη αφηγήσει τραγικών περιπετειών και μεγάλων πράξεων” […] ν’ αγαπήση όχι τα σπάνια, αλλά τα συνήθη και μάλλον των δραματικών εγκληματιών τον κοινόν γεωργόν όστις “κερδαίνει εντίμως τον άρτον του, και τρώγει αυτόν πεζώς κόπτων με το μαχαίριόν του”’ (155–56); cf. Kourtídis’s translation in footnote 10.

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372   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe In this way Palamás defines the realist content of the short story in contrast to the ‘infertile imitations’25 of the [Romantic] European literature of the previous years. At the same time he gives a definition of realism that is very close to Eliot: ‘the meticulous study of the real as a source of every idealization’, and using a phrase of Papadiamándis he calls it ‘the author’s literary conscience’26 ([1896a], 2: 155). According to Eliot, the ultimate duty of the author is the faithful representation of the humble and the common, which runs two risks. The first is to beautify it according to literary tradition in order to satisfy the readers’ expectations – termed ‘falsism’ by George Henry Lewes (2001, 37). The other is to depict it accurately in an objective and scientific manner which, nevertheless, turns it into something more insignificant, coarse and eventually unsympathetic or even detestable (Naturalism). The risk diminishes when the artist does not hold the mirror up to the external world but aspires to ‘give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in [his] mind’ (Eliot 1859, 233). The realist author has to deal with everyday, common matters because they constitute the core of reality, but to render them ‘with deep human sympathy’ (237). If to the commonplace is added ‘a touch of sentiment to the characters and a touch of poetry which will evoke the reader’s sympathy for the character’s emotion’ (Hyde 1957, 150), the result will be something more than the real – idealism – and it will succeed in ‘amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot [… it] will extend our sympathies’ (Eliot 2001, 29). Palamás adopts this reasoning in his ‘Ta prota diigimata tou Karkavitsa’ (‘Karkavítsas’s first short stories’) (1892) and ‘I Lygeri’ (‘The fair maid’) (1897). He points out that Karkavítsas’s characters are peasants who express the national soul, and he praises the author for having ‘the double gift of observation and love; each of his stories is purely a precise rendering of everything he sees and hears; nevertheless he sees and hears only what his soul believes and his heart adores’27 (2: 166). This makes him a realist and an idealist at the same time, the real being in the selected facts and the ideal in the manner of their presentation through the artist’s soul. Similar observations are made in Palamás’s critique of Papadiamándis’s stories in the article ‘H mousa tou Papadiamandi: Otan ezouse’ (‘Papadiamándis’s muse: when he was alive’) ([1899], 10: 310–19). Papadiamándis does not depict reality on the basis of generalities about men and nature but insists on the ‘deep study of things’28 (314). However, he does not limit himself to an accurate reproduction of things, but adds to it the reflection of reality in his

μίμησις’. μελέτην του πραγματικού, ως πηγής πάσης εξιδανικεύσεως και πάσης τέχνης’, ‘η φιλολογική συνείδησις, ως το αποκαλεί κάπου ο ημέτερος Παπαδιαμάντης’. 27 ‘το διπλούν δώρον της παρατηρήσεως και της αγάπης·έκαστον διήγημά του δεν είναι παρά η ακριβής απόδοσις των όσα βλέπει και ακούει·αλλά δεν βλέπει και δεν ακούει παρά όσα πιστεύει η ψυχή του, όσα λατρεύει η καρδία του’. 28 ‘την βαθείαν των πραγμάτων μελέτην’. 25 ‘άγονος

26 ‘επισταμένην

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The Reception of George Eliot in Greece   373 own mind. ‘In the same picture he put what he saw with his eyes and what he saw with his soul […] Inside the observer always lies the poet’ (313, 318). It seems that truth is not in the exact correspondence of art and the real world but of art and the artist’s state of mind as he is writing (Mansell 1965, 207). Papadiamándis’s characters do not have individuality; each of them separately can be considered insignificant, worthless and dull but as a whole they look ‘like a picture of a Greek village fete painted by some Flemish painter’ (312).29 Papadiamándis, according to Palamás, gives (through a loose construction of the plot, various interruptions of the story and narratorial intrusions) the impression that he does nothing but transcribe his childhood memories and deep familiarity with the rural people of his island, to such a degree that: some superficial reader would come to the conclusion that [Papadiamándis] has nothing but memory and not a single grain of imagination. However I do not believe that our literature has at the moment any other artist who possesses to such a degree what the psychologists call sympathetic imagination.30 (315)

Conclusion With the exception of Vikélas, whose private opinion remained unpublished until 2001, Eliot was unknown in Greece during her lifetime. This is not surprising given that between 1857 and 1880 Greek literature was in thrall to historical fiction and – amongst British literature – Sir Walter Scott. From 1857 until 1900 there were few translations of realist authors (Balzac, Dickens and Tolstoy figure twice and Dostoevsky once in the list of translated books). The majority of translations at that time consists either of the classics of the European canon (Dante, Molière, Shakespeare, Goethe) and the Romantic poets (Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand), or of the popular French novels (mainly Eugène Sue, Alexandre Dumas, Xavier de Montepin, Ponson du Terrail and Paul de Kock). This last is the largest category of all (Kasinis 2006). In the 1880s, short stories about contemporary, mainly peasant, life became the predominant fashion; at the same time (1879) Zola’s Nana had been translated into Greek, and was followed by other less notorious translations. It is in the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s that Eliot was first translated and sporadically mentioned or referred to. Greek criticism under the influence of the French discovers her or her reception and use in various contexts: in the definition of realism (versus Romanticism) and the sympathetic English 29

For a detailed study of the comparison of the late-nineteenth-century Greek short story with Dutch painting see Georgia Farinou-Malamatari, ‘Η διηγηματογραφία του Παπαδιαμάντη και η ολλανδική ζωγραφική’, in Το σχοίνισμα της γραφής: Παπαδιαμαντ(ολογ)ικές Μελέτες (Athens: Gutenberg, 2014), pp. 53–67. 30 ‘και κανείς επιπόλαιος αναγνώστης θα μπορούσε [...] να συμπεράνη ότι [ο Παπαδιαμάντης] μνήμη μόνον έχει, και φαντασία σπειρί δεν έχει. Και όμως δεν πιστεύω να βρίσκεται ώς την ώρα στη φιλολογία μας τεχνίτης κατέχοντας τόσο ζωηρά τη δύναμη που οι ψυχολόγοι ονομάζουν συμπαθητική φαντασία.’

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374   The Reception of George Eliot in Europe Naturalism (versus French Naturalism); in the critical acceptance of the Russian novel; and in the debate between literary chauvinism and literary cosmopolitanism. The spasmodic character of the references produces a fragmentary picture of the English author. It is only Palamás who appropriates the views of the early works of Eliot and uses them in his articles on the three most famous Greek short story writers and their output up until the early twentieth century. Such phrases as ‘meticulous study of the real’, ‘Dutch painting’, ‘eyes of the mind’ and ‘sympathy’ all testify to the understated presence of George Eliot.

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Bibliography The bibliography is divided in correspondence to the chapters of this book. Translations and editions are listed for each country by work, the works being listed in alphabetical order, and translations/editions being listed chronologically for each work.

Introduction Works cited

Adler, Jeremy (2014) ‘“A Vast Fusion […] of the Various National Tendencies”: Goethe and Henry James’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, LXXXIII.1: 53–72. Aiello, Lucia (2013) Beyond Reception Theory: Dostoevsky in England, Oxford: MHRA Legenda. Ajouri, Philip (2007) Erzählen nach Darwin. Die Krise der Teleologie im literarischen Realismus: Friedrich Theodor Vischer und Gottfried Keller, Berlin: de Gruyter. —(2014) ‘Darwinism in German-Speaking Literature (1859–c.1890)’, in Glick, Thomas F. and Elinor Shaffer (eds) The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, vol. 3, London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 17–45. Armstrong, Isobel (2013) ‘George Eliot, Spinoza and the Emotions’, in Anderson, Amanda and Harry E. Shaw (eds) A Companion to George Eliot, Chichester; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 294–308. Ashton, Rosemary (1980) The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(1991) G. H. Lewes, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(1996) George Eliot: A Life, London: Faber and Faber. Beer, Gillian (1983) Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Brown, Catherine (2010) ‘Why Does Daniel Deronda’s Mother Live in Russia?’, George Eliot – George Henry Lewes Studies, University Park, PA, 58–59 (September): 26–42. —(2011) ‘Daniel Deronda’, in The Art of Comparison, Oxford: MHRA Legenda, pp. 47–90. Cardwell, Richard A. (ed.) (2004) The Reception of Byron in Europe, 2 vols, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Christie, Ian (2013) ‘Ancient Rome in London: classical subjects in the forefront of cinema’s expansion after 1910’, in Michelakis, Pantelis and Maria Wyke (eds) The Ancient World in Early Cinema, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eliot, George (1963) Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Feuerbach, Ludwig (1959) The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, New York: Harper and Bros. First published as Das Wesen der Christenheit (1841), 2nd edn 1848; trans. Marian Evans, 1854. Glick, Thomas F. and Elinor Shaffer (eds) (2014) The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, vols 3 and 4, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Goethe, J. W. von (1786–88) (1970) Italian Journey, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. —(1824) Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. Thomas Carlyle, 3 vols, Edinburgh; London: n. pub. Haight, Gordon S. (1954–78) The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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376  Bibliography —(1968) The Life of George Eliot, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hardy, Barbara (1959) The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form, London: Athlone Press. Jameson, Fredric (2013) The Antinomies of Realism, London: Verso. Levine, George (ed.) (2013) The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewes, G. H. (1846) The Spanish Drama: Lope de Vega and Calderon, London: Knight. —(1857) A Biographical History of Philosophy, London and New York: George Routledge & Sons. First Published 1845–46. —(1864) The Life of Goethe, 2nd edn, London: George Routledge & Sons. Mandal, A. A. and Brian Southam (eds) (2008) The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe, Series Editor: Elinor Shaffer, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Marucci, Franco (2003) “George Eliot”, in Storia della letteratura inglese, volume III, Tomo II, “Il romanzo”, Florence: Le Lettere, 775–927. McCormack, Kathleen (2005) George Eliot’s English Travels: Composite Characters and Coded Communications, New York: Taylor & Francis; London: Routledge. Moretti, Franco (1987) The Way of the World, London: Verso. Murray, John (1854) Handbook for Travellers on the Continent, London: John Murray. Ormond, Leonee (2005) ‘George Eliot and the Victorian Art World’, George Eliot Review, no. 36, pp. 25–37. Pinney, Thomas (ed.) (1963) Letters of George Eliot, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Pittock, Murray (ed.) (2013) The Reception of Walter Scott in Europe, Series Editor: Elinor Shaffer, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Reimarus, Hermann Samuel (1879) Fragments, consisting of brief critical remarks on the object of Jesus and his disciples as seen in the New Testament, trans. and ed. Charles Voysey, London and Edinburgh: n. pub. Ribot, Théodule (1874) English Psychology. New York: D. Appleton & Co. Rignall, John (2000) Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(ed.) (1997) George Eliot and Europe, Aldershot: Scolar Press. Röder-Bolton, Gerlinde (1998) George Eliot and Goethe: An Elective Affinity, Studies in Comparative Literature 13, Amsterdam: n. pub. Shaffer, E. S. (1975) ‘Daniel Deronda and the Conventions of Fiction’, in ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(1991) ‘Introduction’, in George Eliot, Middlemarch, London: Everyman, pp. xi–xxix. Repr. 2010. —(1997) ‘“Hearing the Grass Grow”: George Eliot in Weimar’, Proceedings of the English Goethe Society, LXVI, 3–22. Spinoza, Benedict de (Baruch 1996) Ethics Tractatus Theologico-politicus, London: Penguin. Strauss, David Friedrich (1892) The Life of Jesus, trans. George Eliot. London: n. pub. First published as Das Leben Jesu (1828), trans. Marian Evans. Szerb, Antal (2001) Journey by Moonlight, trans. Len Rix, London: Pushkin Press.

1 The Reception of George Eliot in Germany during her Lifetime German editions in English

AB (1859b) Adam Bede, Collection of British Authors, Copyright Edition, 2 vols, Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, nos 482 and 483.

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Bibliography  377 DD (1876) Daniel Deronda, Collection of British Authors, Copyright Edition, 4 vols, Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, nos 1617, 1618, 1619 and 1620. Essays and Leaves from a Notebook (1884) Essays and Leaves from a Notebook, Collection of British Authors, Copyright Edition, Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, no 2229. FH (1867) Felix Holt, the Radical, Collection of British Authors, Copyright Edition, 2 vols, Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, nos 897 and 898. ITS (1879) Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Collection of British Authors, Copyright Edition, Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, no 1828. ‘The Legend of Jubal’ (1874) ‘The Legend of Jubal’ and other Poems, Asher’s collection of English Authors, British and American, Copyright Edition, Berlin: Albert Cohn, no 99. LV and BJ (1878) The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob, Collection of British Authors, Copyright Edition, Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, no 1732. M (1872–73) Middlemarch, Collection of English and American Authors, Copyright Edition, 4 vols, Berlin: Asher & Co. MF (1860) The Mill on the Floss, Collection of British Authors, Copyright Edition, 2 vols, Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, nos 509 and 510. R (1863) Romola, Collection of British Authors, Copyright Edition, 2 vols, Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, nos 682 and 683. SCL (1859a) Scenes of Clerical Life, Collection of British Authors, Copyright Edition, 2 vols, Leipzig: Berhard Tauchnitz, nos 462 and 463. SM (1861) Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, Collection of British Authors, Copyright Edition, Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, no. 550. German translations

AB (1860) Adam Bede, trans. Julius Frese, 2 vols, Berlin: Franz Duncker. Agatha (1871) Agatha, trans. Anon, Freiburg: Heider. DD (1876) Daniel Deronda, trans. Adolf Strodtmann, 4 vols, Berlin: Paetel. (1879) Der gelüftete Schleier: Bruder Jacob, trans. Emil Lehmann, Vienna: A. Hartleben. (1880) Die Juden und ihre Gegner: Ein Essay, trans. Emil Lehmann, Hamburg: D. Meiszner.

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378  Bibliography (1885) Bilder aus dem kirchlichen Leben Englands, trans. Georg Kuhr, 2 vols, Leipzig: Franz Duncker. FH (1867) Felix Holt, der Radicale, trans. Emil Lehmann, 6 vols, Berlin: Janke. LV and BJ (1879) Der gelüftete Schleier. Bruder Jacob, trans. Emil Lehmann, Vienna: A. Hartleben. M (1872–73) Middlemarch: Aus dem Leben der Provinz, trans. Emil Lehmann, 4 vols, Berlin: Franz Duncker; Stuttgart: Krabbe. MF (1861a) Die Mühle am Floss, trans. Julius Frese, 2 vols, Berlin: Franz Duncker. The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep! (1880) Die Juden und ihre Gegner. Ein Essay, trans. Emil Lehmann, Hamburg: D. Meiszner. R (1864) Romola, trans. A. E. Wollheim, 2 vols, Naumberg: G. Pätz. SCL (1885) Bilder aus dem kirchlichen Leben Englands, trans. Georg Kuhn, 2 vols, Leipzig: Franz Duncker. SM (1861b) Silas Marner, der Weber von Raveloe, trans. Julius Frese, Berlin: Franz Duncker. Translations published in East Germany

AB (1971) trans. Ana Maria Brock, epilogue Klaus Udo Szudra, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. (1973) trans. Ana Maria Brock, epilogue Klaus Udo Szudra, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. M (1979) trans. Irmgard Nickel, epilogue Klaus Udo Szudra, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. MF (1967) trans. O. and E. Fetter, epilogue Klaus Udo Szudra, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. (1970) trans. O. and E. Fetter, epilogue Klaus Udo Szudra, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. SM (1958) (1962) (1968) (1968) (1979) (1980)

trans. trans. trans. trans. trans. trans.

J. Augspurg 1886, epilogue Günther Klotz, Leipzig: Reclam. J. Augspurg 1886, epilogue Günther Klotz, Leipzig: Reclam. Eva Schumann, epilogue Günther Klotz, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. Eva Schumann, epilogue Günther Klotz, Berlin: Buchclub65. Eva Schumann, epilogue Günther Klotz, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. Eva Schumann, epilogue Günther Klotz, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag.

Translations published in West Germany

AB (1987) trans. and epilogue Eva-Maria König, Stuttgart: Reclam.

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Bibliography  379 M (1985) trans. and epilogue Rainer Zerbst, Stuttgart: Reclam. MF (1983) trans. and epilogue Eve-Maria König, Stuttgart: Reclam. SM (1963) trans. Julius Frese 1861, epilogue Herta Killy, Frankfurt: Fischer. Translations published in the reunified Germany

AB (2012) trans. Julius Frese 1860, Paderborn: Salzwasser Verlag. (2012) trans. Julius Frese 1860, Bremen: Outlook Verlag. M (2005) trans. Irmgard Nickel 1979, Augsburg: Weltbild Verlag; based on the East German Aufbau edition of 1979. (2010) trans. Irmgard Nickel 1979, Cologne: Anaconda Verlag; based on the East German Aufbau edition of 1979. MF (2000) trans. and epilogue Eva-Maria König 1983, Stuttgart: Reclam. R (1998) trans. Werner Siebenhaar, epilogue Andrew Brown 1994, Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe. SM (1994) trans. Kuno Weber 1957, epilogue Richard Gerber 1957, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag; based on the Swiss publisher Manesse’s 1957 edn. (1994) trans. Elke Link and Sabine Roth, Cadolzburg: Ars Vivendi Verlag. (1999) trans. Elke Link and Sabine Roth 1994, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag; based on the 1994 edn. Other works cited

Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (1875–1912) Munich; Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 54: 672–73. Altvater, Friedrich (1930) Wesen und Form der deutschen Dorfgeschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, Germanische Studien 88, Berlin: Emil Ebering. Ashton, Rosemary (1991) G. H. Lewes: A Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Assing, Ludmilla (ed.) (1861–70, 1905) Tagebücher von Varnhagen von Ense, 15 vols, Leipzig: Brockhaus. Baker, William (ed.) (1995, 1999) The Letters of George Henry Lewes, 3 vols, Victoria, BC: University of Victoria. Biographisches Jahrbuch und Deutscher Nekrolog (1912) ‘Erich Schmidt’, Berlin, 17: 155–75. Dahn, Ludwig Julius Sophus Felix (1890–95) Erinnerungen, 4 vols, Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel. Die Gegenwart: Wochenschrift für Literatur, Kunst und öffentliches Leben (1872) 1.5 (24 February), 1.6 (2 March), 1.7 (9 March), 2.39 (19 October).

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380  Bibliography Dodd, William B. and Ann Bowden (1988) Tauchnitz International Editions in English, 1841–1955: A Bibliographical History, New York: Bibliographical Society of America. Dohm, H. (1869) ‘George Eliot’, Unsere Zeit: Deutsche Revue der Gegenwart, Monatsschrift zum Conversations-Lexikon, Neue Folge, Leipzig: 5.2. Dooley, Allan (1992) Author and Printer in Victorian England, Charlotteville; London: University Press of Virginia. Drewitz, Ingeborg (1979) Berliner Salons: Gesellschaft und Literatur zwischen Aufklärung und Industriezeitalter, Berlinische Remiszenzen 7, Berlin: Haude & Spener. Frese, Julius (1860) ‘Vorwort’, in George Eliot, Adam Bede, trans. Frese, 2 vols, Berlin: Franz Duncker, 1: iii–vi. Glatzer, Nahum (ed.) (1958) Leopold und Adelheid Zunz: An Account in Letters, 1815–1885, London: Leo Beck Institute. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1949–52) Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, 14 vols, Hamburg: Christian Wegner. Goldammer, Peter (ed.) (1972) Theodor Storm: Briefe 1817–88, Berlin; Weimar: Aufbau Verlag. Gutzkow, Karl (1860) ‘Adam Bede’, Unterhaltungen am häuslichen Herd, Leipzig, 4.54: 863. Haight, Gordon S. (ed.) (1954–78) The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols, New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press. —(1968) George Eliot: A Biography, Oxford; London: Oxford University Press. Harris, Margaret and Judith Johnston (eds) (1998) The Journals of George Eliot, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hein, Jürgen (1976) Dorfgeschichte, Stuttgart: Metzler. Helbling, Carl (ed.) (1950–54) Gottfried Keller: Gesammelte Briefe, 4 vols, Berne: Benteli. Honegger, J. J. (1873) ‘Neueste Romanliteratur’, Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, Leipzig, 16: 241–46. Hutton, R. H. (1860) ‘The Novels of George Eliot’, National Review, London, 11 (July): 191–219. Irwin, Jane (ed.) (1996) George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Notebooks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jäckh, Werner (1962) Festschrift zum 125jährigen Bestehen der Firma Bernhard Tauchnitz Verlag, 1837–1962, Stuttgart: Illig. Karpeles, Gustav (1889) Friedrich Spielhagen: Ein literarischer Essay, Leipzig: L. Staackman. Kaufmann, David (1877) ‘George Eliot und das Judenthum’, Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums, Dresden, 26.4: 172–88; 5: 214–31; 6: 255–70. Keitel, Walter and Helmuth Nürnberger (eds) (1976–94) Theodor Fontane: Briefe, 5 vols, Munich: Carl Hauser. Kitzing, W. and C. Wahl (1886) Handbuch des Leihbibliothekswesens, Taucha-Leipzig: Thallwitz. Klemperer, Victor (1913) Die Zeitromane Friedrich Spielhagens und ihre Wurzeln, Weimar: Alexander Duncker. Kohl, Horst (ed.) (1893) Die politischen Reden des Fuersten (Otto v.) Bismarck: Historischkritische Gesammtausgabe, Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta Nachfolger. Lewald, Fanny (1887) Freiheit des Herzens: Lebensgeschichte, Briefe, Erinnerungen, Berlin: Der Morgen. Lewes, G. H. (1858) ‘Realism in Art: Recent German Fiction’, Westminster Review, London, 14: 488–518. Ludwig, Otto (1856) Zwischen Himmel und Erde, Frankfurt a.M.: Meidinger Sohn. —(1877) Romane und Romanstudien, ed. William J. Lillyman, Munich: Hanser. Marggraf, Hermann (1858) ‘Dorfgeschichte und Weltgeschichte in novelistischer Einkleidung’, Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, Leipzig, 8: 133–44.

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Bibliography  381 —(1858) ‘Goethe und die neueste Literatur über ihn’, Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, Leipzig, 17: 301–12. —(1860) ‘Ein neuer Roman von George Eliot’, Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, 52: Leipzig, 952–55. Martino, Alberto (1990) Die deutsche Leihbibliothek: Geschichte einer literarischen Institution (1756–1914), Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Mayer, Gustav (ed.) (1923) Ferdinand Lassalle: Briefwechsel, 6 vols, Stuttgart; Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. The Mill on the Floss, review of (1861) Dublin University Magazine, 57: 192–200. Mommsen, Adelheid (1992) Mein Vater: Erinnerungen an Theodor Mommsen, Munich: Mattes & Seitz. First published 1936. ‘Notiz’ (1860) Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, Leipzig, 17 (26 April): 319. Nowell-Smith, Simon (1966) ‘Firma Tauchnitz 1837–1900’, Book Collector, London, 15.4 (Winter): 434–35. Pietsch, Ludwig (1893–94) Wie ich Schriftsteller geworden bin: Erinnerungen aus den fünfziger Jahren, 2 vols, Berlin: F. Fontane & Co. Pinney, Thomas (ed.) (1963) Essays of George Eliot, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Polheim, Konrad and Rainer Baasner (eds) (1989–97) Tagebücher: Marie von Ebner Eschenbach, 6 vols, Tübingen: Niemeyer. Price, Lawrence Marsden (1932) The Reception of English Literature in Germany, Berkeley: University of California Press. Prutz, Robert Eduard (1860) Die deutsche Literatur der Gegenwart: 1848 bis 1858, 2 vols, Leipzig: Voigt & Günther. Rebing, Günter (1972) Der Halbbruder des Dichters: Friedrich Spielhagens Theorie des Romans, Literatur und Reflexion, 8 vols, Frankfurt a.M.: Athenäum. Rignall, John (ed.) (2000) Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rodenberg, Julius (1874) ‘Die Literatur und das Publikum’, Der Salon, Leipzig, 1: 26–40. —(1899) Erinnerungen aus der Jugendzeit, 2 vols, Berlin: Paetel. Röder-Bolton, Gerlinde (1990) ‘George Eliot, Goethe and the “passionless Mejnour”’, Notes and Queries, London, 37.1: 38. —(1993) ‘German Influences in The Mill on the Floss’, in Thomas, Neil (ed.) Celtic and Germanic Themes in European Literature, Lewiston, NY; Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, pp. 109–19. —(1994) ‘George Eliot’s Weimar’, George Eliot Review, Coventry, 25: 51–55. —(1998) George Eliot and Goethe: An Elective Affinity, Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature 13, Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. —(2000) ‘“Where the Mighty Jupiter Walked ...”: George Eliot and G. H. Lewes in Weimar’, George Eliot – George Henry Lewes Studies, University Park, PA, 38/39: 44–60. —(2002) ‘Tragedy and The Mill on the Floss’, in Tang, Maria (ed.) Lectures d’une oeuvre: The Mill on the Floss de George Eliot, Nantes: Editions du temps, pp. 91–106. —(2006) George Eliot in Germany, 1854–55: ‘Cherished Memories’, Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Schérer, Wilhelm (1877) ‘George Eliot und ihr neuester Roman’, Deutsche Rundschau, Berlin, 10 (Feb.): 240–55. Schleich, Ludwig (1920) Besonnte Vergangenheit. Lebenserinnerungen 1859–1919, Berlin: Vier Falken. Schmidt, Erich (1911) Reden zur Literatur- und Universitätsgeschichte, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. —(1886–1901) Charakteristiken, 2vols, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. Schmidt, Julius (1860) ‘Aesthetische Streifzüge’, Die Grenzboten, 12: 470.

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382  Bibliography —(1860) ‘Adam Bede und andere Romane’, Die Grenzboten, 21,287–92. —(1860) ‘Neue Romane’, Die Grenzboten, 52, pp 481–92. —(1870–75) Bilder aus dem geistigen Leben unserer Zeit, 4 vols, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Schoenbach, Anton (1875) Über die humoristische Prosa des XIX. Jahrhunderts, Graz: Leuschner & Lubensky. Simpson, Richard (1863) ‘George Eliot’s Novels’, Home and Foreign Review, 3 (October). Spielhagen, Friedrich and Albert Hänel (1885) Zur Erinnerung an Lina Duncker, geb. Tendering, Trauerrede. Spielhagen, Friedrich (1864) Vermischte Schriften, 2 vols, Berlin: Otto Janke. —(1883) Beiträge zur Theorie und Technik des Romans, Leipzig: L. Staackmann. —(1890) Finder und Erfinder. Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, 2 vols, Leipzig: L. Staackmann. Wagner, Karl (2000) ‘George Eliot in Deutschland und Österreich. Transkulturelle Affären des 19. Jahrhunderts’ in Norbert Bachleitner (ed.) Beiträge zur Rezeption der britischen und irischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum, Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, pp.137–56. Weilen, Alexander von (1912) ‘Erich Schmidt’, Biographisches Jahrbuch und Deutscher Nekrolog, Berlin, 17: 154–177. Werses, Shmuel (1976) ‘The Jewish Reception of Daniel Deronda’ in Alice Shalvi (ed.) Daniel Deronda: A Centenary Symposium, Jerusalem: Jerusalem Academic Press, p.12. Wolf, Gerhard (1888) (ed.) Fanny Lewald, Zwölf Bilder nach dem Leben: Erinnerungen, Berlin: Janke. Wolzogen, Ernst von (1885) George Eliot. Eine biographisch-kritische Studie, Leipzig: Albert Unflad. Zeising, Adolf (1860) ‘Eine englische Dorfgeschichte’, Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, Leipzig: 39, pp. 706–11. Ziegengeist, Agnes (1998) (ed) Konrad Burdach – Erich Schmidt. Briefwechsel 1884–1912, Stuttgart and Leipzig: S. Hirzel Verlag.

2 George Eliot in East, West and Reunified Germany, 1949–2013 Translations

See entry for Chapter 1. Other works cited

Baadke, Friedrich (2004a) correspondence with author, 5 November. —(2004b) correspondence with author, 10 November. Baker, William and John Ross (2002) George Eliot: A Bibliographical History, New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll. Barck, Simone, Martina Langermann and Siegfried Lokatis (1997) Jedes Buch ein Abenteuer: Zensur-System und literarische Öffentlichkeiten in der DDR bis Ende der sechziger Jahre, Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Belde, Hans (2012) Leben und Werk von George Eliot: Essay, Munich: Grin. Berger, Friedemann (2003) correspondence with author, 18 February. Bock, Gabriele (2008) ‘Lesen in der eingeschlossenen Gesellschaft’, in Korte, Barbara, Sandra Schaur and Stefan Welz (eds) Britische Literatur in der DDR, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 41–48. Böhnke, Dietmar (2008) ‘Übersetzung englischsprachiger Literatur in der DDR: Erfahrungsberichte und Versuch einer Bilanz’, in Korte, Barbara, Sandra Schaur

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Bibliography  383 and Stefan Welz (eds) Britische Literatur in der DDR, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 123–32. Brandstädter, Otto (2008) ‘200 Editionen aus der britischen Literatur in 40 Jahren: eine bescheidene oder bemerkenswerte Leistung von Lektoren des Aufbau-Verlags Berlin?’, in Korte, Barbara, Sandra Schaur and Stefan Welz (eds) Britische Literatur in der DDR, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 33–40. Brown, Andrew (1998) ‘Nachwort’, in George Eliot, Romola, trans. Werner Siebenhaar, Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe, pp. 781–802. First published 1994, Oxford University Press. Emmerich, Wolfgang (2009) Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. First published 1989. Gerber, Richard (1994) ‘Nachwort’, in George Eliot, Silas Marner, trans. Kuno Weber, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, pp. 399–416. First published 1957, Manesse. Klose, Dietrich (2003) correspondence with author. Klotz, Günther (1958) ‘Nachwort’, in George Eliot, Silas Marner, trans. J. Augspurg 1886, Leipzig: Reclam, pp. 231–44. König, Eva-Maria (1983) ‘Nachwort’, in George Eliot, Die Mühle am Floss, trans. E.-M. König, Stuttgart: Reclam, pp. 739–55. —(1987) ‘Nachwort’, in George Eliot, Adam Bede, trans. E.-M. König, Stuttgart: Reclam, pp.743–65. Korte, Barbara, Sandra Schaur and Stefan Welz (eds) Britische Literatur in der DDR, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Lokatis, Siegfried and I. Sonntag (eds) Heimliche Leser in der DDR: Kontrolle und Verbreitung unerlaubter Literatur, Berlin: C. Links. Lukács, Georg (1989) The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, London: Merlin. First published 1937 in Russian. Maletzke, Elsemarie (1993) George Eliot, Frankfurt: Insel Verlag. Szudra, Klaus Udo (1967) ‘Nachwort’, in George Eliot, Die Mühle am Floss, trans. O. and E. Fetter, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, pp. 639–57. —(1971) ‘Nachwort’, in George Eliot, Adam Bede, trans. A. Brock, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, pp. 637–52. —(1979) ‘Nachwort’, in George Eliot, Middlemarch, trans. Irmgard Nickel, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, pp. 579–600. —(1989) ‘Nachwort’, in Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, trans. Margit Meyer, ed. Klaus Udo Szudra, Berlin; Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, pp. 513–34. Uglow, Jenny (2008) George Eliot, London: Virago. First published 1987. Zerbst, Rainer (1985) ‘Nachwort’, in George Eliot, Middlemarch, trans. R. Zerbst, Stuttgart: Reclam, pp. 1153–75.

3 George Eliot in the Netherlands Dutch translations

AB (1860) Adam Bede, trans. Anne Busken Huet-van der Tholl, Haarlem: Kruseman. (1910) Adam Bede, trans. Dutric (pseud.), Doetinchem: Misset. BJ (1878), Brother Jacob, trans. Zwaardemaker-Visscher, Sneek: Van Druten & Bleeker. DD (1876) Daniel Deronda, trans. Van Westrheene, Sneek: Van Druten & Bleeker.

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384  Bibliography FH (1867) Felix Holt, trans. Van Westrheene, Sneek: Van Druten & Bleeker. ITS (1879) Impressions of Theophrastus Such, trans. Anon., Haarlem: F. Bohn. ‘The Legend of Jubal’ (1888) ‘The Legend of Jubal’, trans. C. van Kempe Valk, Amsterdam: Rössing. LV (1878) De Opgeheven Sluier, trans. Zwaardemaker-Visscher, Sneek: Van Druten & Bleeker. M (1873) Middlemarch, trans. Van Westrheene, Amsterdam: Van Druten & Bleeker. (2002) Middlemarch, trans. A Roeleveld and M. Stevens, Amsterdam: Atheneum Polak & Van Gennep. MF (1861) (1912) (1950) (1981)

De De De De

Molen van Dorlcote, trans. Anon., Amsterdam: van Kampen. Molen van Dorlcote, Dutric (pseud.), Doetinchem: Misset. Molen aan de Rivier, trans. Elisabeth de Roos, Amsterdam: Contact. Moen aan de Floss, trans. W. A. Dorsman-Vos, Utrecht: Het Spectrum.

R (1864) Romola, trans. J. C. van Deventer, Haarlem: A. C. Kruseman. SCL (1861) Herders en Schapen, trans. Busken Huet, Haarlem: Kruseman. SM (1861) Silas Marner, trans. Van Westrheene, Amsterdam: Van Kampen. (1861) Silas Marner, trans. Anon., Deventer: Ter Gunne. Other works cited

Aerts, Remieg (1994) ‘De Gids en zijn publiek’, in Anon. (ed.) Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis, Leiden: Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging, 1: 107–29. —(1997) De Letterheren: Liberale cultuur in de Negentiende Eeuw; het tijdschrift De Gids, Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. Armstrong, Isobel (2013) ‘George Eliot, Spinoza and the Emotions’, in Anderson, Amanda and Harry E. Shaw (eds) A Companion to George Eliot, Chichester; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 294–308. Ashton, Rosemary (1996) George Eliot: A Life, Harmondsworth: Hamish Hamilton. Atkins, Dorothy (1978) George Eliot and Spinoza, Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg. Balsem, N. C. (1881) ‘George Eliot’, in Tiedeman, H. (ed.) Mannen van beteekenis in onze dagen, Haarlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink, pp. 131–90. Boersema, K. H. (1924) Allard Pierson: Eene Cultuur-Historische Studie, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Busken Huet, Conrad (1858) Brieven over den Bijbel, 2nd rev. edn, Haarlem: Kruseman. —(1863) ‘Letterkunde, kronijk en kritiek’, De Gids, Amsterdam, 2 (April): 95–121; review of Romola, partly repr. 1881 in Litterarische Fantasiën en Kritieken, Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 8: 105–22.

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Bibliography  385 —(1873) ‘George Eliot’s nieuwe roman’, Algemeen Dagblad van Nederlandsch Indië, Batavia, 1.77 (5 July); review of Middlemarch, repr. 1881 in Litterarische Fantasiën en Kritieken, Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 8: 122–29. —(1875) ‘De Dorpsvertelling’, Algemeen Dagblad van Nederlandsch Indië, Batavia, 3 (21 Aug.–7 Sept.): 195–209; repr. 1881 in Litterarische Fantasiën en Kritieken, Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 9: 183–208. —(1876) ‘Boekbeoordeelingen’, Algemeen Dagblad van Nederlandsch Indië, Batavia, 4 (20 and 23 Dec.): 300–01; on Daniel Deronda, repr. 1881 in Litterarische Fantasiën en Kritieken, Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 8: 129–34. —(1878) ‘Nederlandsche Tijdschriften in 1878’, Nederland, Utrecht, 3 (November): 345–51; repr. 1881 in Litterarische Fantasiën en Kritieken, Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 10: 177–207. —(1881) ‘George Eliot’, De Amsterdammer, weekblad voor Nederland, Amsterdam, 9 January; repr. 1886 in Litterarische Fantasiën en Kritieken, Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 21: 64–71. —(1881–88) Litterarische Fantasieën en Kritieken, 25 vols, Haarlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink; collected literary criticism. —(1885) ‘Nieuwe Engelsche Letteren: George Eliot’s Life, edited by her husband J. W. Cross’, Algemeen Dagblad van Nederlandsch Indië, Batavia, 13.97 (27 April); repr. 1886 in Litterarische Fantasiën en Kritieken, Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 21: 71–74. —(1890) Brieven uitgegeven door zijne vrouw en zijn zoon, 2 vols, Haarlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink; collected letters. Busken Huet-Van der Tholl, A. D. (1926–27) ‘Brieven van mevr. Anne Busken Huet aan mejuffrouw Sophie Potgieter’, in Berg, J. (ed.) De Nieuwe Gids, Amsterdam, 1926, 2: 207–18, 263–72, 454–65, 525–34, 617–26; 1927, 1: 71–78, 165–72, 554–62, 683–90, 2: 39–48, 283–89. Duyvendak, Lizet (2009) ‘English Reading in a Dutch Library for Women (1894–1900)’, in Toremans, Tom and Walter Verschueren (eds) Crossing Cultures: NineteenthCentury Anglophone Literature in the Low Countries, Louvain: Leuven University Press, pp. 177–88. Eliot, George (1913) The Works of George Eliot, New Cabinet Edition, 9 vols, Edinburgh; London: Blackwood. —(1954–78) The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols, New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press. Gatens, Moira (2009) ‘The Art and Philosophy of George Eliot’, Philosophy and Literature, Baltimore, 33: 73–90. —(2012) ‘Compelling Fictions: Spinoza and George Eliot on Imagination and Belief ’, European Journal of Philosophy, Oxford, 20.1: 74–90. —(2013) ‘Philosophy’, in Harris, Margaret (ed.) Georg Eliot in Context, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 214–21. Gay, Peter (1995) The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience; Victoria to Freud, New York: Norton. Génestet, P. A. de (1860) ‘Brieven aan het Publiek’, Zondagsblad, Haarlem (June): 374–76. Haight, Gordon S. (1978) George Eliot: A Biography, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Henson, Miriam (2009) ‘George Eliot’s Middlemarch as a Translation of Spinoza’s Ethics’, George Eliot Review, Coventry, 40: 18–26. Kalmthout, Ton van (2009) ‘Translation as a Complementary Factor in Cultural Repertoire Formation’, Arcadia, Amsterdam, 44.2: 335–51. Kloek, J. J. (1985) Over Werther geschreven: Nederlandse reacties op Goethes Werther, 1775–1800; proeve van een historisch receptie-onderzoek, Utrecht: Hes.

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386  Bibliography Kloos-Reyneke van Stuwe, Jeanne (1925–26) ‘George Eliot’, De Nieuwe Gids, Amsterdam, 1–2 (1925), 1–2 (1926). Kruseman, A. C. (1886–87) Bouwstoffen voor een geschiedenis van den Nederlandschen boekhandel, gedurende de halve eeuw 1830–1880, 2 vols, Amsterdam: Van Kampen. Laar, H. J. M. van de (1978) Opperbankier en wetenschapsman: Willem Cornelis Mees 1813–1884, The Hague: Nijhoff. Lewes, G. H. (1858) The Life and Works of Goethe: With Sketches of His Age and Contemporaries, 2nd edn, Leipzig: Brockhaus. —(1860–61) Ons Leven: handleiding tot de kennis van het menschelijk ligchaam, zijne behoeften en krachten [Physiology of Common Life], trans. Herman van Capelle, Haarlem: Kruseman. —(1864) A Biographical History of Philosophy, London: G. Cox. —(1866) ‘Spinoza’, Fortnightly Review, London, 4: 385–406; trans. Anon. 1868 in De Wetenschappelijke Bladen, Haarlem: Kruseman. Mees-Verwey, Mea (1928) De betekenis van Johannes van Vloten: Een bibliografie met inleiding, Santpoort: C. A. Mees. Nemoianu, Virgil Martin (2010) ‘The Spinozist Freedom of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda’, Philosophy and Literature, Baltimore, 34: 65–81. Olmsted, John Charles (ed.) (1979) A Victorian Art of Fiction: Essays on the Novel in British Periodicals, 1830–1869, New York: Garland. Perkin, James Russell (1990) A Reception-History of George Eliot’s Fiction, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. Pierson, Allard (1855) Bespiegeling, gezag en ervaring: Eene wijsgerige, geschiedkundige proeve, Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon. —(1860) ‘Eene bijdrage in de Rotterdamsche afdeeling der Hollandsche Maatschappij van fraaije kunsten’, Zondagsblad, Haarlem (September). —(1871a) ‘Een keerpunt in de Wijsgeerige Ontwikkeling’, De Gids, Amsterdam, 2: 453–87. —(1871b) Over Alexandre Vinet: Eene Voorlezing, Arnhem: Thieme. —(1876) ‘Engelsche Dichtkunst van den Dag’, De Gids, Amsterdam, 1: 161–82. —(1881) ‘George Eliot’, De Gids, Amsterdam, 1: 261–68. Querido, Israel (1915) ‘Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot’, Groot Nederland, Amsterdam, 8: 267–73. Roessingh, K. H. (1922) Het Modernisme in Nederland, Amsterdam: Bohn. Saalmink L. G. (1993) ‘Het Vertonen en Aankondigen van te vertalen boeken (1795– 1830)’, De Negentiende Eeuw, Hilversum, 17: 67–86. Schepper, Susanna de (2009) ‘George Eliot on the Dutch Market (1860–1896)’, in Toremans, Tom and Walter Verschueren (eds) Crossing Cultures: NineteenthCentury Anglophone Literature in the Low Countries, Louvain: Leuven University Press, pp. 83–97. Spinoza, Baruch de (1981) Ethics, trans. George Eliot 1856, ed. Thomas Deegan, Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg. Strauss, Dr David Friedrich (1840) Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet von …, 2 vols, 4th edn, Tübingen: C. F. Osiander. —(1973) The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, London: SCM Press; trans. 1846 from 4th German edn 1840. Streng, C. F. M. (1995) ‘Realisme’ in de kunst- en literatuurbeschouwing in Nederland tot 1875: een begripshistorische studie, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. —(2006) ‘Goethe in Nederland tussen 1814 en 1870’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taalen Letterkunde, Leiden, 122: 17–41. Thissen, Siebe (2000) De Spinozisten: Wijsgerige beweging in Nederland (1850–1907), The Hague: Sdu uitgevers.

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Bibliography  387 Verheul, Clazien (1984) ‘Ethisch Realisme: de ontvangst van de romans van George Eliot in Nederland in de periode 1860–1881’, in Anon. (ed.) Voortgang: Jaarboek voor de Neerlandistiek, Amsterdam: Subfaculteit Nederlands Vrije Universiteit, 5: 130–64. Vinet, A. R. (1944) Mémoire en faveur de la Liberté des Cultes, Lausanne: Librairie Payot. Vloten, Francisca van (1996) Veelzeggend: Johannes van Vloten aan het Woord, Deventer: Stichting Johannes van Vloten. Vloten, Johannes van (1843) review of F. C. de Greuve, Het leven van Jezus kritisch verdedigd tegen Dr. D. F. Strauss, De Gids, Amsterdam, 421–33, 477–90, 549–53, 604–14. —(1862a) Ad B. de Spinozae opera quae supersunt omnia supplementum, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. —(1862b) Baruch d’Espinoza, zijn leven en schriften; in verband met zijnen en onzen tijd, Amsterdam: Muller. —(1867) ‘Een mannelijk boek van vrouwenhand’, De Levensbode, Deventer, 1: 321–86. —(1873) ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’, De Levensbode, Deventer, 5: 65–83. Weel, Adriaan van der (2000a) ‘Dutch Nineteenth-Century Attitudes to International Copyright’, Publishing History, Ann Arbor, MI, 47: 31–44. —(2000b) ‘The Rise of the English Book in the Netherlands’, Quaerendo, Leiden, 30.4: 277–87. —(2002) ‘W. H. Kirberger: Early Specialist Importer of English Books into the Netherlands’, Quaerendo, Leiden, 32.3–4: 245–56. Werven, Diederik L. van (2001) Dutch Readings of George Eliot 1856–1885, Utrecht: University of Utrecht. Wodnitzky, Yael (2014) ‘Consciousness in Spinoza’s Ethics and the Early Novels of George Eliot’, MA thesis, Faculty of Philosophy, Utrecht University. Zenzinger, Ted (2012) ‘Spinoza, Adam Bede, Knowledge, and Sympathy: A Reply to Atkins’, Philosophy and Literature, Baltimore, 36.2: 424–40. Zuidema, R. (1935) ‘De Vrouw van Busken Huet’, Jaarboek Haerlem 1935, Haarlem, 59–119.

4 ‘Spirit of the Age(s)’: The Reception of George Eliot in Sweden Swedish translations and editions

AB (1861a) Adam Bede, trans. Z. Thomas Björk, n.p.: Norrköping Föreningens Boktryckeri. AmB (1891) The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, adapt. Henning Wendell, Norrköping: M. M. Wallberg. DD (1878) Daniel Deronda i sammandrag från Engelskan, trans. and ed. M. A. Goldschmidt, 3 vols, Stockholm: Bonniers. FH (1867b) Felix Holt, radikalen, trans. Herman Hörner, 3 vols, Stockholm: S. Flodin. (1884) ‘Tal i arbetarfrågan af Felix Holt’, ‘Hur man skriver en berättelse’ (On storytelling) trans. Urban von Feilitzen, Helsingborg: n. pub. From ‘Leaves from a Notebook’. (1886) ‘Om författarskap’, trans. Anna von Feilitzen, Ny Illustrerad Tidskrift, Stockholm, 22 May: 173.

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388  Bibliography LV (1888b) ‘Den lyfta slöjan’, trans. Anon., Stockholm: Aftonbladet. (1956) ‘När slöjan lyftes’, trans. Jane Lundblad, Stockholm: Tidens klassiker. M (1888–89) Ur Landsortslifvet: Middlemarch, trans. A. G. Engberg, 2 vols, Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Sons. (1961) Middlemarch, trans. Elsie and Håkan Tollet, Stockholm: Natur och Kultur. MF (1889–90) Qvarnen vid Floss, trans. Anna von Feilitzen, Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Sons. (2002) Bror och Syster: Kvarnen vid Floss, trans. Gun-Britt Sundström, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag. R (1887) Romola, trans. J. R. Spilhammar, Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Sons. SCL (1888a) Bilder ur engelska presters lif, trans. C. F. Bagge, Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Sons. SM (1861b) Silas Marner, väfvaren i Raveloe, trans. G. Thomée, Stockholm: Bonniers Europeiska följetongen, nos 32–36. (1867a) En kärlekshistoria af George Eliot, trans. Turdus Merula (Aurora von Qvanten), Stockholm: Hierta Samling af skönlitteratur. (1888c) Silas Marner vafvaren i Ravelowe, trans. J. A. Spilhammar, Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Sons. (1944) Silas Marner, trans. Ingegerd von Tell, Stockholm: Natur och Kultur. Other works cited

Adlersparre, Sophie (1882) ‘Editorial Comment’, Tidskrift för Hemmet, Stockholm, 258–59. Algulin, Ingemar and Bernt Olsson (1995) Litteraturens historia i världen, 4th edn, Stockholm: Norstedt. Backman, Carl Johan (1851) Om Romanen, Uppsala: n. pub. Beer, Gillian (1986) George Eliot, Key Women Writers, ed. Sue Roe, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bergmann, Helena (1979) Between Obedience and Freedom: Woman’s Role in the Mid-Victorian Industrial Novel, Gothenburg Studies in English, Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. —(1980) ‘Politics through Love: Felix Holt and the Industrial Novel’, Moderna Språk, Gothenburg, 74.3: 219–26. Bergstedt, Carl-Fredrik (1871) ‘Den sociala romanen i England’, Samtiden, Stockholm, 823–28. —(1873) ‘Litteratur’ (review of Middlemarch), Samtiden, Stockholm, 120–25. Bergsten, Staffan (2002) ‘Spännande tragedi i engelskt 1800tal’, Vestmanlands länstidning, Västerås, 11 May: 40. Bjursten, Herman (Ernst Ludvig) (1856) ‘Bref till en vän i landsorten’, Svenska tidningen, Stockholm, 20 September. Böök, Fredrik (1933) ‘George Eliot’, Den Viktorianska tidsåldern i engelsk litteratur, vol. 6 of Bonniers Illustrerade Litteraturhistoria, ed. Claes Lindskog, Otto Sylvan and Fredrik Böök, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, pp. 173–83. Bossik, Ulla (1987) ‘Fars kärlek nyckel till hennes värld’, Norrköpings Tidningar, Östergötlands Dagblad, Norrköping, 30 April: 5.

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Bibliography  389 Bromander, Lennart (2002) ‘Sin tids Fadime’, review of Bror och Syster, Aftonbladet, Stockholm, 15 July: 4. C. D. W. (Carl David af Wirsén) (1888a) ‘Engelska prester’, Vårt Land, Stockholm, 144 (23 June): 2–3. —(1888b) ‘Silas Marner’, Vårt Land, Stockholm, 35 (11 February): 2–3. —(1890) ‘Middlemarch’, Vårt Land, Stockholm, 82 (11 April): 2–3. Claesson Pipping, Git (1993) Könet som läsanvisning: George Eliot och Victoria Benedictsson i det svenska 1880–talet; En receptionsstudie, Stockholm; Stehag: Symposium Graduale. —(2006) ‘Jane Eyre kommer till Sverige’, in Einarsson, Monica et al. (eds) Blad till Bladh: En vänbok till Christine våren 2006, Stockholm: Södertörn Studies in History 4, pp. 29–38. —(2007) Men arbetet! Mitt arbete! Identitet och berättande i Helena Westermarcks yrkeskvinnobiografier, Gothenburg; Stockholm: Makadam. Claesson Pipping, Git and Eleanor Wikborg (2007) ‘Jane Austen’s Reception in Sweden: Irony as Criticism and Literary Value’, in Mandal, Anthony and Brian Southam (eds) The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe, London: Continuum, pp. 152–68. Cross, John Walter (1885) George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals Arranged and Edited by Her Husband, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood. ‘Daniel Deronda’ (1878) Nya Dagligt Allehanda, Stockholm, 237 (11 October). Enckell, Mikael (2009) Om konsten att älska skriften: Essäer, Stockholm: Söderströms, pp. 13–28. Erdmann, Nils (1888) Modern Realism, Stockholm: Seligmann. ‘Erika’ (Sophie Adlersparre) (1867) ‘Vår lektyr: 3 Miss Braddon och George Eliot’, Tidskrift för Hemmet, Stockholm, 183–89, 232–47. Frykman, Erik (1980) ‘Konventionstrotsande kvinna och medkännande människoskildare’, in De motsägelsefulla viktorianerna, Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söners Förlag, pp. 93–101. ‘George Eliot och hennes författarskap’ (1881) Nya Dagligt Allehanda, Stockholm, 4 February: 28. Granlund, Helena (1994) The Paradox of Self-Love: Christian Elements in George Eliot’s Treatment of Egoism, Stockholm Studies in English, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Hagberg, Knut (1944) ‘Slutord’, in George Eliot, Silas Marner, trans. Ingegerd von Tell, Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, pp. 229–30. —(1961) ‘Slutord’, in George Eliot, Silas Marner, trans. Ingegerd von Tell, Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, pp. 229–30. Håkansson, Sara (2009) Narratorial Commentary in the Novels of George Eliot, Lund: Lund Studies in English. Halldén, Ruth (1963) ‘En gammal god bok’, Uppsala Nya Tidning, Uppsala, 25 July: 2. —(1980) ‘Djup dimension åt vardagen: om Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë och George Eliot’, in Håkansson, Björn, Lars Ardelius and Lars Forssell (eds) Författarnas Litteraturhistoria: de utländska författarna 2, Stockholm: författarförlaget, pp. 104–19. —(1981) ‘Vem försvarar girigheten’, review of Silas Marner, Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, 1 June: 4. —(1984) ‘Förkrympta, krassa livet’, Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, 30 March: B 2. —(2002) ‘Det brinner en eld’, review of Bror och Syster, Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, 23 April: B 2. —(2004) ‘George Eliot’, in Radikaler och Viktorianer, Stockholm: Atlantis, pp. 121–31. Hedberg, Johannes (1985) ‘Marian (Mary Ann) Evans, alias George Eliot – en oviktoriansk författare’, Artes, Stockholm, 6: 89–94.

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390  Bibliography Holmberg, Claes-Göran (1974) ‘Litterärt utlandsklimat på 1880–talet: Några anteckningar om recensioner av engelsk, fransk och tysk litteratur’, in Ericsson, Anita (ed.) Press & Litteratur 2: Åtta presshistoriska studier, Lund: Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen, pp. 91–109. Howitt, Margaret (1867) Ett år hos Fredrika Bremer, trans. Thora Hammersköld, Stockholm: Flodin. Krook, Axel (1890) ‘Qvarnen vid Floss’, Göteborgs Posten, Gothenburg, 12 April: 83 B. Lagerlöf, Karl-Erik (1990a) ‘Ett liv i närheten av skandalen’, Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, 18 November: B 1. —(1990b) ‘Både exotisk och samtida’, Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, 20 November: B 3. Lagerroth, Erland (1961) ‘Efterskrift’, in George Eliot, Middlemarch, trans. Elsie and Håkan Tollet, Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 2: 458–62. Lagerroth, Ulla-Britt (1963) Körkarlen och Bannlyst: motivstudier i Selma Lagerlöfs tiotalsdiktning, Stockholm: Bonniers. Leavis, Frank Raymond (1948) The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, London: Chatto and Windus. Levine, George (2008) ‘George Eliot’s Hypothesis of Reality’, in Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 25–50. Lindblom, Paul (1982) ‘Infernalisk iakttagare’, review of George Eliot’s Bror och Syster, Arbetet, Malmö, 11 April: 3. Lindgren, Hellen (1886) ‘George Eliot’, Finsk tidskrift, Helsingfors, 20: 450–56. Lundblad, Jane (1956) ‘George Eliot’, in George Eliot, När slöjan lyftes, trans. Jane Lundblad, Stockholm: Tidens klassiker, pp. 5–8. Lundgren, Cai (2002) ‘Ödesdiger kärlek till en bror’, review of George Eliot’s Bror och Syster, Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm, 10 May: 7. Mattis, Irene (2012) ‘Förord’, in George Eliot, Bror och Syster, trans. Gun Britt Sundström, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, pp. 9–15. Mazzarella, Marete (2000) ‘En annorlunda viktorian’, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, Malmö, 13 July: A 4. Melberg, Arne (1984) ‘Myten om den skrivande kvinnan’, Expressen, Stockholm, 27 October: 5. När Albert Bonniers förlag firade sitt 100–årsjubileum (1937), Stockholm: Bonnier. Norbelie, Barbro Almqvist (1992) ‘Oppressive Narrowness’: A Study of the Female Community in George Eliot’s Early Writings, Studia Anglistica Uppsaliensia, Stockholm: Almqvist och Wiksell. Nordlund, Anna (2005) Selma Lagerlöfs underbara resa genom den svenska litteraturhistorien 1891–1996, Stockholm; Stehag: Symposium. Olsson, Ulf (2002) ‘Nödens engagemang’, Expressen, Stockholm, 5 April: 6. Petersen, Henrik (2002) ‘George Eliot’, review of Bror och Syster, trans. Gun Britt Sundström, Bonniers Litterära Magasin, Stockholm, 3: 82–83. Platen, Sigrid (1912) ‘Från George Eliots lefnadsväg’, Dagny, Stockholm, 27–28: 318–21. Scholl, Lesa (2011) Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman: Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot, Farnham: Ashgate. Slomovitz, Paul (1943) ‘George Eliots Juderoman, Daniel Deronda: Judestatstanken tjugo år före Herzl’, Judisk Tidskrift, Stockholm, 16.4: 269–378. Strömholm, Stig (1981) ‘En moralist med nyanser’, Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm, 31 January: 8. Sundström, Gun-Britt (2002) ‘Förord’, in George Eliot, Bror och Syster: Kvarnen vid Floss, trans. Gun-Britt Sundström, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, pp. 9–15. Svanberg, Birgitta and Ebba Witt-Brattström (1997) ‘George Eliot’, in Hundra skrivande kvinnor, Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, pp. 49–57.

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Bibliography  391 Tegner, Ingeborg (1929) George Eliot: en studie i hennes religiösa och filosofiska utveckling, Lund: Håkan Olssons boktryckeri. Theorin, Claes (1994) ‘Slängda konventioner’, Borås Tidning, Borås, 1 December: 5. Venuti, Lawrence (1998) The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference, London; New York: Routledge. Vinge, Louise (1985) ‘Dunstan’s förödande dumhet’, Göteborgs Posten, Gothenburg, 27 July: 3. Westermarck, Helena (1884) ‘Den realistiska riktningen i den franska romanen’, Finsk Tidskrift, Helsinki, 17: 101–16, 181–94. —(1894) George Eliot och den engelska naturalistiska romanen: en litterär studie, Helsinki: Wentzel Hagelstams Förlag. Wittrock, Ulf (1953) Ellen Keys väg från kristendom till livstro, Uppsala: Appelbergs boktryckeri.

5 George Eliot’s Reception in Denmark Danish translations and editions

AB (1859–60) Adam Bede, trans. Anon., 2 vols, Copenhagen: Eibes Forlag. (1887) Amos Barton’s sørgelige skæbne, trans. J. V. Østerberg, Dansk Folkebibliothek, vol. 6, Copenhagen: P. Hauberg & Co. (1906) Den Rette: En Landsbyhistorie, trans. N. P. Madsen, Copenhagen: Thor Pontoppidan. (1924) Adam Bede, trans. N. P. Madsen, 2 vols, Copenhagen: O. Lohse. BJ (1879) Et løftet Slør og Broder Jacob: To Fortællinger, trans. Anon., Copenhagen: n. pub. FH (1907) Læssøe-Müller, Paul and Ingemann Ottosen (eds), Engelske Kulturbilleder: Uddrag af Felix Holt, The Radical, Copenhagen: Det Schuboteske Forlag. LV (1879) Et løftet Slør og Broder Jacob: To Fortællinger, trans. Anon., Copenhagen: n. pub. (1912a) Et løftet slør, trans. Anon., Copenhagen: Universalforlaget. M (1873) Middlemarch: Studier af det engelske Provinsliv, trans. Anon., 2 vols, Copenhagen: Berlingske Bogtrykkeri. (2003) Middlemarch, trans. Claus Bech, intro. Bo Green Jensen, 2 vols, Copenhagen: Gyldendal. (1994) Middlemarch, dir. Anthony Page (BBC TV, 12 January), Danmarks Radio, rebroadcast August 1996. MF (1877) Dorlcote Mølle, trans. Anon., 2 vols, Copenhagen: Berlingske Bogtrykkeri. (1912b) Møllen ved Floss, trans. Paul Læssøe-Müller, 2 vols, Copenhagen: I. L. Lybeckers Forlag. (1924) Møllen ved Floss: Genfortalt for Ungdommen, trans. and adapt. Q. Meilbo, Copenhagen: Prior. (n.d.) The Mill on the Floss, stereotyped edn, Edinburgh; London: Blackwood & Sons. MG (1861) Herr Gilfil’s Kjærlighedshistorie, trans. Anon., Holbæk: Jordans Forlag.

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392  Bibliography R (1885) Romola, trans. Frederik Winkel Horn, Copenhagen: Hagerups Forlag. SM (1863) Silas Marner: Væveren i Raveloe, trans. P. V. Grove, Copenhagen: Eibes Forlag. (1909) Silas Marner: Væveren fra Raveloe, trans. Aslaug Mikkelsen, Copenhagen: John Martin’s Forlag. (2000) Silas Marner: Væveren i Raveloe, trans. Claus Bech, Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Other works cited

Agger, Bodil (1965) ‘Eksempler på den tragiske proces i George Eliots romaner’, unpub. MA thesis, University of Copenhagen. Austen, Jane (1855–56) Forstand og Hjerte, trans. Carl Karup, 3 vols, Kjøge: L. Jordan. Brandes, Georg (1906) Main Currents in 19th Century Literature, trans. Diana White and Mary Morison, 6 vols, London: Heinemann; New York: MacMillan. Brummer, Therese (1895) To Kvindeportraiter: George Eliot, Bertha v. Suttner, Copenhagen: Hostrup Schultz. Brunn, K. (1943) ‘George Eliot: En engelsk hjemstavnsforfatter’, Fyns Venstreblad, Odense, 9 August. Brunsted, Birgit (1996) ‘Med en passion for idéer’, Det fri Aktuelt, Copenhagen, 7 February. Downs, Brian W. (1948) ‘Anglo-Danish Literary Relations 1867–1900: The Fortunes of English Literature in Denmark’, Modern Language Review, Cambridge, 43.2 (April): 145–74. Frost, Simon (2007), ‘“A handsome volume”: Fra litteraturhistorie til den litterære teksts sociologi’, trans. Tore Rye Andersen, Passage, Aarhus, 57: 29–45. Grödal, Hanne Tang (1983) ‘“That passionate sensibility”: Lidenskabens ambivalente triumf i George Eliots The Mill on the Floss’, in Christensen, Ann-Dorte et al. (eds) Aarbog for kvindestudier, Aalborg: University of Aalborg, pp. 211–29. Hertel, Lisbeth (1991) Fem victorianske ægteskaber, Copenhagen: Spektrum, pp. 211–58. Hilden, Adda, (2003) ‘Aslaug Mikkelsen Møller’, in Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon, http:// www.kvinfo.dk/side/597/bio/1179/origin/170/query/aslaug%20mikkelsen/ (accessed 14 September 2013). Hjørnager Pedersen, Viggo (2013) ‘George Eliot’, in De Gyldne Riger: En lystvandring gennem den engelske litteratur, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bahnhof, pp. 175–81. Kampmann, Christian (1969) ‘Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot’ (review), Information, Copenhagen, 12 August. Klitgård, Ebbe (2013) Chaucer in Denmark: A Study of the Translation and Reception History 1782–2012, Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark. Kruuse, Jens (1967) ‘Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot’ (review), Jyllandposten, Aarhus, 14 August. Læssøe-Müller, Paul (n.d.) ‘Grove, P. V.’, in Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, http://www. denstoredanske.dk/Dansk_Biografisk_Leksikon/Medier/Journalist/P.V._Grove (accessed 14 September 2013). Leavis, Q. D. (1967) Silas Marner, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lehrer, Eva (2003) ‘Daniel Deronda: den viktorianske zionist’, Tidsskrift om jødisk liv, Copenhagen, 2: 12–14. Melberg, Arne (1988) ‘George Eliot og middelvejen’, in Hertel, Hans (ed.) Verdens Litteraturhistorie, vol. 5, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, pp. 148–49. Mikkelsen, Aslaug (1942) ‘En victoriansk Forfatterinde’, in Foregangskvinder i engelsk litteratur, Copenhagen: Haase og Søns Forlag, pp. 147–78.

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Bibliography  393 Møller, Lis (1995) ‘En anderledes kærlighedshistorie’, Kristeligt Dagblad, Copenhagen, 21 July. Mortensen, Birgit (2003) ‘Brummer, Therese’, in Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon, http:// www.kvinfo.dk/side/597/bio/318/origin/170/ (accessed 14 September 2013). Mortensen, Peter (2007) ‘“Unconditional Surrender”? Jane Austen Reception in Denmark’, in Mandal, Anthony and Brian Southam (eds) The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe, London: Continuum, pp. 117–31. Nielsen, Jørgen Erik (1976–77) Den samtidige engelske litteratur og Danmark 1800–1840, I-II: Publications of the Department of English, vol. 4, Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. —(2009) Dickens i Danmark, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Østergaard, Claus Bratt (1996) ‘Lidenskab og selvindsigt’, Politiken, Copenhagen, 3 March. Petersen, Carl S. (n.d.) ‘Horn, Frederik Winkel’, in Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, http://www. denstoredanske.dk/Dansk_Biografisk_Leksikon/Historie/Litteraturhistoriker/ Fr._Winkel_Horn (accessed 14 September 2013). Rahbek Rasmussen, Jens (2006) Modernitet eller åndsdannelse: Engelsk i skole og samfund 1800–1935, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Rosenberg, P. A. (trans.) and Kai Rosenberg (n.d.) ‘En Aften; De gyldne Tider gaa, Ven’, Copenhagen, Royal Danish Library, MA ms 5844, mu 9912.1100. Rubow, Paul. V. and Knud Sørensen (eds) (n.d.) ‘Østerberg, V.’, in Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, http://www.denstoredanske.dk/Dansk_Biografisk_Leksikon/Samfund,_ jura_og_politik/Sprog/Filolog/V._%C3%98sterberg (accessed 14 September 2013). Sandvad, Else (1996) ‘Drama i Victoriatiden’, Samvirke, Copenhagen, 2 (February): 28–30. Sørensen, Marianne (1982) Halvmånefasen og kuglen: kærlighed, arbejde og kvindefrigørelse i Charlotte Brontë’s romaner, Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. —(1987) ‘Mellem erfaring og metafor: Æstetik, køn og kulturkritik i George Eliots romaner’, in Festskrift for Ingeborg Nixon, vol. 2 of Einersen, Dorrit et al. (eds) Kvindecenterets forskningspublikationer, Copenhagen: Copenhagen University Press, pp. 22–69. —(1989) ‘Den lille snehvide og den onde stedmoder: Om rivalisering og kvindelige forfattere’, in Koch, Lene and Bente Elkjær (eds) Fjende-veninde: Om konkurrence og misundelse mellem kvinder, Copenhagen: KVINFO, pp. 38–45. —(1996a) ‘Kvinden fra Middlemarch’, Weekendavisen, Copenhagen, 23 February. —(1996b), ‘Grublen og Klarsyn: George Eliot og Middlemarch’, Bogens Verden, Copenhagen, 1: 254–57. Tetzlaff, Marie (2013) ‘Oversætter med forkærlighed for Pynchon fylder 70 år’, Politiken, Copenhagen, 20 June. Venuti, Lawrence (2008) The Translators’ Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd edn, London: Routledge.

6 George Eliot in Norway: The Enthusiasm that Petered Out Translations and editions

AB (1910) Adam Bede, trans. Anna Lassen, Kristiania: Steenske Bogtrykkeri og forlag. (1912) ‘Av “Adam Bede” av George Eliot’, trans. Ivar Aasen, in Liestøl, Knut (ed.) Skrifter i Samling, Kristiania: Gyldendalske, 3: 375–80. (1954) Adam Bede, trans. Sverre Brændeland, Oslo: Ansgar Forlag; reissued 1972. (1999a) Adam Bede, London: Folio Society.

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394  Bibliography AmB (1919) Amos Barton og vanlagnaden hans, trans. Henrik Rytter, Oslo: Det norske samlaget. JR (1896) Janets Anger, trans. Thora Storm, Trondheim: Aktietrykkeriet. (1999b) ‘Janet’s Regret’, in Silas Marner and Scenes of Clerical Life, London: Folio Society, pp. 355–506. LV (1878) Det løftede slør, trans. Anon., Kristiania: Aftenposten. M (1873a) Middlemarch: en Fortælling af det engelske Provinsliv, trans. Anon., Christiania: Aftenposten. (1873b) Middlemarch: Studier af det engelske Provinsliv, trans. Anon., Copenhagen: Berlingske bogtrykkeri. (1873–74) Middlemarch: en Fortælling af det engelske Provinsliv, trans. Anon., Bergen: Georg Griegs bogtrykkeri. (1995) Middlemarch: bilder fra livet i provinsen, trans. Mona Lyche Ramberg, Oslo: Gyldendal; reissued 1996, 2008. MF (1895–96) Møllen ved Floss, trans. Christian A. Bugge, Kristiania: Grimsgaard & Mallings Forlag. (1908–09) Møllen ved Floss, trans. Anon., Chicago: John Andersen. (2002) Møllen ved Floss, trans. Mona Lyche Ramberg, Oslo: Aschehoug. SM (1892) Silas Marner: Væveren fra Raveloe, trans. Anon., Høvik: Bibliothek for de tusen hjem. (1950) Veveren fra Raveloe, trans. Ruth Nissen-Drejer, Oslo: Ansgar forlag. (1960) ‘Silas Marner’, trans. Anon., illus. Arnold L. Hicks, in Illustrerte klassikere, Fredrikstad: Illustrerte Klassikere A/S, 87: repr. 2009. Other works cited

Beyer, Edvard et al. (eds) (1972) Verdens litteraturhistorie, Oslo: J. W. Cappelens Forlag. Bing, Just (1905) Europas Litteraturhistorie i det 19de Aarhundrede: Grundlinier og Hovedværker, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag. —(1928–34) Verdens-litteraturhistorie: grunnlinjer og hovedverker, Oslo: Aschehoug. Bull, Francis (1940) Verdens litteraturhistorie, Oslo: Gyldendal. Carroll, David (ed.) (2000) George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, London; New York: Routledge. Espeland, Velle (2009) ‘George Eliot: Skandaleombrust forfatterinne’, in Illustrerte klassikere: Den usynlige mann, Oslo: Egmont serieforlag, 22: 116–20. Haarberg, Jon, Tone Selboe and Hans Erik Aarset (2007) Verdenslitteratur: Den vestlige tradisjonen, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Hertel, Hans (ed.) (1989) Verdens litteraturhistorie 1830–1914, Oslo: Gyldendal norsk forlag. Kulås, Guri (2005) ‘George Eliot’, Klassekampen, 8 October. Langholm, Odd Inge (1996) ‘Forord’, in George Eliot, Middlemarch: Bilder av livet i provinsen, Oslo: Den norske bokklubben, 1: i–vi. Lassen, Anna (1910) ‘Forord’, in George Eliot, Adam Bede, Kristiania: Steenske bogtrykkeri og forlag. Liestøl, Knut (1919) ‘George Eliot’ (preface), in George Eliot, Amos Barton og vanlagnaden hans, Oslo: Det norske samlaget, pp. i–vi.

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Bibliography  395 Lothe, Jakob (2006) ‘Narrative Vision in Middlemarch: The Novel Compared with the BBC Television Adaptation’, in Chase, Karen (ed.) Middlemarch in the TwentyFirst Century, Cary, NC: Oxford University Press, pp. 177–99. Midttun, Olav (1919) ‘George Eliot: Amos Barton’, Syn og Segn, Kristiania: 430–31. Mollerin, Kaja Schjerven (2007) ‘Fortellinger fra virkeligheten’, Vinduet, Oslo, 61.4: 90–93. Narvesen, Knut (2007) ‘Highgate kirkegård, London: en fortelling om vennskap og kjærlighet i George Eliots 184. år’, Bokvennen, Oslo, 9.1: 44–47. Nøding, Aina (2010) ‘Fra fabler til føljetonger’, in En samfunnsmakt blir til: 1660–1880, vol. 1 of Norsk Presses Historie (1660–2010), eds Martin Eide and Hans Fredrik Dahl, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, pp. 305–59. Øksnevad, Reidar (1949) Det britiske samvelde og Eire i norsk litteratur: en bibliografi, Oslo: Gyldendal. Parton, James (1898) ‘George Eliot’, Kringsjaa, Kristiania, 11: 207–12. Ramberg, Mona Lyche (1996) ‘Oversetters etterord’, in George Eliot, Middlemarch: Bilder av livet i provinsen, Oslo: Den norske bokklubben, 2: 457–64. Randers, Kristofer (1895) ‘George Eliot’, Aftenposten, Kristiania, 20 October. Skram, Amalie (1987) ‘Et løftet slør og Broder Jakob: To Fortællinger Af George Eliot’, in Engelstad, Irene (ed.) Optimistisk Læsemaade, Oslo: Gyldendal, pp. 24–25. Sørbø, Marie Nedregotten (2014) ‘Jane Austen and Norway: Sharing the Long Road to Recognition’, in Mandal, Anthony and Brian Southam (eds) The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe, rev. edn, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 132–52. Sørensen, Johan (1887) ‘Series Postscript’, repr. in George Eliot, Silas Marner: Væveren fra Raveloe, trans. Anon. 1892, Høvik: Bibliothek for de tusen hjem. Strømme, Olaf (1911) ‘George Eliot: Adam Bede’, For kirke og kultur, Kristiania, 18: 188. Tambs-Lyche, Hans (1893) ‘Salme av George Eliot’, Kringsjaa, Kristiania, 1: 410. —(1894) ‘George Eliot’, Kringsjaa, Kristiania, 3: 337–44, 444–51, 497–503, 597–603, 650–56, 729–35, 842–45. Tysdahl, Bjørn (1995) ‘Middlemarch: romanen bak TV-serien’, Aftenposten, Oslo, 8 January: 9. Wesenberg, Hans (ed.) (1885) The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton: Af George Eliot: Udgivet til skolebrug, Kristiania: Alb. Cammermeyer. Winter-Hjelm, K. A. (1881) ‘Obituary’, Norsk Familjeblad 2, Kristiania, 12 February.

7 The Reception of George Eliot in France French translations and editions

AB (1861) Adam Bede, trans. François D’Albert-Durade, 2 vols, Paris: E. Dentu; Geneva: H. Georg; repr. Paris: Hachette, 1886, 1892, 1899, 1903, 1906. (1947) Adam Bede, trans. and adapt. Jeanne Dulong, Paris: Éditions du Dauphin. (1991) Adam Bède, trans. François d’Albert-Durade, rev. Dominique Jean, Paris: Julliard. (1995) Romans (reprint of AB (1861), SM (1954) and M (1951)), Omnibus edn, Paris: Presses de la Cité. DD (1881a) Daniel Deronda, trans. Ernest David, 2 vols, Paris: Calmann-Lévy; repr. 1882, 1886. (2010) Daniel Deronda, trans. Alain Jumeau, Paris: Gallimard, Folio Classique.

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396  Bibliography JR (1891a) La Conversion de Jeanne (JR), trans. Anon., pref. (‘Notice’) H. Duclos, Paris: Librairie illustrée. M (1890a) Middlemarch: étude de la vie de province, trans. M.-J. M., 2 vols, Paris: Calmann-Lévy. (1951) Middlemarch, trans. Albine Loisy, Paris: Plon, Le Club Français du Livre; repr. 1981, Paris: Christian Bourgois. (1953) Middlemarch, trans. Lucienne Molitor, Verviers: Gérard, Marabout Paperbacks; repr. 1958, 1967. (1995) Romans (reprint of AB (1861), SM (1954) and M (1951)), Omnibus edn, Paris: Presses de la Cité. (2005) Middlemarch, trans. Sylvère Monod, pref. Virginia Woolf, Paris: Gallimard, Folio Classique. MF (1863a) La Famille Tulliver, ou Le Moulin sur la Floss (MF), trans. François D’AlbertDurade, 2 vols, Paris: E. Dentu; Geneva: H. Georg; repr. 1887. (1887a) Le Moulin sur la Floss (MF), trans. François D’Albert-Durade (repr. from 1863a, with new title), 2 vols, Paris: Hachette; repr. 1894, 1897, 1900, 1904, 1906, 1908, 1922. (1891b) The Mill on the Floss, ed. Em. Fenard, abridged edn, Paris: Garnier. (1893) Le Moulin sur la Floss (MF), trans. Anon., pref. (‘Notice’) C. Simond, abridged edn, Paris: H. Gautier. (1937) Tom and Maggie (selections from MF), ed. Ronald Windross, school edn with English text (abridged and simplified), Paris: Didier. (1949) Le Moulin sur la Floss (MF), trans. and abridged Mme E. Roucher, Lyon: E. Vinay. (1957a) Le Moulin sur la Floss (MF), trans. and abridged Jean Muray, Paris: Hachette. —(1957b) Le Moulin sur la Floss (MF), trans. Lucienne Molitor, Verviers: Gérard, Marabout Paperbacks. (2003) Le Moulin sur la Floss (MF), trans. Alain Jumeau, Paris: Gallimard, Folio Classique. R (1878) Romola, ou Florence et Savonarole, trans. François D’Albert-Durade, 2 vols, Geneva: Sandoz; Paris: Fischbacher; repr. 1887. (1887b) Romola, trans. François D’Albert-Durade (repr. from 1878, with new title), 2 vols, Paris: Hachette. SCL (1863b) Scènes de la vie du clergé, trans. Emmanuel Léon Pasquet, Brussels: Lacroix, Verboeckhoven. (1884) Scènes de la vie du clergé, trans. François D’Albert-Durade, Paris: Fischbacher; repr. Paris: Ombres, 2001. (1886) Scènes de la vie du clergé: La Conversion de Jeanne (JR), trans. François D’AlbertDurade (repr. from 1884, with new title), Paris: Hachette; repr. 1890, 1896, 1901, 1903, 1905, 1906, 1911. (1887c) Scènes de la vie du clergé: Tribulations du R. A. Barton, suivies du Roman de M. Gilfil (AmB, MG), trans. François D’Albert-Durade (repr. from 1884 and 1886, with new title), Paris: Hachette. (1890b) Scènes de la vie cléricale (AmB), trans. Anon., pref. (‘Notice’) C. Simond, Paris: H. Gautier. (1924) Scenes of Clerical Life, ed. Mlle S. Clot, school edn with English text (abridged), Paris: Hachette.

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Bibliography  397 (1925) Scenes of Clerical Life: Amos Barton, ed. R. Vettier, school edn with English text, Paris: Masson. (1938a) Scenes of Clerical Life: Mr Gilfil’s Love Story, ed. Ronald Windross, school edn with English text (abridged and simplified), Paris: Didier. (1938b) Scenes of Clerical Life: The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, ed. Ronald Windross, school edn with English text (abridged and simplified), Paris: Didier. (1981) Scènes de la vie du clergé, trans. François d’Albert-Durade, rev. Jean Gattégno, Paris: Christian Bourgois. SM (1863c) Silas Marner, trans. François D’Albert-Durade, Geneva: H. Georg. (1881b) Silas Marner, trans. François D’Albert-Durade, new edn, Paris: Fischbacher. (1885) Silas Marner, trans. Mme Maisonrouge, Paris: Firmin-Didot. (1887d) Silas Marner, ed. Auguste Malfroy, school edn with English text, Paris: Hachette; repr. 1890, 1891, 1896, 1902, 1908. (1889) Silas Marner, trans. Auguste Malfroy, Paris: Hachette; repr. 1890, 1896, 1899, 1903, 1905, 1913. (1890c) Silas Marner, ed. Jules Guiraud, school edn with English text, Paris: Belin; repr. 1891, 1897. (1896) Silas Marner, trans. Léon Morel, school edn, Paris: Delagrave. (1900) Silas Marner, ed. abbé C. Dinnet, school edn with English text, Paris: Poussielgue; repr. 1905. (1908) Silas Marner, ed. P. Lestang, school edn with English text (abridged), 2 vols, Marseille: Ferran jeune; repr. 1918. (1911) Silas Marner, ed. Douglas Gibb, school edn with English text, Paris: Didier. (1934) Silas Marner, trans. A. Canaux, Tours: Mame. (1939a) Silas Marner, ed. Ronald Windross, school edn with English text (abridged and simplified), Paris: Didier. (1939b) Silas Marner, trans. Charlotte and Marie-Louise Pressoir, Paris; London: Nelson. (1950) Silas Marner, trans. Marguerite Faguer, Paris: Hatier. (1954) Silas Marner, trans. Joseph Vilar, intro. Raymond Las Vergnas, Paris: Club Bibliophile de France. (1966) Silas Marner, trans. Pierre Leyris, Paris: Gallimard; repr. with pref., 1980. (1980) Silas Marner, trans. Pierre Leyris, pref. Jean-Louis Curtis, Paris: Gallimard, Folio Classique; repr. from 1966. (1995) Romans (reprint of AB (1861), SM (1954) and M (1951)), Omnibus edn, Paris: Presses de la Cité. Other (1909) Pages choisies de George Eliot, ed. Émile Hovelaque, Paris: Armand Colin. Other works cited

Basch, Françoise (1971) ‘La Femme victorienne, roman et société, 1837–1867’, unpub. PhD thesis, University of Paris III. —(1974) Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel 1837–67, trans. Anthony Rudolf, London: Lane; New York: Schocken Books. —(1979) Les Femmes victoriennes: Roman et société (1837–1867), Paris: Payot. Beauvoir, Simone de (1958) Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, Paris: Livre de Poche; repr. 1964. —(1973) Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. James Kirkup, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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398  Bibliography Billy, Robert de (1923) ‘Une amitié de trente-deux ans’, in ‘Hommage à Marcel Proust’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, Paris, January. Bolton, Françoise (1978) ‘Les Romans de George Eliot et ses Carnets: Étude du développement conjoint d’un art et d’une pensée’, unpub. PhD thesis, University of Paris-Sorbonne. Bos, Charles du (1922–37) Approximations, Paris: n. pub. Bourl’honne, Pierre (1933) George Eliot: Essai de biographie intellectuelle et morale, Paris: Champion. Bremond, Henri (1906) ‘La Religion de George Eliot’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 5.36 (15 Dec.). Brunetière, Ferdinand (1881) ‘Le Naturalisme anglais: Étude sur George Eliot’, La Revue Bleue, 3.2 (17 Sept.); repr. 1892 in Le Roman naturaliste, Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens (1974–) Montpellier: Centre d’études & de recherches victoriennes & édouardiennes, Université Paul Valéry. Caraës, Colette (1979) ‘La Femme et les femmes dans les romans de George Eliot’, unpub. PhD thesis, University of Rennes. Cazamian, Madeleine L. (1923) Le Roman et les idées en Angleterre, 2 vols, Strasbourg: Les Belles Lettres. Chaffurin, Louis (1910) ‘Les Idées morales et religieuses de George Eliot’, La Revue Pédagogique, Paris, 15 September. —(1920) ‘Les Amours de George Eliot’, La Grande Revue, Paris, 103 (July–September). Couch, John Philip (1967) George Eliot in France: A French Appraisal of George Eliot’s Writings, 1858–1960, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Drouet-Richet, Stéphanie (2001) Les marges du regard dans la fiction éliotienne, Lille: Atelier national de Reproduction des Thèses. Gide, André (1939) Journal 1889–1939, Paris: Gallimard. Jougan, Sylvie (1999) ‘La stratégie de l’indirection dans l’oeuvre romanesque de “George Eliot”’, unpub. PhD thesis, University of Paris III. Jumeau, Alain (1987) ‘George Eliot, ses personnages et son lecteur: genèse d’une fiction (1857–1861)’, unpub. PhD thesis, University of Paris-Sorbonne. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien (1892) ‘Le Roman contemporain et le Naturalisme en Allemagne’, Revue des Deux Mondes, Paris, 3.110 (15 March). Montégut, Émile (1883) ‘Esquisses littéraires: George Eliot; I. L’Âme et le talent; II. Les Œuvres et la doctrine morale’, Revue des Deux Mondes, Paris, 3.16 (1 and 15 March). Paulhan, Jean (1941) Les Fleurs de Tarbes, Paris: Gallimard. Pond, E. J. (1927) Les idées morales et religieuses de George Eliot, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Quesnel, Léo (1873) ‘Le Roman contemporain en Angleterre: George Eliot’, La Revue Bleue, 2.5 (5 July). Romieu, Émilie and Georges (1930) La Vie de George Eliot, Paris: Gallimard. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1946) L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, Paris: Nagel, pp. 86–88. Schérer, Edmond (1863) ‘George Eliot’, in Études critiques sur la littérature contemporaine, Paris: Michel Levy, 1: 17–27. —(1878) ‘Daniel Deronda par George Eliot’, in Études sur la littérature contemporaine, Paris: Michel Levy, 5: 287–302. Seichepine, Marielle (1997) Le temps dans les romans de George Eliot, Lille: Atelier national de Reproduction des Thèses. Taine, Hippolyte (1872) Notes sur l’Angleterre, Paris: Hachette. Tang, Maria (1996) ‘Les fils du texte: Trame et déchirure dans les romans de George Eliot’, unpub. PhD thesis, University of Paris III. Thibaudet, Albert (1920) ‘Le Centenaire de George Eliot’, Nouvelle Revue Française, Paris, February.

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Bibliography  399 —(1921) ‘Réflexions sur la littérature: Du roman anglais’, Nouvelle Revue Française, Paris, November. Toussaint, Benjamine (2002) ‘Religion et humanisme dans l’œuvre d’Elizabeth Gaskell et de George Eliot’, unpub. PhD thesis, University of Paris IV.

8. The Reception of George Eliot in Italy: 1868 to the Present Italian translations

AB (1931) trans. M. Carpi, Florence: Rinascimento del Libro. (2011) trans. Francesca Nizi, Rome: Castelvecchi; first unabridged translation. DD (1882) trans. and intro. Cesare Olivetti, Rome: Stabilimento Tipografico Italiano. (1996) trans. Olivia Crosio, Turin: Frassinelli. LV (1978) ‘Il velo scostato’, in Il Cavaliere dalla Piuma Rosso-sangue, trans. Pietro Meneghelli, Rome: Lestoille. (1985) trans. Riccardo Reim, Rome: Lucarini. (1996) Il velo dissolto, trans. Elisa Morpurgo, Florence: Passigli. (1999) Jacob e suo fratello, trans., intro. and notes Enrica Villari, Venice: Marsilio. (2007a) trans. Riccardo Colli, Giulianova: Galaad. (2007b) Il velo strappato e altre storie, trans. Francesca Avanzini, Milan: La Tartaruga; with stories by American women authors. (2010) trans. Enrica Villari, Venice: Marsilio; Rome: Newton Compton; incl. Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘La storia della vecchia nutrice’. (2010b) trans. Susanna Burchielli, Milan: Alia. M (1982) trans. Mario Manzari, Turin: UTET; repr. 2008, pref. Antonia Byatt, BUR. (1983) trans. Michele Bottalico, intro. Silvano Sabbadini, Milan: Mondadori. (1999) trans. Giovanni Baldi, Milan: Garzanti. MF (1934) trans. Lila Jahn, Milan: Treves; repr. 1944, Milan: Garzanti. (1935) ‘Narrato’, adapt. Francesco Perri, Turin: UTET, ‘La scala d’oro’. (1940) trans. Giacomo Debenedetti, Biblioteca Romantica, Milan: Mondadori; mult. repr. incl. 1980 with intro. Anna Luisa Zazo. (1964) trans. Clara Brusasca, Milan: Bietti. (1966) trans. Virginia Galante-Garrone, Rome: Edizioni Paoline. (1968) trans. Giovanna Biasotti, Milan: Fabbri. (1975) trans. Anna Gerola, Geneva: Ferni. (2004) trans. Silvia Nono, intro. Nadia Fusini, Rome: La Repubblica. R (1868, 1906) trans. Gustavo Strafforello, abridged edn, Il romanziere contemporaneo illustrato, Milan: Treves; incl. 23 illustrations. (1920) trans. Emilia Franceschini, Florence: Salani. (1957) trans. Vittorio Radicati, Turin: UTET. (2009) trans. Sara Donegà, Florence: Barbès.

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400  Bibliography SCL (1914) ‘Le tribolazioni del Reverendo Amos Barton’, trans. and intro. Gaetano Negri, Milan: Sonzogno. (1922) ‘Il matrimonio di Mr. Gilfil’, ‘Il pentimento di Giannina’, trans. Paolo Bellezza, Milan: Vallardi. (1954) ‘Le tristi vicende del Reverendo Amos Barton’, trans. Bianca Dettore, intro. Giorgio Luti, Florence: Sansoni. (n.d.) trans. Gerolamo Bottoni, Milan: Sonzogno. SM (1926) Il tessitore di Raveloe, Silas Marner, trans. Anon., Milan: Vallardi. (1935) trans. Lia Spaventa Filippi, Milan: Sonzogno. (1939) trans. Calandra-Pedrotti, Turin: UTET. (1954) La bella storia di Silas Marner, trans. Maria Luisa Agosti Castellani, Milan: Rizzoli; repr. 1995, intro. Paolo Ruffilli. (1967) trans. Francesco Franconeri, Milan: Bietti. (1968) trans. Maria Gallone, Milan: Fabbri.

Other works cited

Antosa, Silvia (2006) ‘Transport and Society in Transition in the Fiction of George Eliot’, in Costantini, Mariaconcetta, Renzo D’Agnillo and Francesco Marroni (eds) La letteratura vittoriana e i mezzi di trasporto: dalla nave all’astronave, Rome: Aracne, pp. 307–16. Berti, Luigi (1935) ‘Considerazioni generali sul realismo morale di George Eliot’, La Nuova Italia, Florence, 12: 379–82. Biagi, Guido (1907) ‘Introduction’, in George Eliot, Romola, Florentine Librarian, London: Unwin, pp. xv–xli. Bignami, Marialuisa (2007) ‘George Eliot: la visione e la rappresentazione del reale’, in Bignami, Marialuisa (ed.) Le trame della conoscenza: Percorsi epistemologici della letteratura inglese dalla prima modernità al postmoderno, Milan: Unicopli, pp. 67–78. —(2009) ‘Sir Joshua and the Historian: Portraits in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda’, in Orestano, Francesca and Francesca Frigerio (eds) Strange Sisters: Literature and Aesthetics in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 179–88. —(2011) ‘Iris Murdoch and George Eliot: Two Women Writers of Ideas’, in de Melo Araùjo, Sofia and Fatima Vieira (eds) Iris Murdoch: Philosopher Meets Novelist, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, pp. 23–30. —(2012) ‘Giuseppe Mazzini: What did he mean for George Eliot?’, Anglistica pisana, Pisa, 9: 176–79. —(2012) ‘What do George Eliot’s Women Wear? Dress and Characterization in her Stories’, in Romana Paci, Francesca, Carla Pomarè and Marco Pustianaz (eds) Essays in Victorian Literature and Culture in Honour of Toni Cerutti, Turin: Trauben, pp. 41–50. Billiani, Francesca (2007) Culture nazionali e narrazioni straniere: Italia, 1903–1943, Florence: Le Lettere. Boccaccini, Gabriele (1995) ‘1882: Cesare Olivetti e la traduzione italiana di Daniel Deronda di George Eliot’, Amicizia ebraico-cristiana, Florence, 30: 141–45. Bugliani, Francesca (1993) ‘Modelli epistemici in Romola di George Eliot’, in De Scarpis, Valerio, Loretta Innocenti, Franco Marucci and Armando Pajalich (eds) Intrecci e contaminazioni: Atti del XIV Congresso A.I.A., Venice: Supernova, pp. 135–48.

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Bibliography  401 Calimani, Dario (1979) ‘George Eliot e l’evoluzione dello stereotipo ebraico’, Rassegna di Israel, Rome, 45.8–9: 328–41. De Logu, Pietro (1969) La narrativa di George Eliot, Bari: Adriatica. De Stasio, Clotilde (1982) Lo scrittore e le due nazioni, Bari: Adriatica; pp. 62–64 are devoted to Felix Holt. Eliot, George (1987) Middlemarch, ed. Anita Weston and John McRae, Naples: Loffredo; with essays on M incl. Michele Bottalico, ‘Tradurre Middlemarch’, pp. 33–43; Francesco Marroni, ‘Middlemarch e le metafore dell’eccesso’, pp. 11–31; Mark Irvine, ‘Middlemarch: studio della vita di provincia’, pp. 45–61; Rosamaria Loretelli, ‘Middlemarch, Santa Teresa e la tela del ragno’, pp. 129–39; Carla Locatelli, ‘Middlemarch: il microscopio, la goccia d’acqua e gli impercettibili movimenti del narrare’, pp. 140–46. Grego, Alessandra (2000) ‘The Dual Form of Daniel Deronda’, RSV (Rivista di Studi Vittoriani), Pescara, 5: 93–113. ‘An Italian on George Eliot’ (1891) Blackwood’s Magazine 150: 867–77. Lanaro, Giorgio (1999) Il positivismo tra scienza e religione: Studi sulla fortuna di Comte in Gran Bretagna, Milan: Franco Angeli. Lewes, George Henry (1891) Vita di Volfango Goethe, trans. Giulio Pisa, Milan: Cooperativa Editrice Italiana. Lops, Marina (1990) ‘Femminile, flusso e forma in George Eliot’, in Arru, Angiolina and Maria Teresa Chialant (eds) Il racconto delle donne: Voci, autobiografie, figurazioni, Naples: Liguori, pp. 199–212. Marroni, Francesco (1980) Una verità difficile: Studio sui romanzi di George Eliot, Bologna: Patron. —(1985) ‘Felix Holt, the Radical: George Eliot e il dibattito sulla nuova cultura operaia’, in Pagetti, Carlo (ed.) SH/SF: Da Shakespeare alla science-fiction: percorsi della cultura inglese, Pescara: Libreria dell’Università, pp. 127–54. —(1995) ‘Comte e l’‘eccesso’ testuale di Felix Holt’, Merope, Pescara, 14: 5–30. —(1997) Spettri senza nome: modelli epistemici e narrativa vittoriana, Pescara: Campus; repr. 2007, Rome: Carocci. —(2004) ‘George Eliot fra religione dell’umanità e “vane speranze”’, in Miti e mondi vittoriani: La cultura inglese dell’Ottocento, Rome: Carocci, pp. 142–58. —(2010) ‘Silas Marner: George Eliot’s Garden Building as Fabular Representation of a New Social Order’, in Mariani, Andrea (ed.) Riscritture dell’Eden: Il giardino nell’immaginazione letteraria angloamericana, Crocetta del Montello: Mazzanti, 6: 131–45. Marucci, Franco (2002) ‘The Lifted Veil, il racconto mesmerico di George Eliot’, in Vanon Alliata, Manuela (ed.) Desiderio e trasgressione nella letteratura fantastica, Venice: Marsilio, pp.127–39. —(2009) L’inchiostro del mago: Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento, Pisa: Pacini. Mineo, Ady (1995) ‘L’epifania nuziale di Dorothea Brooke’, in De Clementi, Andreina and Maria Stella (eds) Viaggi di donne, Naples: Liguori, pp. 131–45. Mucci, Carla (2000) ‘Realismo e epistemologia negativa in George Eliot’, in Ettorre, Emanuela, Andrea Mariani and Francesco Marroni (eds) Before Life and After, Pescara: Tracce, pp. 81–103. Negri, Gaetano (1891) George Eliot: la sua vita e i suoi romanzi, 2 vols, Milan: Treves; repr. 1903, Milan: Baldini e Castoldi; 1903 edn contains biography of Negri by Michele Scherillo. Payne, Susan (1992) The Strange within the Real: The Function of Fantasy in Austen, Bronte and Eliot, Rome: Bulzoni. Pennacchia Punzi, Maddalena (2001) Il mito di Corinne: viaggio in Italia e genio femminile in Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller e George Eliot, Rome: Carocci.

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402  Bibliography Perletti, Greta (2008) Le ferite della memoria: Il ritorno dei ricordi nella cultura vittoriana, Bergamo: Sestante Edizioni (Bergamo University Press); pp. 130–52 are dedicated to Eliot. Pisapia, Biancamaria (1967) ‘George Eliot e Henry James’, Studi americani, Rome, 13: 235–80. Praz, Mario (1952) La crisi dell’eroe nel romanzo vittoriano, Florence: Sansoni. —(1956) The Hero in Eclipse in the Victorian Novel, trans. Angus Davidson, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sacerdoti Mariani, Gigliola (1979) ‘Il sionismo di Moses Hess e George Eliot’, Nuova Antologia, Rome, 21.30: 339–49. Sasso, Eleonora (2008) ‘Beauchamp’s Career and Literary Dialogism: Meredith Misreads George Eliot’, in Soccio, Anna E. (ed.) Beauchamp’s Career: George Meredith, testo e contesto, Rome: Aracne, pp. 153–65. Sciarra, Raffaella (2009) ‘Gender e mesmerismo in The Lifted Veil di George Eliot’, in Mariani, Andrea, Francesco Marroni and Massimo Verzella (eds) Scritture femminili: da Mary Wollstonecraft a Virginia Woolf, Rome: Aracne, pp. 217–28. Sette, Miriam (1996) ‘The Lifted Veil: George Eliot e il peso della realtà’, RSV (Rivista di Studi Vittoriani), Pescara, 1: 111–20. —(2000) ‘“Their truths are only half-truths”: George Eliot e John Stuart Mill’, in Ettorre, Emanuela, Andrea Mariani and Francesco Marroni (eds) Before Life and After, Pescara: Tracce, pp. 61–78. —(2004) George Eliot: il corpo della passione, Pescara: Campus. —(2006) ‘Muoversi malinconicamente: George Eliot, Middlemarch, e la lipemania viatoria’, in Marroni, Francesco, Mariaconcetta Costantini and Renzo D’Agnillo (eds) La letteratura vittoriana e i mezzi di trasporto: dalla nave all’astronave, Rome: Aracne, pp. 177–85. —(2008) ‘George Eliot e la corporeità melanconica’, Bérénice, L’Aquila, 40.1: 256–68. —(2010) ‘George Eliot, The Lifted Veil e il multiverso creativo’, in Fazzini, Elisabetta, Andrea Mariani and Giuliana Di Biase (eds) Il conforto della ragione: Studi in onore di Bernardo Razzotti, Lanciano: Itinerari, pp. 407–16. —(2012) ‘George Eliot’s Romola as an expression of a cultural Risorgimento: Metaphor and narration of a system of civilization’, Anglistica pisana, Pisa, 9: 34–37. Thompson, Andrew (1998) George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento, Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press. Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe (1990) ‘George Eliot’, in Letteratura inglese, Milan: Mondadori, pp. 1064–867. Tosello, Maria (1956) Le fonti italiane della ‘Romola’, Turin: Giappicchelli. Villa, Luisa (1994) Riscrivendo il conflitto: Indagine sull’incidenza del genere nella narrativa di George Eliot, Alessandria: Dell’Orso. —(2009) ‘The Case of Camilla Rucellai in George Eliot’s Romola’, in Vescovi, Alessandro, Luisa Villa and Paul Vita (eds) The Victorians and Italy: Literature, Travel, Politics and Art, Monza: Polimetrica, pp. 193–207.

9. The Early Italian Reception of Romola Translations

See Chapter 8 above.

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Bibliography  403 Works cited

Bassi, Emilia (1914) Medaglioni letterari: La vita e le opere di Jane Austen e George Eliot; Studî inglesi di Emilia Bassi, Rome: E. Mantegazza. De Logu, Pietro (1969) La narrativa di George Eliot, Bari: Adriatica. Eliot, George (1957) Romola, trans. Vittorio Radicati di Marmorito, 2 vols, Turin: Utet. Haight, Gordon S. (1954–78) The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Manzoni, A. (1943) ‘Del romanzo storico e, in genere, de’ componimenti misti di storia e d’invenzione’, in Manzoni, A., Opere varie, ed. M. Barbi and F. Ghisalberti, Florence: Sansoni, n. pub., pp. 623–74. Marroni, Francesco (1980) La verità difficile: Uno studio sui romanzi di George Eliot, Bologna: Pàtron. Negri,  Gaetano (1898) George Eliot la sua Vita e i suoi romanzi, Milan: Baldini and Castoldi; first edn 1891 Milan: Treves. Praz,  Mario (1956) The Hero in Eclipse, trans. Angus Davidson, Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published 1952 as La crisi dell’eroe nel romanzo vittoriano, Florence: Sansoni. Tosello, Maria (1956) Le fonti italiane della Romola di George Eliot, Turin: Giappichelli.

10 Romola in England and Italy Translations

See Chapter 8 above. Works cited

Affron, Charles (2002) Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life, New York: Scribner. Aquarone, Bartolommeo (1857–58) Vita di fra Jeronimo Savonarola, 2 vols, Alessandria: Carlo Astuti. Arrivabene, Carlo (1855) I poeti italiani: Selections from the Italian Poets, London: P. Rolandi; reviewed in The Leader, London, 15 December. —(1862) Italy under Victor Emmanuel, London: Hurst & Blackett; reviewed by G. H. Lewes (1862), ‘Our Survey of Literature, Science, and Art’, Cornhill Magazine, London, 6 (August): 275–76. Ashton, Rosemary (1991) G. H. Lewes: A Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Baker, William (1992) The Early History of the London Library, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press. Bassi, Emilia (1914) Medaglioni letterari: la vita e le opere di Jane Austen e George Eliot, Naples: La Nuova Riforma. Bertazzi Grassi, Giambattista (1906) Esame critico della filosofia di G. H. Lewes, 2 vols, Messina: Libreria Editrice Trimarchi. Biagi, Guido (1896) The Private Life of the Renaissance Florentines, Florence: Bemporad & Son. —(1898) Spigolature Savonaroliane, Florence: Franceschini. —(1909) Men and Manners of Old Florence, London: Fisher Unwin. —(1925) Fiorenza, fior che sempre rinnovella: Quadri e figure di vita fiorentina, Florence: Battistelli.

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404  Bibliography Bishop, Hal (2010) Lost and Found: Rachel Reckitt’s Book Illustrations, Including the Complete Set of Woodblocks Engraved for The Mill on the Floss, and What Was Lost in Their Making, Risbury: Whittington Press. Browning, Oscar (1890) Life of George Eliot, London: Walter Scott. Bugliani, Francesca (1993) ‘Modelli epistemici in Romola di George Eliot’, in De Scarpis, Valerio and Loretta Innocenti (eds) Intrecci e Contaminazioni, Padua: Supernova, pp. 135–48. —(1999) ‘Reading English Literature in Italy: Intellectual and Critical History’, Intellectual News, London, 4.1: 46–51; pub. online 4 April 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.10 80/15615324.1999.10426689 (accessed 14 September 2014). Cadioli, Alberto and Giuliano Vigini (eds) (2004) Storia dell’editoria Italiana dall’unitá ad oggi, Milan: Editrice Bibliografica. Carocci, Guido (1897) Firenze scomparsa: Ricordi storico-artistici, Florence: Galletti & Cocci. Castelli, Mario (1965) Il Soggiorno fiorentino di stranieri insigni, Florence: il Fauno. Caverni, Gianni and Raffaella Marcucci (2012) Firenze casa mia: ospiti celebri e cittadini illustri, Florence: Polistampa. Cenni, Serena and Francesca di Blasio (eds) (2012) Una sconfinata infatuazione: Firenze e la Toscana nelle metamorfosi della cultura anglo-americana: 1861–1915, Florence: Edizioni dell’Assemblea. Chapman, Alison and Jane Stabler (eds) (2003) Unfolding the South: NineteenthCentury British Women Writers and Artists in Italy, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Christie, Ian (2013) ‘Ancient Rome in London: Classical Subjects in the Forefront of Cinema’s Expansion after 1910’, in Michelakis, Pantelis and Maria Wyke (eds) The Ancient World in Silent Cinema, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 109–24. Cobbe, Frances Power (1894) Life of Frances Power Cobbe as Told by Herself, London: Bentley & Son. Cross, J. W. (1886) George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, 3 vols, London: Blackwood. Dagna, Stella (2103) ‘A Tribute to Her Creativity: Maria Gasparini in The Stage’, in Duckett, Victoria, Monica Dall’Asta and Lucia Tralli (eds) Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives, Bologna: University of Bologna, pp. 353–61. De Gubernatis, Angelo (1900) Fibra: Pagine di ricordi, Rome: Forzari e C. Tipografi del Senato. Del Vecchio Veneziani, Augusta (1934) Gaetano Negri: 1838–1902, Rome: Formiggini. De Nicolò, Marco (1997) ‘L’avvento di una cittadinanza repubblicana e i “placidi tramonti” del regno: la “Lega della democrazia”’, Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica, Rome, 1: 201–37. Dentler, Clara Louise (1964) Famous Foreigners in Florence: 1400–1900, Florence: Bemporad Marzocco. Duckett, Victoria, Monica Dall’Asta and Lucia Tralli (eds) (2013) Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives, Bologna: University of Bologna. L’Eco di Savonarola: foglio mensile diretto da Italiani Cristiani (1847–60) London: Daniel R. Oakey. Eliot, George (1868) Romola, trans. Gustavo Strafforello, Il romanziere contemporaneo illustrato, Milan: Treves. —(1882–84) Daniel Deronda, trans., pref. and annot. Cesare Olivetti, 2 vols, Rome: Stabilimento Tipografico Italiano. —(1906) Romola, trans. Gustavo Strafforello, Il romanziere contemporaneo illustrato, Milan: Treves. —(1907) Romola, ed. Guido Biagi, London: Fisher Unwin.

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Bibliography  405 —(1920) Romola, trans. Emilia Franceschini, Florence: Adriano Salani. —(1954–55) The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 7 vols, London: Oxford University Press. —(1980) Romola, ed. and intro. Andrew Sanders, Harmondswoth: Penguin. —(1994) Romola, ed. and intro. Andrew Brown, Oxford: Clarendon Press. —(2000a) The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(2000b) ‘Recollections of Italy 1860’, in The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 327–68. Farina, Rachele (ed.) (1995) Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi. Field, Kate (1864) ‘English Writers in Florence’, Atlantic Monthly, Boston, 14 (December): 660–71. —(1880) ‘Recollections by Kate Field’, New York Tribune, 24 December: 5. —(1996) Selected Letters, ed. and intro. Carolyn J. Moss, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Fornaciari, Giulia (1925) ‘Guido Biagi: in memoria (1855–1925)’, Nuova Antologia di lettere scienze ed arti, Rome, 1 July: 73–77. Freitag, Sabine (ed.) (2003) Exiles from European Revolutions: Refugees in Mid-Victorian England, Oxford: Berghahn. Garrow (later Trollope), Theodosia (1861) Social Aspects of the Italian Revolution, in a Series of Letters from Florence; Reprinted from the Athenaeum, London: Chapman. Gavazzi, Alessandro (1851) Orations by Father Gavazzi, London: David Bogue. Giandebiaggi, Massimo (1987) Bibliografia ed iconografia del romanzo popolare illustrato in Italia 1840–1899, Viterbo: Agnesotti. Gish, Lillian with Ann Pinchot (1969) The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Glendinning, Victoria (1992) Trollope, London: Hutchinson. Gollin, Rita K. (2002) Annie Adams Fields: Woman of Letters, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Goodman, Susan (2011) Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and its Writers 1857–1925, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Griffith, George V. (1999) ‘George Eliot on the American Screen’, in Tepa Lupack, Barbara (ed.) Nineteenth-Century Women at the Movies: Adapting Classic Women’s Fiction to Film, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University, pp. 299–318. Hamnett, Brian (2011) The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haraszti, Zoltan (ed.) (1927) ‘Victorian Authors at Florence: Letters by T. Adolphus Trollope to Kate Field Now First Published’, More Books: Being the Bulletin of the Boston Public Library, Boston, 2: 139–45. Hawthorne, Sophia (1869) Notes in England and Italy, New York: Putnam & Son. Horner, Leonard (1890) Memoir of Leonard Horner, ed. K. M. Lyell, London: privately printed. Hutton, Laurence (1897) Literary Landmarks of Florence, New York: Harpers. Huzzard, John A. (1957) ‘The Treatment of Florence and Florentine Characters in George Eliot’s Romola’, Italica, Madison, WI, 34 (Sept.): 158–65. Isabella, Maurizio (2009) Risorgimento in Exile, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kitchel, Anna Theresa (1933) George Lewes and George Eliot: A Review of Records, New York: John Day. Lewes, Giorgio Enrico (1891) Vita di Volfango Goethe, trans. Giulio Pisa, Milan: Cooperativa Editrice Italiana.

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406  Bibliography —(1907) Lo Studio della Psicologia, trans. Anon., pref. and annot. Giambattista Grassi Bertazzi, Milan: Dante Alighieri. —(1995) The Letters of George Henry Lewes, ed. William Baker, 2 vols, English Literary Studies Monograph series 64, Victoria, BC: University of Victoria. Lilly, Mia (2010) ‘Giornale delle donne and the Discourse of Femininity in Post-Unification Italy: A Critical Discourse Analysis’, Valley Humanities Review, Lebanon Valley College, Annville, PA (Spring): 1–18. Luzzato, Emilia (alias Giorgio Palma) (1885) ‘Giorgio Eliot, la sua vita e l’opera sua’, Giornale delle donne, Turin. Maddox, Brenda (2009) George Eliot: Novelist, Lover, Wife, London: Harper. Mahoney, John L. (1959) ‘Thomas A. Trollope: Victorian Man of Letters’, University of Rochester Library Bulletin, Rochester, NY, 15 (1960): 25–28. Mazzini, Giuseppe (1852) lecture delivered at the first Conversazione of the Friends of Italy, Tracts of the Society of the Friends of Italy no. 4, London: Society of the Friends of Italy. —(1906–90) Scritti editi ed inediti, 106 vols, Imola: Tipografia Galeati (SEI), vol. 79. McCormack, Kathleen (2010) ‘George Eliot: Poetry, Fiction and European Spas’, Journal of European Studies, New York, 40.9: 9–22. —(2013) George Eliot in Society: Travels Abroad and Sundays at the Priory, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Milman, H. H. (1856) review of several volumes on Savonarola by English, French and German authors, Quarterly Review, London, 99: 1–60. Mitchell, Sally (2004) Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Morelli, Emilia (1965) L’Inghilterra di Mazzini, Biblioteca scientifica, vol. 21, Rome: Istituto per la storia del Risorgimento Italiano. Mori, Maria Teresa (2005) ‘Margherita Albana Mignaty e Pasquale Villari’, Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica, fascicolo 1, Rome: 101–23. Negri, Gaetano (1891) George Eliot: la sua vita e i suoi romanzi, Milan: Fratelli Treves. —(1894) ‘Il pensiero religioso e filosofico in Italia’, in Rumori Mondani, Milan: Hoepli, pp. 21–87. —(1897) Meditazioni vagabonde: Saggi critici, Milan: Hoepli. Oderman, Stuart (2000) Lillian Gish: A Life on Stage and Screen, London: McFarland. Ormond, Leonée and Richard (1975) Lord Leighton, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Paolini, Claudio (2013) A Sentimental Journey: Inglesi e Americani a Firenze tra 800 e 900; I luoghi, le case, gli alberghi, Florence: Edizione polistampa. Poston, Lawrence (1966) ‘Thomas Adolphus Trollope: A Victorian Anglo-Florentine’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Manchester, 49.1: 133–64. Praz, Mario (1950) ‘Gli studi di letteratura inglese’, in Antoni, Carlo and Raffaele Mattioli (eds) Cinquant’anni di vita intellettuale italiana 1896–1946: scritti in onore di Bendetto Croce, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2: 3–16. —(1952) La crisi dell’eroe nel romanzo vittoriano, Florence: Sansoni. —(1956) The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Redi, Riccardo (2009) La Cines: storia di una casa di produzione italiana, Bologna: Persiani Editore. Il romanziere contemporaneo illustrato (1867–70) Milan: Treves biblioteca utile, 27 February and 5 March 1868. Il romanziere contemporaneo illustrato (1905–) Milan: Fratelli Treves. Romola (1911) dir. Mario Caserini, Società Italiana Cines; Italian film. Romola (1924) dir. Henry King; American film. Rudman, Harry W. (1940) Italian Nationalism and English Letters, London: Allen & Unwin.

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Bibliography  407 Ruffini, Giovanni (1856) Il Dottor Antonio, trans. Bartolommeo Aquarone from the original Doctor Antonio: A Tale of Italy (1855), n.p.: n. pub. Sacerdoti, Mariani Gigliola (2007) ‘Joseph Mazzini & Company: il linguaggio dell’amicizia e dell’ideologia’, in Angelini, Giovanna and Marina Tesoro (eds) De Amicitia: scritti dedicati ad Arturo Colombo, Milan: Franco Angeli, pp. 334–47. —(2012) ‘La Rivoluzione Toscana del 1859 nella “vision” di Thomas A. Trollope’, in Manica, Giustina (ed.) La rivoluzione toscana del 1859, Florence: Polistampa, pp. 197–223. Scharnhorst, Gary (2008) Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Scherillo, Teresa (1928) Il Pensiero di Gaetano Negri su uomini e fatti del Risorgimento, e sui problemi più ardui e più vivi di politica, di religione, di morale, Milan: Hoepli. Schor, Esther (2003) ‘Acts of Union: Theodosia Garrow Trollope and Frances Power C. on the Kingdom of Italy’, in Chapman, Alison and Jane Stabler (eds) Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 90–109. Smiles, Samuel (1859) Self-Help, London: John Murray. —(1865) Chi s’aiuta Dio l’aiuta, trans. Gustavo Strafforello, ‘Biblioteca Utile’, Milan: Treves. Sorani, Aldo (1925) ‘L’animatore degli scambi culturali’, Il Marzocco, Florence, 30 (18 Jan.): 2–3. Strafforello, Gustavo (trans.) (1859) L’Italia nei canti dei poeti stranieri contemporanei, Turin: Unione Tipografica Editrice. —(1888) ‘Rassegna della letteratura inglese’, Rivista contemporanea: Rassegna mensile di letteratura italiana e straniera, Florence, January–May. —(1889) Curiosità ed amenità letterarie, Florence: L. Niccolai. Strahan, Lisbeth Gooch Seguin (1888) Scenes and Characters from the Works of George Eliot: A Series of Illustrations by Eminent Artists, London: A. Strahan. Sutherland, John (1986) ‘Cornhill’s Sales and Payments: the First Decade’, Victorian Periodicals Review, Baltimore, 19.3 (Fall): 106–08. Sweeney, Kevin W. and Elizabeth Winston (1995) ‘Redirecting Melodrama: Gish, Henry King, and Romola’, Literature/Film Quarterly, Salisbury, MD, 23: 137–46. Thompson, Andrew (1998) Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Thompson, Frank (ed.) (1995) Henry King, Director: From Silents to ‘Scope’, Los Angeles: Directors Guild of America; based on interviews by David Shepard and Ted Perry. Tjoa, Hock Guan (1977) George Henry Lewes: A Victorian Mind, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tosello, Maria (1956) Le fonti italiane della Romola di George Eliot, Turin: Giappichelli. Treves, Giuliana Artom (1953) Anglo-fiorentini di cento anni fa, Florence: Sansoni. Trollope, Thomas Adolphus (1856) The Girlhood of Catherine de’ Medici, London: Chapman. —(1859a) A Decade of Italian Women, London: Chapman; reviewed in The Leader, 16 April. —(1859b) Tuscany in 1849 and 1859, London: Chapman. —(1862) La Beata: A Tuscan Romeo and Juliet, London: Chapman & Hall. —(1865) A History of the Commonwealth of Florence to the Fall of the Republic in 1531, London: Chapman. —(1887) What I Remember, 2 vols, London: Richard Bentley & Son. —(2009) Tuscany in 1849 and 1859, ed. Gigliola Sacerdoti Mariani, Florence: Regione Toscana. Vespucci, Amerigo (1885) ‘Conversazioni in famiglia’, Giornale delle donne, Turin: 140–46. Villari, Pasquale (1859–61) La storia di Girolamo Savonarola e de’ suoi tempi, Florence: Le Monnier.

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408  Bibliography —(1862) L’Italia, la civiltà latina e la civiltà germanica, Florence: Le Monnier. —(1863) The History of Girolamo Savonarola and of His Times, trans. Leonard Horner with the cooperation of the author, 2 vols, London: Longman. —(1888) The Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola, trans. Linda Villari, London: T. Fisher Unwin. Vinay, Valdo (1961) Evangelici italiani esuli a Londra durante il Risorgimento, Turin: Libreria Editrice. Wagenknecht, Edward (1991) Lillian Gish: An Interpretation, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1927. Whiting, Lilian (1899) Kate Field: A Record, London: S. Low. Williamson, George C. (1902) Frederic Lord Leighton, n.p.: George Bell. Witemeyer, Hugh (1979) George Eliot and the Visual Arts, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zuccari Anna (1877) ‘Conversazioni con mia figlia, IV. La donna letterata’, Giornale delle donne, Turin: 200–01. Guides to Florence

(1853) [O. Blewitt], A Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, 3rd edn, London: John Murray. (1861) Nuovissima guida illustrata della città di Firenze e suoi dintorni: Adorna di una nuovissima pianta topografica della città, d’un panorama e di molte finissime incisioni in legno eseguite sopra apposite fotografie dall’artista G. Salvioni, Florence: Edizione Sonzogno. (1861) Piccola guida della città di Firenze e suoi dintorni, Milan: Sonzogno. (1861–65) Murray’s Handbook of Florence and its Environs, London: John Murray. (1862) Andrea Bettini, Guida di Firenze e suoi contorni, Florence: Bettini.

11 George Eliot in Spain Spanish translations and editions

AB (1884) Adán Bede: Novela inglesa de Jorge Elliot, trans. Anon., Barcelona: Doménech Editor. (1930) Adán Bede, trans. Manuel Vallvé, 2 vols, Barcelona: Editorial B[artolomé] Bauzá; Colección La novela interesante, Biblioteca para la mujer. (1944) Adán Bede, trans. Agustín Esclasans, Barcelona: Lauro & Casa Provincial de Caridad; Colección Ave Phoenix. (2000) Adam Bede, trans. Manuel Vallvé, rev. edn, Barcelona: Ediciones del Bronce. (2008a) Adam Bede ed., intro. and notes Margaret Reynolds, London: Penguin. AmB (2008b) Los infortunios del reverendo Amos Barton (AmB), trans. César Palma, Madrid: Belvedere. BJ (2004a) El hermano Jacob (BJ), trans. Carmen Francí, Barcelona: Alba. DD (2002) Daniel Deronda, dir. Tim Hooper, London: BBC. (2010a) Daniel Deronda, trans. Jacinto Forment, Madrid: Homolegens. FH (1867) Félix Holt el radical, trans. and abridged Anon., Barcelona: Imprenta del Diario de Barcelona; Folletín del Diario de Barcelona, 2nd series, 9: 407–66.

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Bibliography  409 ITS (2011) Impresiones de un tal Teofrasto (ITS), trans. Carme Font, Barcelona: Pendragón. JR (1946a) Arrepentimiento (JR), trans. J. Farrán y Mayoral, Barcelona: Editorial Hispano Americana; repr. 1949. LV (1987) El velo descubierto (LV), trans. Ángel Bofarull, Barcelona: Ediciones Nuevo Arte Thor, Colección El laberinto 25. (1989) El vel alçat (LV), trans. María Dolores Ventós, Barcelona: Laertes. (2012a) El velo alzado (LV), trans. José Luis López Muñoz, Barcelona: Alba. M (1984) Middlemarch, trans. Cristina Quintana, intro. Isabel Quintana, Madrid: Editora nacional. (1991) Middlemarch: Un estudio de la vida en provincias, trans. José Luis López Muñoz, Barcelona: Mondadori; repr. Alba, 2000. (1993) Middlemarch: Un estudio de la vida de provincias, trans. M[aria] Engracia Pujals, ed. Pilar Hidalgo, Madrid: Cátedra. (2003b) Middlemarch, ed. and intro. Rosemary Ashton, London: Penguin. (2010b) Middlemarch: Un estudio de la vida de provincias, 2nd edn, trans. M[aria] Engracia Pujals, ed. Pilar Hidalgo, Madrid: Cátedra. MF (1932) El molino (MF), trans. G[uillermo] Sans Huelin, 3 vols, Madrid: Calpe. (194?) El hilandero (MF), trans. Francisco Roselló, Barcelona: Editorial Alejo Climent. (1943) El molino junto al Floss (MF), trans. María Luz Morales, Madrid: Iberia. (1946b) El molino del Floss (MF), trans. Rafael Sardá, Barcelona: Reguera. (1951a) El molino a orillas del Floss (MF), trans. Vicente P. Quintero, Madrid: Éxito. (1962) El molino junto al Floss (MF), trans. María Luz Morales, Barcelona: Planeta. (1969) El molino junto al Floss (MF), trans. Mauro Armiño, Barcelona: Ramón Sopena. (1988a) El molino junto al Floss (MF), trans. María Luz Morales, intro. Doireann McDermott, Barcelona: Planeta. (1995) El molino junto al Floss (MF), trans. María Luz Morales, intro. Nora Catelli, Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores. (2003a) El molino del Floss (MF), trans. Carmen Francí, Barcelona: Alba. SCL (1988b) Scenes of Clerical Life, ed. and intro. Thomas A. Noble, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2013) Escenas de la vida parroquial (SCL), trans. Marta Salís, Barcelona: Alba. SM (1919a) Silas Marner, trans. Anon., Buenos Aires: La Nación, http://www.gutenberg. org/files/24823/24823–h/24823–h.htm (accessed 19 August 2014). (1919b) Silas Marner, (Catalan) trans. Josep Carner, Llorenç Riber l’Albaflor, Morera i Galicia and Carles Riba, Barcelona: Editorial Catalana. (1919c) Silas Marner: Novela, trans. Isabel Oyarzábal [Smith], Madrid: Calpe; repr. 1935, 2006. (1945) Silas Marner, trans. and ed. Juan Ruiz de Larios, Barcelona: Bruguera. (1946c) Silas Marner: El hilandero de Raveloe, trans. Luis Ferrán de Pol, Guanajuato, México: Editorial Albatros. (1948) Silas Marner, trans. Isabel Oyarzábal, rev. ‘Montenegro’, Barcelona: Baguñá Hermanos.

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410  Bibliography (1951b) Silas Marner, trans. Tomás Mario Cerro González, pref. F.S.R. [Federico Sáinz de Robles], Madrid: Aguilar. (195?) Silas Marner, trans. J. Sirvent [Ramón Folch i Camarasa], Barcelona: GP, Colección Pulga 53. (1980) Silas Marner, trans. Anna D’Aumonville Alegría, Barcelona: Fontamara; repr. Valdemar, 2000. (1992) Silas Marner: El tejedor de Raveloe, trans. Hernando Valencia Goelkel, Santa Fé de Bogotá, Colombia: Editorial Norma. (2009) Silas Marner, trans. Roser Vilagrassa Sentís, Barcelona: Editorial Saymón. Other (2012b) La novelas tontas de ciertas damas novelistas, trans. and intro. Gabriela Bustelo, Madrid: Impedimenta. Other works cited

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412  Bibliography Eliot, George (1871–72) Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood & Sons. Eliot, George (1876) Daniel Deronda, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood & Sons. Eliot, George (1879) Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood & Sons. Eliot, George (2004b) Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, intro. David Carroll, appendix Q. D. Leavis, London: Penguin. Eliot, George (2008c) The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight, intro. Dinah Birch, Oxford: Oxford University Press. El-Saffar, Ruth (1993) ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’, in Levine, Linda Gould, Ellen Marson and Gloria Waldman (eds) Spanish Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Source Book, Westport, CA: ABC Clio/Greenwood, pp. 378–88. ‘Expediente de censura 649–43, The Mill on the Floss’ (1943) Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, 10 March. ‘Expediente de censura 7306–44, Adam Bede’ (1944) Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, 10 March. ‘Expediente de censura 3895–50, The Mill on the Floss’ (1950) Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, 24 August. ‘Expediente de censura 7095–61, The Mill on the Floss’ (1961) Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, 16 December. Ford, Richard (1966) A Handbook for Travellers in Spain, and Readers at Home, 3 vols, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. First published 1845. Fraga, Fuentes and María Amelia (1999) ‘Sobre la recreación fílmica de The Mill on the Floss’, in Caramés Lage, José Luis, Carmen Escobedo de Tapia and Jorge Luis Bueno Alonso (eds) El cine: otra dimensión del discurso artístico, Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 1: 271–87. Furst, Lilian R. (2000) ‘The Talk of the Town in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Leopoldo Alas’ La regenta’, Letras Peninsulares (Towards a Poetics of Realism/Hacia una poética del realismo, ed. Harriet Turner), Davidson, NC, 12: 209–19. García-Bermejo Giner, María Fuencisla (1986) ‘Otras notas al diálogo de la primera novela de George Eliot’, Atlantis, Madrid, 8.1–2: 37–52. Genette, Gérard (1984) Palimpsestos: La literatura en segundo grado, Madrid: Taurus. ‘Goethe y el 50º aniversario de su muerte’ (1882) La época, Madrid, 34.10714 (6 May): 4. Gómez de Baquero, E. (1893) ‘Los mejores libros’, La época, Madrid, 22 October: 2. González Burgos, Luis (1876) Memoria leída en el Ateneo científico, literario y artístico de Madrid, 30 Diciembre, Madrid: Imprenta de la Revista contemporánea. González Serrano, V. (1879) ‘Goether y Schiller (1)’, Revista de Andalucía, Malaga, 6.15 (1 January): 81–106. Guelbenzu, José María (2010) ‘Compañeros ideales’, El país, Madrid, 14 August, Sup. Babelia, 1, http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/Companeros/ideales/elpep uculbab/20100814elpbabpor_16/Tes (accessed 12 February 2014). Guerra, Ángel [José Betancort] (1916) ‘El movimiento de las ideas: de Kipling a Wells’, El Imparcial, Madrid, 7 August: 3. Haight, G. S. (ed.) (1954–56) The George Eliot Letters, vols 1–7, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(1978) The George Eliot Letters, vols 8–9, New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press. Harrington, Henry George (1866) Travelling in Spain in the Present Day, London: Sampson Low & Marston. Hemingway, Maurice (1983) Emilia Pardo Bazán: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Bibliography  413 Hurtley, Jacqueline Anne (1986) Josep Janés: El Combat per la Cultura, Barcelona: Curial. —(1992) José Janés: editor de literatura inglesa, Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias. Larra, Luis Mariano de (1863) La conquista de Madrid, Madrid: José Rodríguez. —(1866) Oros, copas, espadas y bastos, Madrid: José Rodríguez. Lázaro Lafuente, Alberto (2008) ‘La narrativa inglesa de terror y el terror de la censura española’, in Ruiz Bautista, Eduardo (ed.) Tiempo de censura: la represión editorial durante el franquismo, Gijón: Trea, pp. 197–232. L. de A. (1919) ‘Revistas extranjeras: El movimiento sufragista inglés’, Cuba contemporánea, Havana, 7.20.79 (July): 436–41. Lefevere, André (1992) Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, London: Routledge. Lesage, Alain-René (1787–88) Gil Blas de Santillana, trans. P. José Francisco de Isla, 4 vols, Madrid: Imprenta Manuel González. Lewes, George Henry (1846) The Spanish Drama: Lope de Vega and Calderón, London: C. Knight. —(1875) On Actors and the Arts of Acting, Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz. —(1876a) ‘Spiritualism and Materialism’, Fortnightly Review, London, 25 (new series): 479–95, 707–19. —(1876b) ‘El espiritualismo y el materialismo’, Revista contemporánea, Madrid, Buenos Aires and Havana, 2.11.3.3 (15 May): 316–35, http://www.filosofia.org/hem/ dep/rco/0030316.htm (accessed 17 August 2014). —(1879) Study of Psychology: Its Object, Scope, and Method, ed. George Eliot, London: Trübner & Co. —(2012) A Biographical History of Philosophy [1845–46], foreword John Lubbock, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(ed.) (1865) Fortnightly Review, London, 1 (15 May). Llanas, Manuel (2004) Historia de l’edició à Catalunya: El segle XIX, Barcelona: Gremi d’Éditors de Catalunya. Llorente, D. Jean Antonio (1822) Historia crítica de la Inquisición en España, Madrid: Imprenta del censor. —(1826) The History of the Inquisition in Spain: From the Time of its Establishment to the Reign of Ferdinand VII, trans. and abridged Anon., 8 vols, London: G. B. Whitaker. Lubbock, John (1870) The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Men, London: Longmans, Green & Co. McMullen, Bonnie (1997) ‘“Spanish Sights”: From Ronda to Daniel Deronda’, in Rignall, John (ed.) George Eliot and Europe, Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, pp. 123–37. Melly, Jeniffer Mae (1990) George Eliot and Emilia Pardo Bazán: ‘The Palpitating Question’ and their Novels ‘The Mill on the Floss’ and ‘Los pazos de Ulloa’, Portland, OR: Reed College University Press. Mérimée, Prosper (1973) Les ames du Purgatoire; Carmen, Paris: Garnier, Flammarion. Navas Quintana, Gracia (2007) ‘Silas Marner de George Eliot, en versión de Isabel Oyarzábal de Palencia’, in Zaro, Juan Jesús (ed.) Traductores y traducciones de literatura y ensayo (1835–1919), Granada: Comares, pp. 359–410. Nord, Deborah Epstein (2013) Gypsies and the British Imagination 1807–1930, New York: Columbia University Press. ‘Obituary note’ (1880) El imparcial, Madrid, 14.4873 (28 December): 3. Oyarzábal de Palencia, Isabel [Isabel Oyarzábal Smith] (1922) El sembrador sembró su semilla: Novela, Madrid: Rivadeneira. —(1940) I Must Have Liberty, New York; Toronto: Longman, Green & Co.

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12 George Eliot in the Catalan Lands: The Long and the Short of It Translations and editions in the Catalan Lands

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418  Bibliography —(2011b) Email correspondence with the author, 8 September. Massot, Josep and Sergi Vila Sanjuán (1999) ‘Planeta compra Columna y desembarca en el mercado editorial en lengua catalana’, La Vanguardia, Barcelona, 31 July: 32. Nash, Mary (2004) Mujeres en el mundo: Historia, retos y movimientos, Madrid: Alianza. —(2005) ‘El moviment feminista durant la Transició’, in Pagès i Blanch, Pelai (ed.) La transició democràtica als Països Catalans, València: Universitat de València, pp. 355–65. ‘Normes ortogràfiques’ (1913) Institut d’Estudis Catalans Centanys, Secció Filològica 2013, http://normesortografiques.espais.iec.cat/ (accessed 29 March 2013). Pericay, Xavier and Ferran Toutain (1997) El malentès del noucentisme, Barcelona: Proa. First Published 1996. Pijuan Vallverdú, Alba (2003) ‘Entrevista a Jordi Arbonès’, Quaderns: Revista de traducció, Barcelona, 10: 153–63. Rodríguez Espinosa, Marcos (2002) ‘Identidad nacional y traducción: entrevista a Jordi Arbonès’, Trans, Málaga, 6: 215–24, http://pagines.uab.cat/catedrajordiarbones/ content/entrevista (accessed 24 March 2013). Small, Helen (2009) ‘Introduction’, in George Eliot, The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. ix–xxxviii. Sobrequés i Callicó, Jaume (2012) ‘La llarga lluita per la pervivència nacional’, in Història de Catalunya, Barcelona: Base, pp. 131–50. Soler (Trier), Maridès (2006) ‘Els codis socioculturals de la “viuda desheredada” a Pilar Prim de Narcís Oller i a Middlemarch de George Eliot’, Zeitschrift für Katalanistik, Freiburg, 19: 103–17. Trenc Ballester, Eliseu and Alan Yates (1988) Alexandre de Riquer (1856–1920): The British Connection in Catalan Modernisme, Sheffield: Anglo-Catalan Society. Triadú, Joan (1995) ‘Panoràmica d’una societat’, Avui, Barcelona, 8 June (‘Cultura’): v. Van Hensbergen, Gijs (2002) Gaudí, London: HarperCollins. Ventós, Maria Dolors (1996) ‘Traductors’, Ressò de Ponent: Revista de l’Ateneu Popular de Ponent, Lleida, 137: 4. —(2013) Email correspondence with the author, 26 February. ‘Vindicación feminista’ (1976–79), http://vindicacionfeminista.blogspot.com.es/ (accessed 29 March 2013). Webber, Jude and Miquel Strubell i Trueta (1991) The Catalan Language: Progress towards Normalisation, Sheffield: Anglo-Catalan Society. Woolf, Virginia (1919) ‘George Eliot’, Times Literary Supplement, London, 20 November, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/woolf/VW-Eliot.html (accessed 23 March 2013).

13. The Reception of George Eliot in Russia: The Start that Determined the Paradigm Russian translations and editions

AB (1859) Adam Bid, transl. unknown, Sanct-Petersburg: Iu.A. Krashevskii. (1865) Detoubiitsa, ili Adam Bid, derevenskii stoliar, transl. unknown, Sanct-Petersburg: A. A. Kraevskii. (1899) Adam Bid, transl. unknown, Moscow: S. S. Moshkin. (1900) Detoubiitsa, ili Adam Bid, derevenskii stoliar, transl. Ie. B. M, pervoe izdanie, Moscow: I. D. Sytin. (1900) Detoubiitsa, ili Adam Bid, derevenskii stoliar, transl. Ie. B. M, vtoroe izdanie, Moscow: I. D. Sytin.

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Bibliography  419 (1902) Adam Bid, transl. M. D. Shishmariova, Sanct-Petersburg: Narodnaia Volia. (1903) Adam Bid, transl. M. D. Shishmariova, Sanct-Petersburg: Narodnaia Volia. (1909) Adam Bid, transl. M. D. Shishmariova, Sanct-Petersburg: Narodnaia Volia. DD (1877) (1902) (1904) (1915)

Daniel’ Deronda, Daniel’ Deronda, Daniel’ Deronda, Daniel’ Deronda,

transl. transl. transl. transl.

unknown, Sanct-Petersburg: Ie. N. Akhmatova. unknown, Sanct-Petersburg: Sh. F. Bussel’. unknown, Sanct-Petersburg: Sh. F. Bussel’. and abridged N. Vasin, Moscow: Putevodnyi ogoniok.

FH (1867) Feliks Gol’t, radikal, transl. unknown, Sanct-Petersburg: Iu. A. Bokram. (1867) Feliks Gol’t, radikal, transl. unknown, Sanct-Petersburg: Delo. (1915) Buria v tikhom omute, transl. and abridged N. Vasin, Moscow: Putevodnyi ogoniok. JR (1860) Ispoved’ Dzhenet, transl. unknown, Sanct-Petersburg: K. Vul’f. M (1873) V tikhom omute – buria, transl. unknown, Sanct-Petersburg: A. Morigerovsk. (1873) Midl’march. Kartiny provintzial’noi zhizni, transl. and ed. M. Ie. Saltykov (Shchedrin), Sanct-Petersburg: A. A. Kraevskii. (1981) Midlmarch. Kartiny provintzial’noi zhizni, transl. I. Gurova and Ie. Korotkova, foreword V. Skorodenko, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. (1988) Midlmarch. Kartiny provintzial’noi zhizni, transl. I. Gurova and Ie. Korotkova, foreword V. Skorodenko, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. (2007) Midlmarch. Kartiny provintzial’noi zhizni, transl. I. Gurova and Ie. Korotkova, foreword V. Skorodenko, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. (2011) Midlmarch. Kartiny provintzial’noi zhizni, transl. I. Gurova and Ie. Korotkova, foreword V. Skorodenko, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. (2012) Midlmarch. Kartiny provintzial’noi zhizni, transl. I. Gurova and Ie. Korotkova, foreword V. Skorodenko, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. (1981) Midlmarch, trans. Irina Gavrilovna Gurova and E. V. Korotkova, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. MF (1865) Mel’nitsa na Flosse, pervoe izdanie, transl. unknown, Sanct-Petersburg: A. A. Kraevskii. (1865) Mel’nitsa na Flosse, vtoroe izdanie, transl. unknown, Sanct-Petersburg: A. A. Kraevskii. (1902) Mel’nitsa na Flosse, transl. and abridged V. Koshivich, Sanct-Petersburg: Slovo. (1904) Brat i sestra, transl. and abridged V. Koshivich, Moscow: D. P. Iefimov. (1915) Mel’nitsa na Flosse, transl. and abridged N. Vasin, Moscow: Putevodnyi ogoniok. (1963) Mel’nitsa na Flosse, transl. G. Ostrovskaia and L. Poliakova, foreword K. Rovda, Moscow; Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury. (1963) Melʹnitsa na Flosse (MF), trans. Galina Arsenievna Ostrovskaia and L. Poliakova, Moscow; Leningrad: Goslitizdat. (1983) Mel’nitsa na Flosse, transl. G. Ostrovskaia and L. Poliakova, Tallin: n. pub. (2011) Mel’nitsa na Flosse, trans. A. N. Mamykin, adapt. R. Makhadzhan, Moscow: AST. (2014) Mel’nitsa na Flosse, transl. G. Ostrovskaia and L. Poliakova, foreword K. Rovda, Moscow: Azbuka, Azbuka-Attikus. R (1891) Romola, transl. A. L-na, Sanct-Petersburg: V. Komarov. (1892) Romola, transl. unknown, Sanct-Petersburg: A. S. Suvorin.

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420  Bibliography SM (1899) Sailas Marner, tkach iz Ravello, transl. unknown, Moscow: I. D. Sytin. (1901) Ne v den’gakh schastie, trans. and abridged with ill. B. Reginald Burch, SanctPetersburg: M. N. Sleptsov. (1901) Ne v den’gakh schastie, trans. and abridged with ill. B. Reginald Burch, SanctPetersburg: I. N. Kushner & Co. (1901) Zoloto i liubov’, transl. Ie. B. M., Moscow: Vilde. (1906) Zoloto i liubov’, transl. Ie. B. M., Sanct-Petersburg: A. P. Pechkovskii, P. A. Bulanzhe & Co. (1910) Zoloto i liubov’, transl. Ie. B. M., Moscow: A. A. Gatsuk. (1915) Devochka s zolotymi kudriami, transl. and adapt. N. Vasin., Moscow: Putevodnyi ogoniok. (1959) Sailas Marner, transl. N. L. Iemel’iannikova, foreword A. Levinton, Moscow; Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury. (1959) Sailas Marner, trans. Nina Lʹvovna Emeliannikova, Moscow; Leningrad: Goslitizdat. Other works cited

Andreeva, Yulia A. (1974) Mesto Dzordzh Eliot v razvitii angliiskogo romana vtoroi poloviny XIX veka, Moscow: Moscow State University. Anikst, Aleksandr A. (1956) Istoria angliiskoi literatury, Moscow: Uchpedgiz. Ardov, Evgenii (1969) ‘Iz vospominanii o Ivane Sergeeviche Turgeneve’, in Petrov, S. and V. Fridliand (eds) I. S. Turgenev v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, vol. 2, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Belinskii, Vissarion G. (1953) ‘O russkikh povestiakh i povestiakh gospodina Gogolia’, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Moscow: Akademia nauk, 1: 259–307. Boborykin, Piotr V. (1890) Evropeiskii roman XIX veka: zapadnyi roman za dve treti veka, St Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevich. —(1911) Stolitsy mira, Moscow: E. P. Akhmatova. Chernyshevskii, Nikolai G. (1949) Pis′ma 1838–1876, in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 14, Moscow: OGIZ. Chicherin, Aleksei V. (1958) Vozniknovenie romana-epopei, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Davidova, Lidiia K. (1891) Dzhordzh Eliot: Eio zhiz’n i literaturnaia deiatel’nost’, St Petersburg: A. Transhelia. —(1900) ‘Vvedenie’, in Dzhordzh Eliot, Adam Bid, trans. M. D. Shihmariova, St Petersburg: Narodnaia pol′za. Druzhinin, Aleksandr V. (1865) ‘Romola: roman o florentiiskoi zhizni’, in Sobranie sochinenii, St Petersburg: N. V. Gerbelia, 5: 450–54. Dzeims, Genri (1969) ‘Ivan Turgenev’, in I. S. Turgenev v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, vol. 2, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Eliot, George (1954–55) The George Eliot Letters, ed. G. S. Haight, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gniusova, Irina B. (2012) ‘Dzhordzh Eliot i L. N. Tolstoy (Pastoral′naia traditsiia v “Adame Bide” i “Voskresenii”)’, Vestnik Tomskogo Universiteta, Tomsk, 356. Goncharov, Ivan A. (1955) Literaturno-kriticheskie statii, retsenzii, zametki, pisma, in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Gorbunova, Natalia V. (2010) ‘K voprosu o vospriiatii Dzordzh Eliot v sovremennoi Rossii’, in Nazarova, Larissa (ed.) Zarubezhnaia literatura v vysshei shkole: innovatsii, metody, problemy izuchenia i prepodavaniia, Ekaterinburg: Urals State University, pp. 110–19.

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Bibliography  421 Herzen, Aleksandr I. (1958) Pis’ma, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 14, Moscow: OGIZ. Hewitt, Karen (2005) ‘Dzordzh Eliot i eio “Middlemarch”’, Voprosy Literatury, Moscow, 2. Ia., R. (1885) ‘Dzhordzh Eliot i evrei’, Voskhod: uchiono-literaturnyi i politekhnicheskii zhurnal, St Petersburg, February. Ivasheva, Valentina V. (1974) ‘U istokov angliiskogo Naturalism’, in Ivasheva, Valentina V., Angliiskii realisticheskii roman XIX veka v ego sovremennom zvuchanii, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Koropchevskii, Dmitrii (1884) ‘Kriticheskie statii Dzordzh Eliot’, Iziaschnaia literatura, St Petersburg, 10. Kovalevskii, Mikhail M. (1969) Vospominania ob I. S. Turgeneve in I. S. Turgenev v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, vol. 2, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Kuzmin, Boris A. (1977) O Goldsmite, o Bairone, o Blake: Statii o literature, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Lotman, Lidia M. (1974) Realizm russkoi literatury 60–kh godov XIX veka: istoki i esteticheskoe svoeobrazie, Leningrad: Nauka. Lugais, Astra L. (1987) Problemy realizma i naturalizma v tvorchestve Dzordzh Eliot (Rannii period, 1851–1861), Tallinn: Nauka. Maslova, Natalia V. (2001) Regional’nyi roman v tvorchestve Dzordzh Eliot, St Petersburg: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii universitet. Mikhailov, Mikhail I. (1859) ‘“Adam Bid” Dzordzh Eliot’, Sovremennik, St Petersburg, 78. —(1861) ‘Novyi roman Dzordzh Eliot “The Mill on the Floss”’, Sovremennik, St Petersburg, 80. Mordovtsev, Dmitrii M. (1870) ‘Zadachi sovremennogo romana’, Delo, St Petersburg, 11. Nekrasov, Nikolai A. (1950) ‘Fiziologia Peterburga’, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 9: 143–46. Pospelov, Gennadii N. (1972) Istoria russkoi litratury XIX veka, Moscow: Vysshaia shkola. Proskurnin, Boris M. (2005) ‘Pochemu Dzhordzh Eliot nedootsenena v sovremennoi Rossii, ili O polze zarubezhnogo vzgliada na rossiiskuiu anglistiku’, Voprosy literatury, Moscow, 2. —and Karen Hewitt (2004) Roman Dzhordzh Eliot ‘Melnitsa na Flosse’: Kontekst, Estetika, Poetika, Perm: Perm State University. P-skaia, Olga (1877) ‘Vstuplenie: Stseny i kharaktery iz novogo romana Eliot “Daniel Deronda”’, Vestnik Evropy, St Petersburg, 5. Reshetnikov, Fiodor M. (1956) Izbrannoe, vol. 1, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Rovda, Kirill I. (1935) Dzhordzh Eliot i eio otsenka v Rossii, Leningrad: Akademia nauk. —(1963) ‘Dzhordzh Eliot i eio roman Melnitsa na Flosse’, in Dzhordzh Eliot, Melnitsa na Flosse, trans. G. A. Ostrovskaia and L. Poliakova, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Shashkov, S. S. (S. Stavrin) (1874) ‘Literaturnye sily Anglii’, Delo, St Petersburg, 12: 82–113. Slonimskii, Leonid (1884) ‘Dzhordzh Eliot: Ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva’, Vestnik evropy, St Petersburg, 5. S-skoi (1899) Dzhordzh Eliot i eio roman ‘Daniel Deronda’, Ekaterinoslav: Satanovskii. Terry, R. C. (ed.) (1999) Oxford Reader’s Companion to Trollope, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tkachev, Piotr N. (1868) ‘Liudi budushchego i geroi meshchnstva’, Delo, St Petersburg, 4: 5. Tolstoy, Lev N. (1938) Pis’ma, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 60, Moscow: Gosudarsnvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury. —(1949) Dnevniki, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 43, Moscow: Gosudarsnvennoe izdatel′stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury. —(1952) Pis’ma, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 48, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury.

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422  Bibliography Tsebrikova, Maria K. (1871) ‘Angliiskie pisatel’nitsy’, Otechestvennye zapiski, St Petersburg, 8–11. —(1876) ‘Dva motiva sovremennoi poezii’, Otechestvennye zapiski, St Petersburg, 5. Tugusheva, Maia P. (1990) V nadezhde pravdy i dobra: portrety pisatel’nits, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelsnvo khudozhestvennoi literatury. Turgenev, Ivan S. (1965) Pis’ma 1872–1874, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 10, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelsnvo khudozhestvennoi literatury. —(1965) Pis’ma 1876–1878, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 12, book 1, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelsnvo khudozhestvennoi literatury.

14. George Eliot in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia (1917–2014) Russian translations and editions

See Chapter 13 above for translations of the Soviet and Post-Soviet periods. Other works cited

Andreeva, Iuliia Andreevna (1974) Mesto Dzordzh Eliot v razvitii angliiskogo romana vtoroi poloviny XIX veka, Moscow: Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet. Anikst, Aleksandr Abramovich (1956) ‘Dzhordzh Eliot’, in Istoria angliiskoi literatury, Moscow: Uchpedgiz, pp. 338–42. —(1981) ‘Predislovie’, in Tugusheva, M. P. (ed.) Pisateli Anglii o literature:19–20 vv., Sbornik statei perevedeno na russkii iazyk, Moscow: Progress, pp. 3–18. Belʹskii, Aleksandr Andreevich (1975) ‘Dzhordzh Eliot’, in Anikst, Aleksandr, A. Ermakov, N. Gudzii, A. A. Surkov, V. Vinogradov and V. Zhdanov (eds) Kratkaia literaturnaia entsiklopedia, Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopedia, 8: 215–19. Bushkanets, Irina N. (1974) ‘Dzhordzh Eliot v otsenke zhurnalov N. A. Nekrasova Sovremenniki Otechestvennye zapiski’, in Bushkanets, Efim Grigorievich (ed.) Russkaia literatura i osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie, 16 nos, Kazan: Kazanskii Gosudarstvennyi Pedagogicheskii Institut: 72–97. —(1975) ‘Dzhordzh Eliot v russkoi kritike’, in Bushkanets, Efim Grigorievich (ed.) Russkaia literatura i osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie, 16 nos, Kazan: Kazanskii Gosudarstvennyi Pedagogicheskii Institut: 29–56. Danilevskii, Rostislav Iurievich (2011) ‘Institutsionnoie znachenie deiatelʹnosti V. M. Zhirmunskogo v istorii russkoi germanistiki 1920–h–1930–h godov (po materialam Sankt-Peterburgskogo Otdelenia Arkhiva Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk)’, http:// www.ruthenia.ru/archiv.html?topic=inet (accessed 14 March 2014). Demidova, Olʹga Rostislavovna (1990a) ‘Dzhordzh Eliot v russkikh perevodakh’, Russkaia literatura, Leningrad, 2: 136–39. —(1990b) Sharlotta Bronte, Elizabet Gaskell, Dzhordzh Eliot v Rossii (1850–e–1870–e gody), Leningrad: LGPI. Gniusova, Irina Fiodorovna (2012) ‘Dzhordzh Eliot i L. N. Tolstoy (Pastoralʹnaia traditsiia v Adame Bide i Voskresenii)’, Vestnik Tomskogo Universiteta, Tomsk, 356: 15–22. —(2014) “Ispoved” Dzhenet D. Eliot i Otets Sergii L. N. Tolstogo: sostradanie vmesto poucheniia’, Vestnik Permskogo universiteta: rossiiskaia i zarubezhnaia philologia, Perm, 1.25: 81–90.

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Bibliography  423 Gorbunova, Natalia Vladimirovna (1998) ‘Problema psikhologizma v literature vtoroi poloviny XIXveka i Dzhordzh Eliot’, in Danilina, G. I. (ed.) Literatura russkogo zarubezhiia, Tyumen: Tyumenskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 4: 109–15. —(2003) Metafory poznaniia v tvorchestve Dzhordzh Eliot, Moscow: Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet. —(2005) ‘“Vpechatleniia Teofrasta takogo-to”: Dzhordzh Eliot v philosofskom kontekste epokhi’, in Sushkova, V. N. (ed.) Zarubezhnaia literatura: istorikokul’turnye i tipologicheskie aspekty, Tyumen: Tyumenskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 1: 38–42. —(2012) ‘Rasskaz D. Eliot “Priotkrytaia zavesa”: k voprosu o pereosmyslenii traditsii’, Vestnik Permskogo universiteta. Rossiiskaia i zarubezhnaia philologia, Perm, 1.17: 116–24. Gritchuk, Magdalena Andreevna (1959) Osobennosti khudozhestvennogo metoda Dzhordzh Eliot, Moscow: Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet. —(1964) ‘Obschestvenno-politicheskaia tema v romane Dzhordzh Eliot Feliks Holt, radical’, Uchenye zapiski Moskovskogogo sudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta imeni V.I. Lenina: Zarubezhnaia literatura, Moscow, 218. Ivasheva, Valentina Vasilievna (1974) ‘U istokov angliiskogo naturalizma: Dzhordzh Eliot’, in Ivasheva, Valentina Vasilievna (ed.) Angliiskii realisticheskii roman XIXveka v ego sovremennom zvuchanii, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, pp. 341–93. Karelʹskii, Alʹbert Viktorovich (1983) ‘Ot geroia k cheloveku (Razvitie realisticheskogo psikhologizma v evropeiskom romane 30h–60h godov XIXveka’, Voprosy literatury, Moscow, 9. —(1990) Ot geroia k cheloveku: Dva veka zapadnoevropeiskoi literatury, Moscow: Sovetskii pisatelʹ. Kondratiev, Iurii Mikhailovich (1966) ‘Glavnye osobennosti esteticheskoi pozitsii Dzhordzh Eliot kak vyrazhenie obshchikh tendentsii v razvitii realisticheskogo romana v Anglii vtoroi poloviny XIXveka’, Uchenye zapiski Moskovskogo Gosudarstvennogo Pedagogicheskogo Instituta imeni V. I. Lenina: Zarubezhnaia literatura, Moscow, 245: 285–343. —(1967a) ‘Iz istorii razvitiia realisticheskogo romana v Anglii vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Dzhordzh Eliot, Meredit, Batler, Hardi)’, Uchenye zapiski Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Pedagogicheskii Institut imeni V. I. Lenina: Zarubezhnaia literatura, Moscow. —(1967b) ‘Pozdnee tvorchestvo Dzhordzh Eliot: Roman Middlmarch’, Uchenye zapiski Moskovskogo Gosudarstvennogo PedagogicheskogoInstituta imeni V. I. Lenina: Zarubezhnaia literatura, Moscow, 280: 96–125. Kuzʹmin, Boris Arkadievich (1940) Dzhordzh Eliot i angliiskii roman 60–h godov, Moscow: Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet. —(1953) ‘Krizis angliiskogo sotsiialʹnogo romana v 50–h–60–h godakh 19. veka: Eliot, Trollop, Rid, Kollinz’, in Anisimov, I. I. et al. (eds) Istoria angliiskoi literatury, Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo AN SSSR, 2, http://az.lib.ru/k/kuzxmin_b_a/text_0030. shml (accessed 15 March 2014). —(1977) ‘Tvorchestvo Dzhordzh Eliot’, in O Goldsmite, o Bairone, o Bloke: Statii o literature, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, pp. 76–133. Levinton, Akhill Grigorievich (1959)‘Dzhordzh Eliot’, in George Eliot, Sailas Marner, trans. Nina Emelyannikova, Moscow; Leningrad: Goslitizdat, pp. 5–24. Lugais, Asta Leopolʹdovna (1987) Problemy realizma i naturalizma v tvorchestve Dzhordzh Eliot (Rannii period, 1851–1861), Tallinn: Eesti Raamat. Malikova, Mariia Emmanuilovna (2011) ‘Zapadnyi Otdel (1935–1950)’, Pushkinskii Dom, http://www.pushkinskijdom.ru/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=ogyY-7bv4o%3d&tabid=134 (accessed 14 March 2014).

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424  Bibliography Naptsok, Bella Radislavovna (1997) Roman D. Eliot ‘Midlmarch’ v kontekste angliiskoi literatury vtoroi poloviny XIXveka, Moscow: Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Pedagogicheskii Institut. Proskurnin, Boris Mikhailovich (2000) ‘Politicheskii roman Dzhordzh Eliot Feliks Holt, radical: Novatorstvo poetiki i traditsii zhanra’, in Angliiskii politicheskii roman XIXveka: Ocherki genezisa i eviolutsii, Perm: Permskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, pp. 160–206. —(2005) Idei vremeni i zrelye romany Dzhordzh Eliot, Perm: Permskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet. —and Karen Hewitt (2004) Roman Dzhordzh Eliot ‘Melnitsa na Flosse’: Kontekst, Estetika, Poetika, Perm: Permskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet. Putykevich, Liudmila Konstantinovna (1973) ‘Literaturno-kriticheskiie statii Dzhordzh Eliot’, in Grazhdanskaya, Z. and V. Bogoslovskii (eds) Esteticheskiie pozitsii i tvorcheskii metod pisatelia, Moscow: Moskovskii Oblastnoi Pedagogicheskii Institut. —(1975) ‘Problema geroia v rannih proizvedeniiah Dzhordzh Eliot’, in Anon. (ed.) Problemy zarubezhnoi literatury, Sbornik trudov, Moscow: n. pub., pp. 105–31. —(1976) Problema stanovleniia khudozhestvennogo metoda Dzhordzh Eliot (Rannii period tvorchestva, 1851–1861), Moscow: n. pub. Rovda, Kirill Iosifovich (1935) Dzhordzh Eliot i eio otsenka v Rossii, Moscow: Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet. —(1935) Dzhordzh Eliot v Rossii, Leningrad: Izdatelʹstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR. —(1963) Dzhordzh Eliot i ee roman ‘Mel’nitsa na Flosse’, ‘Vstuplenie’, in D. Eliot, Melnitsa na Flosse, trans. Galina Arsenievna Ostrovskaia and L. Poliakovaia. Moscow; Leningrad: Goslitizdat, pp. 3–20. Ryzhkova, I. N. (1990) ‘Stanovlenie psikhologizma Dzhordzh Eliot’, Vestnik Kievskogo universiteta, Kiev, 24: 108–10. Schorer, Mark (1967) ‘Structure of the Novel: Method, Metaphor and Mind’, in Hardy, Barbara (ed.) George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’: Critical Approaches to the Novel, London: Athlone, pp. 12–24. Selitrina, Tamara Lʹvovna (1974) ‘K voprosu o literaturno-esteticheskikh vzgliadakh D. Eliot’, in Anon. (ed.) Literaturnye sviazi i traditsii, Gorky: Gorʹkovskii Universitet, 4: 99–116. —(1975a) ‘Obschestvenno-politicheskie vzgliady D. Eliot’, in Anon. (ed.) Pisatel’ i vremia, Sbornik statei, Ulianovsk: Ulianovskii Gosudarstvennyie Pedagogicheskii Institut. —(1975b) Pozdnee tvorchestvo Dzhordzh Eliot: Roman ‘Midlmarch’, Moscow: n. pub. —(1980) ‘Svoieobrazie realizma D. Eliot (roman Midlmarch)’, in Yashenʹkina, R. F. (ed.) Iz istorii realizma v literature Anglii, Mezhvuzovskii sbornik statei, Perm: Permskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, pp. 49–61. —(1982) ‘K voprosu o tipologicheskoi blizosti estetiki D. Eliot i L. Tolstogo’, Literaturnye sviazi i problemy vzaimodeistviia, Gorky, 30–43. —(1984) ‘Daniel Deronda Dzhordzh Eliot and Zhenskii portret G. Dzheimsa’, Literaturnye sviazi i problemy vzaimodeistviia, Gorky, 47–58. Shamina, Natalya Viktorovna (2005) Zhenskaia problematika v victorianskom romane 1840–1870 gg.: Dzhein Osten, Sharlotta i Emili Bronte, Dzhordzh Eliot, Kazan: Kazanskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet. Skorodenko, Vladimir Andreevich (1981) ‘Velikii angliiskii roman’, in D. Eliot, Midlmarch, trans. Irina Gavrilovna Gurova and E. V. Korotkova, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, pp. 3–18. Solovioeva, Natalia Aleksandrovna (1994) ‘Russkii chelovek i anglichanka na rendervous (I. S. Turgenev i Dzhordzh Eliot)’, Vestnik Moskovskoi Gosudarstvennoi Universiteta, Philologia, Moscow, 9.6: 3–6. —(1996) ‘Ot viktorianstva k 20. veku’, in Andreev, L. G., A. V. Karelʹskii, N. S. Pavlova et al. (eds) Zarubezhnaia literatura 20.veka, Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, pp. 277–93.

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Bibliography  425 15 George Eliot in Bulgaria Bulgarian translations

AB (2015) Adam Bede, trans. Vesela Katsarova, Sofia: Colibri; based on AB (1997) London: Wordsworth Editions Limited. M (2012) Middlemarch, trans. Vesela Katsarova, Sofia: Colibri; based on M (1996) Oxford University Press. MF (1987) Vodenitsata na reka Flos, trans. Iliana Saraouleva, Sofia: Narodna kultura; based on MF (1965) New York: Signet Classics. Other works cited

Damyanova, Penka (1990) ‘Detail in George Eliot’s novels’, unpub. PhD dissertation, Sofia University. Eliot, George (1987) Vodenitsata na reka Flos, trans. Iliana Saraouleva, Sofia: Narodna kultura; based on MF (1965) New York: Signet Classics. —(2012) Middlemarch, trans. Vesela Katsarova, Sofia: Colibri; based on M (1996) Oxford University Press. —(2015) Adam Bede, trans. Vesela Katsarova, Sofia: Colibri. Hadgikosev, Simeon (2010) ‘George Eliot’, in Golemite angliiski realisti ot XIX vek, Sofia: Siela, 6: 371–436. Katsarova, Vesela (2004) ‘The Woman Artist as Viewed by the Woman Novelist: George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing’, in Dascal, Reghina (ed.) Gender Studies, Timisiora: Editura Universitati de Vest, pp. 199–213. —(2009a) ‘Women Writers’ Thematic and Artistic Contribution: George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing’, in Trendafilov, Vladimir (ed.) Boundaries, Boundary Crossing and Cross Boundary Transfer, Proceedings of the International Conference of BASA and BSBS, Blagoevgrad: University Publishing House ‘Neofit Rilski’, pp. 41–49. —(2009b) Zhenskata traditsia v angliiskata literature: George Eliot Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Sofia: University Publishing House ‘St. Kliment Ohridski’. —(2010) ‘From Confined Space to Global Worlds: George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing’, in Georgieva, Maria and Allan James (eds) Globalization in English Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 71–89. —(2012) ‘Middlemarch: panorama na burna epocha’, preface to George Eliot, Middlemarch, trans. Vesela Katsarova, Sofia: Colibri, pp. 5–15. Lemon, Lee T. (1985) Portraits of the Artist in Contemporary Fiction, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Literaturen vestnik (2012) 19 December, p. 14. Newton, K. M. (1991) George Eliot, London: Longman. Nikolchina, Miglena (1987) ‘Tragika i tesnogrudie’, preface to George Eliot, Vodenitsata na reka Flos, trans. Iliana Sraouleva, Sofia: Narodna kultura, pp. 5–18.

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426  Bibliography 16. An Unspeakable Journey: Czech and Slovak Reception of George Eliot Czech and Slovak translations

AB (1903) Adam Bede, trans. Zdeněk Franta, 2 vols, Prague: J. Otto; in Czech. BJ (2010) Osud je černý jezdec (LV, BJ), trans. Kristýna Julinová, Řitka: Čas; in Czech. LV (2002) Tichým krokem kráčí strach, trans. Stanislava Pošustová-Menšíková, illus. Pavel Růt, Prague: Argo; anthology in Czech of horror stories incl. LV. (2010) Osud je černý jezdec (LV, BJ), trans. Kristýna Julinová, Řitka: Čas; in Czech. (2014) Svědkyně temnot, trans. Stanislava Menšíková, illus. Milan Malík, Prague: Plus; anthology in Czech of horror stories incl. LV. M (1981) Middlemarch, trans. Šarlota Barániková, Ján Švantl and Daniel Hevier, afterword Verona Chorváthová, pp. 885–96, Bratislava: Tatran; in Slovak. (2006) Middlemarch, trans. Zuzana Šťastná, Prague: Romeo; afterword Zuzana Šťastná, pp. 664–70; in Czech. MF (1892) Červený mlýn, trans. Václav Patejdl, Prague: Jaroslav Pospíšil; in Czech. (1976) Mlyn na rieke, trans. Verona Chorváthová, illus. František Hübel, Bratislava: Slovenský spisovateľ; in Slovak. MG (1931) Milostný příběh faráře Gilfila, trans. Božena Šimková, Prague: V. Horák; in Czech. R (1915) Romola, trans. Zdeněk Franta, 2 vols, Prague: Jan Laichter; in Czech. SM (1894) Silas Marner, trans. Marie Jesenská, Prague: J. Otto; in Czech. (1955) Silas Marner, trans. Emanuela Tilschová and Emanuel Tilsch, Prague: Mladá fronta; afterword Jaroslav Hornát, pp. 199–206; in Czech. (1969) Vráť sa, Eppie, trans. and adapt. Helena Dzurillová, illus. Milan Mravec, Bratislava: Smena; in Slovak. (1989) Silas Marner, tkadlec z  Raveloe, trans. Kateřina Hilská, illus. Lubomír Anlauf, Prague: Svoboda; afterword Jiří Janda, pp. 200–15; in Czech. Other Czechoslovak editions

Eliot, George (1920) Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, adapt. E. Penner, Prague: Prager Verlag-Gesellschaft; abridged for schools, in English. —(1978) Adam Bede: Regény, trans. Tibor Szobotka, Bratislava: Madách; in Hungarian. Other works cited

Bahenská, Marie (2005) Počátky emancipace žen v Čechách, Prague: Libri; Slon.

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Bibliography  427 Březina, Otokar (2004) Korespondence, vols 1–2, Brno: Host. Cross, J. W. (1885) George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, New York: Harper & Brothers. Eliot, George (1960) Daniel Deronda, New York: Harper & Brothers. —(1961) The Lifted Veil, in Seven Seas Sampler, Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, pp. 77–127. ‘Evans, Mary Anne’ (1894) in Anon. (ed.) Ottův slovník naučný, Prague: J. Otto, 8: 846. Hanušová, Dora (1879) ‘George Eliotová’, Ženské listy, Prague, 7.1: 1–8. Krejčí, Karel (1959) Anna Maria Tilschová, Prague: Československý spisovatel. Lacko, Ivan (2004) Feminist paradox: antithetical feminism in the writing of George Eliot, Unpublished dissertation, Comenius University, Bratislava. ‘Lewes, George Henry’ (1900) in Anon. (ed.) Ottův slovník naučný, Prague: J. Otto, 15: 978. Lewis, Linda M. (2003) Germaine de Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist, Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Macura, Vladimír (ed.) (1988) Slovník světových literárních děl, vol. 1, Prague: Odeon. McNeish, James (2003) Dance of the Peacocks: New Zealanders in Exile in the Time of Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung, Auckland: Vintage. Merhout, Luboš (ed.) (2008) Lexikon české literatury, vol. 4, part 2, Prague: Academia. Milner, Ian (1955) ‘Felix Holt, the Radical and Realism in George Eliot’, Časopis pro moderní filologii, Prague, 37.2–3: 163–73. —(1961) ‘Lydgate and the Heroic Aspiration in Middlemarch’, Acta Universitatis Carolinae – Philologica 1, Prague Studies in English, 9: 23–39. —(1963a) ‘The Genesis of George Eliot’s Address to Working Men and Its Relation to Felix Holt, the Radical’, Acta Universitatis Carolinae – Philologica 1, Prague Studies in English, 10: 49–54. —(1963b) ‘George Eliot and the Limits of Victorian Realism’, Philologica Pragensia, Prague, 6.45: 48–59. —(1964a) ‘George Eliot’s Realist Art’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Leipzig, 12.4: 387–94. —(1964b) ‘Herr Klesmer: George Eliot’s Portrait of the Artist’, Philologica Pragensia, Prague, 7.46: 353–58. —(1964c) The heroic pattern in George Eliot, Unpublished dissertation, Charles University, Prague. —(1966) ‘The Structure of Values in Adam Bede’, Philologica Pragensia, 9.48: 281–91. —(1967) ‘The Quest for Community in The Mill on the Floss’, Acta Universitatis Carolinae – Philologica 5, Prague Studies in English, 12: 77–92. —(1968) The Structure of Values in George Eliot, Prague: Charles University. —(1970) ‘The Structure of Values in George Eliot’, Notes and Queries, London, 17.9: 355. —(1973) ‘George Eliot’s Prague Story’, Acta Universitatis Carolinae – Philologica 2, Prague Studies in English, 15: 67–82. —(1974) ‘Dickens Style: A Textual Parallel in Dombey and Son and Daniel Deronda’, Philologica Pragensia, Prague, 56.4: 209–10. Mourek, Václav Emanuel (1888) Historický rozvoj anglické novellistiky, Prague: Knihtiskárna Politiky. —(1890) Přehled dějin literatury anglické, Prague: J. Otto. Pohorský, Miloš (1961) ‘Karolina Světlá’, in Pohorský, Miloš (ed.) Dějiny české literatury, Prague: Nakladatelství Československé akademie věd, 3: 120–38. Ripellino, Angelo Maria (1995) Magic Prague, trans. David Newton Marinelli, London: Picador. Schauer, Hubert Gordon (1917) Spisy, Prague: Kamilla Neumannová.

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428  Bibliography Špičák, Josef (ed.) (1969) Polemika s dobou: Karolina Světlá ve vzpomínkách a korespondenci současníků, Prague: Odeon. Stříbrný, Zdeněk (1987) Dějiny anglické literatury, vol. 2, Prague: Academia. Trollope, Anthony (1980) An Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Váňa, Jan (1898) Knihy a lidé, Prague: J. R. Vilímek.

17 The Reception of George Eliot in Poland Polish translations

AB (1891) Wybór powieści Jerzego Eliota, 2 vols, vol. 1, trans. Waleria Marrené, Warsaw: Salomon Lewental; incl. AB with intro. Marrené, ‘Jerzy Eliot’s Adam Bede’, pp. 5–15. MF (1960) Młyn nad Flossą, trans. Anna Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska, Warsaw: Czytelnik; repr. 1982. (1991) Młyn nad Flossą, rev. trans. Anna Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska, Warsaw; Cracow: Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolińskich. (2004) Młyn nad Flossą, trans. and intro. Anna Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska, Warsaw: Prószyński i S-ka; incl. ‘Od tłumaczki’, pp. 5–9. R (1927) Romola: noce florenckie, trans. Anon., Warsaw: Edward Wende. SCL (1892) Wybór powieści Jerzego Eliota, 2 vols, vol. 2, trans. Maria Obrębska, Warsaw: Salomon Lewental; incl. SCL. Other works cited

Borowy, Wacław (1948) ‘O Młynie nad Flossem pani George Eliot’, Sprawozdania Polskiej Akademii Umiejętności, Cracow, 8; repr. 1983 in Wacław Borowy, Studia i szkice literackie, Warsaw: PIW, 2: 477–84. Dobosiewicz, Ilona (2003a) Ambivalent Feminism: Marriage and Women’s Social Roles in George Eliot’s Works, Opole: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego. —(2003b) ‘Realistic grounding of the revivification experiment in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil’, in Burzyńska, Joanna and Danuta Stanulewicz (eds) PASE Papers in Literature and Culture, Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, pp. 95–100. —(2004) ‘The Conflict between Artistic Vocation and Orthodox Femininity in George Eliot’s “Armgart”’, in Kolek, Leszk S., Aleksandra Kędzierska and Anna Kędra-Kardela (eds) Perspectives on Literature and Culture, Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, pp. 27–33. —(2007) ‘George Eliot’s Challenge to Victorian Antisemitism in Daniel Deronda and “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”’, in Kalaga, Wojciech, Marzena Kubisz and Jacek Mydla (eds) PASE Papers: Studies in Culture and Literature, Katowice: Wydawnictwo PARA, pp. 80–90. —(2011) ‘The Lifted Veil: George Eliot’s Gothic Dream’, in Dobosiewicz, Ilona and Jacek Gutorow (eds) The Dream: Readings in English and American Literature and Culture, Opole: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego, 3: 63–72.

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Bibliography  429 —(2012) ‘Nauka i Naukowcy w Miasteczku Middlemarch’, in Kossakowska-Jarosz, Krystyna and Jolanta Nocoń (eds) Filologiczny Widnokrąg: Obrazy stare i nowe, Opole: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego, pp. 205–16. Dobrzycka, Irena (1971) ‘Eliot George’, in Anon. (ed.) Mały słownik pisarzy angielskich i amerykańskich, Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, pp. 160–61. Dyboski, Roman (1935) ‘Wielcy powieściopisarze angielscy XIX wieku z perspektywy dzisiejszej’, Pamiętnik Literacki, Lwów, 32: 84–109. —(1957) Sto lat literatury angielskiej, Warsaw: Pax. Gostomski, Walery (1898) Historia literatury powszechnej, Warsaw: Gebethner i Wolf. Grzegorzewska, Małgorzata (2008) ‘Czytając jakby w zwierciadle: Problem naśladowania w powieściach: Młyn nad Flossą i Emancypantki’, Studia Bobolanum, Warsaw, 3: 97–118. Gutowska, Anna (2005a) ‘Fictions of Revolutions in A Tale of Two Cities and Romola’, in Bystydzieńska, Grażyna (ed.) Approaches to Literature, Warsaw: Department of English Literature, University of Warsaw, pp. 123–35. —(2005b) ‘Is Daniel Deronda a “Bigamy Novel”? Elements of Sensational Melodrama in the Tale of Gwendolen Harleth’, Acta Philologica, Warsaw, 31: 127–35. —(2007) ‘Ucieczka przed zbrodniczym baronetem: Wątki sensacyjne w powieściach George Eliot’, Acta Philologica, Warsaw, 33: 106–12. —(2011) ‘The Role of Popular Literature Conventions in George Eliot’s Fiction’, unpub. PhD dissertation, University of Warsaw. —(2012) ‘George Eliot: pisarka w męskim przebraniu’, Wysokie Obcasy, Warsaw, 17 August: 17–18. Haight, Gordon S. (ed.) (1954–78) The George Eliot Letters, New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press. Jabłonowski, Władysław (1897) ‘Powieść angielska’, Głos, Warsaw, 40: 974–77. Jarniewicz, Jerzy (2005) ‘Heroizm codzienności’, Tygodnik Powszechy, Cracow, 21: 12–13. Jellenta, Cezary (1895) ‘Cieplarnia bezducha’, in Jellenta, Cezary, Wacław Nałkowski and Maria Komornicka, Forpoczty, Lwów: self-published, pp. 157–63. Kmiecik, Artur P. (1993) ‘Marriage and Money in George Eliot’s Middlemarch’, Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny, Warsaw, 40.4: 311–20. Krzyżanowski, Julian (1939) ‘Zagadka Jermoły: Kraszewski i George Eliot’, in Księga ku czci J. I. Kraszewskiego, Lutsk: Wolynskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciol Nauk, pp. 141–59; repr. 1961 in Julian Krzyżanowski, W świecie romantycznym, Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, pp. 325–38. Mroczkowski, Przemysław (1975) ‘George Eliot: emancypacja a tradycja’, in Dżentelmeni i poeci, Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, pp. 180–86. —(1981) Historia literatury angielskiej, Wrocław; Warsaw; Cracow: Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolińskich; repr. 1986, 1993, 1999, 2004. Nekanda-Trepka, Stefan (1887) ‘Powieść w Anglii i powieściopisarze dni naszych’, Życie, Warsaw, 34: 37. Peszkowa, Wanda (ed.) (1950) Silas Marner by George Eliot, Wrocław: Książnica-Atlas. Plenkiewicz, Roman (1906) Historia literatury powszechnej w zarysie, Wilno: Józef Zawadzki. Słodkowska, Elżbieta (1982) ‘Wybrane problemy ruchu wydawniczego pod zaborami’, Studia o książce, Wrocław, 33–46. Smith, David L. (1992) ‘Will Ladislaw’s Polish Ancestry’, Polish-AngloSaxon Studies, Poznań, 3–4: 55–64. Styczyńska, Adela (1993) ‘Powieść psychologiczna George Eliot: stadium zła w Romoli’, Sprawozdania z Czynności i Posiedzeń Naukowych, Łódź, 46: 79–91. —(1994) ‘Romola as a Psychological Novel: A Study of Moral Degeneration’, Acta Universitatis Lodziensis, Folia Litteraria, Łódź, 36: 129–45.

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430  Bibliography —(1997) ‘Romola as a Historical Novel’, Acta Universitatis Nicolai Copernici, English Studies, Toruń, 7: 49–60. Szala, Alina (1991) ‘Wstęp’, in George Eliot, Młyn nad Flossą, trans. Anna PrzedpełskaTrzeciakowska, Wrocław; Warsaw; Cracow: Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolińskich, pp. iii–cvi. Zbierski, Henryk (1982) Historia literatury angielskiej, Warsaw: PWN; repr. 2002 Poznań: Oficyna Wydawnicza Atena.

18 The Hungarian Reception of George Eliot Hungarian translations

AB (1861–62) Bede Ádám, trans. Ferencz Salamon. Pest: Emich Gusztáv. (1888) Bede Ádám, 2nd edn, 2 vols, trans. Ferencz Salamon. Budapest: Franklin-Társulat. (1978) Adam Bede, trans. Tibor Szobotka. Budapest: Európa. FH (1874) Felix Holt a radicalis, trans. Mária Dominkovics, Budapest: Légrády. M (1874–75) Middlemarch: Tanulmány a vidéki életből, trans. József Csukási, Budapest: Athenaeum. (1976) Middlemarch, trans. Tibor Bartos, Budapest: Európa. (1998) Middlemarch, trans. Tibor Bartos, Budapest: Esély. MF (1897) A vízi malom, trans. János Váczy, Budapest: Franklin-Társulat. (1966) A vízimalom, trans. Tivadar Szinnai, Budapest: Európa. (2010) Büszkeség és ártatlanság, trans. Tivadar Szinnai, Szeged: Lazi. R (1898) Romola, trans. Béla Pataki, Budapest: Franklin-Társulat. SM (1885) A raveloei takács, trans. Géza Kacziány, Budapest: Franklin-Társulat. (1898) A raveloei takács, trans. Géza Kacziány, Budapest: Franklin-Társulat. (2010) Kései boldogság: Silas Marner története, trans. Judit Gebula, Szeged: Lazi. Other works cited

A Pallas Nagy Lexikona: Az összes ismeretek enciklopédiája tizenhat kötetben (1894) vol. 6, Budapest: Pallas. A Pallas Nagy Lexikona: Az összes ismeretek enciklopédiája tizenhat kötetben (1895) vol. 10, Budapest: Pallas. Babits, Mihály (1978) Az európai irodalom olvasókönyve: Töredék és vázlat, Budapest: Magvető. —(n.d.) Az európai irodalom története, Budapest: Nyugat. Bezeczky, Gábor (2001) ’Structural Metaphors in the English and Hungarian Versions of George Eliot’s Middlemarch’, Hungarian Studies, Budapest, 15: 113–19. Dominkovics, Mária (1867) Beszélyek, Miskolc: Fraenkel Bernát biz. James, Henry (1984) Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers, New York: Library of America.

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Bibliography  431 Katona, Anna (1969) A valóságábrázolás problémái George Eliot regényeiben, Budapest: Akadémiai. Pál, József (ed.) (2005) Világirodalom, Budapest: Akladémiai. Péterfy, Jenő (1903) Összegyűjtött munkái, vol. 3, Budapest: Franklin-Társulat. Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály (1982) Kubla kán és Pickwick úr: Romantika és realizmus az angol irodalomban, Budapest: Magvető. Szerb, Antal (1971) Gondolatok a könyvtárban, Budapest: Magvető. —(1980) A világirodalom története, 6th edn, Budapest: Magvető.

19 George Eliot in Romania Romanian Translations

AB (1977) Adam Bede, trans. Dana Crivǎţ, Bucharest: Editura Univers. (1993) Adam Bede, trans. Dana Crivǎţ, Bucharest: Romhelion. (1996) Pasiune şi destin, trans. Dana Crivǎţ, Bucharest: Romhelion. FH (1973) Felix Holt Radicalul, trans. Al. Pascu and Stefan Avǎdanei, Iaşi: Junimea. M (1977) Middlemarch, trans. Eugen Marian, intro. and chronology Eugen Marian, Bucharest: Editura Minerva. (2010) Middelmarch, trans. Eugen Marian, Bucharest: Editura Alfa. MF (1893) Moara de pe Floss (excerpt), trans. Ceghin, Adevarul, Bucharest, 6.1590: 2. (1942) Moara de pe Floss, trans. G. Dem Curteanu, Bucharest: Editura Modernǎ. (1964) Moara de pe Floss, trans. Catinca Ralea and Eugenia Cȋncea, pref. Sorin Alexandrescu, Bucharest: Editura pentru Literaturǎ Universalǎ. SM (1943) Silas Marner, trans. G. Dem Curteanu, Bucharest: Editura Modernǎ. (1969) Silas Marner, trans. Mihai Rǎdulescu, Bucharest: Editura Universitarǎ. Other works cited

Alexandrescu, Sorin (1964) ‘Prefaţǎ’, in George Eliot, Moara de pe Floss, trans. Catica Ralea and Eugenia Cȋncea, Bucharest: Editura pentru Literature Universale, pp. 5–28. Bogdan, Elena (1926) Feminismul, Timişoara: Tipografia Humiadi. Cartianu, Ana and Ion Aurel Preda (eds) (1970) Dicţionar al Literaturii Engleze, Bucharest: Editura Stiinţificǎ. Constantinescu, Barbu (1906) ‘Arta naturalistǎ şi estetica lui Taine’, Viaţa literarǎ, Bucharest, 20: 6–7. Cooke, George Willis (1883) George Eliot: A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings and Philosophy, Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Costache, G. N. (1904) ‘Genul literar ȋn teatru’, Arta (Revistǎ pentru teatru şi literaturǎ), Iaşi, 10, 11, 12: 6–8. Dunca Schian, Constanţa (1904) Feminismul ȋn România: Conferinţǎ, Bucharest: Tipografia Thoma Vasilescu.

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432  Bibliography Eliot, George (1995) The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, ed. D. J. Enright, London; Vermont: J. M. Dent & Charles E. Tuttle. Hangiu, Ion (1996) Dicţionarul presei literare româneşti (1790–1990), Bucharest: Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române. Maiorescu, Titu (1882) ‘Literatura română şi străinătatea’, Convorbiri literare, Iaşi, 15.10: 361–70. Marian, Eugen (1977) ‘Prefaţǎ’, in George Eliot, Middlemarch, trans. Eugen Marian, Bucharest: Editura Minerva, pp. v–xxxi. Perry, Thomas Amherst (2001) Passage to Romania (American Literature in Romania), Iaşi; Oxford; Portland, OR: Center for Romanian Studies. Sǎndulescu, Alexandru (1969) ‘Corespondenţǎ literarǎ şi opiniile estetice’, in Duiliu Zamfirescu, Bucharest: Editura Tineretului, pp. 293–99. Sanielevici, Henric (1906) ‘Romanul istoric’, Curentul nou, Galaţi, 1.4: 220–27. —(1909) ‘Duiliu Zamfirescu şi “poporanismul”’, Viaţa Româneascǎ, Bucharest, 4.5. —(1920) ‘Ce a însemnat “Curentul nou” de la 1906’, Curentul nou, Bucharest, 1: 1. —(1976) ‘Duiliu Zamfirescu şi “poporanismul”’, in Adam, Ioan (ed.) Duiliu Zamfirescu: antologie, studiu introductiv, tabel cronologic, note, bibliografie, Bucharest: Editura Eminescu, pp. 248–53. Scriban, Eugenia (1907a) ‘Femeia ȋn literaturǎ’, Revista idealist, Bucharest, 1.3: 149–63. —(1907b) ‘Femeia ȋn literaturǎ’, Revista idealist, Bucharest, 2.4: 57–85. Stratilescu, Eleonora (1914) George Eliot: Viaţa şi scrierile ei, Iaşi: Institutul de Arte Grafice. Suţu, Alexandru Grigore (1884) ‘Studii asupra romanului realist ȋn zilele noastre’, Convorbiri literare, Iaşi, 18.6: 231–47.

20 The Reception of George Eliot in Greece Greek translations and editions

AmB (2006) Οι κακοτυχίες του αιδεσιμότατου Έιμος Μπάρτον, trans. Kaiti Oikonomou, Athens: To Pondiki. DD (1882) Daniel Deronda, trans. Ernest David, Paris: Calmann Lévy. Evangelical Teaching (2012) ‘Ευαγγελική Διδασκαλία’ (‘Evangelical Teaching’), in Hitchens, Christopher (ed.) Η βίβλος του άθεου: Με τον λόγο κορυφαίων διανοητών, trans. Aris Berlis, Athens: Polaris, pp. 113–34. LV (1997) Το πέπλο (LV), trans. Argyro Mandoglou, Athens: Patakis. (1998) Ανασηκώνοντας το πέπλο (LV), trans. and intro. Alina Paschalidi, Athens: Estia. (2007d) Το ανυψωμένο πέπλο (LV), trans. Yorgos Barouxis, Athens: To Pondiki. M (2003) Middlemarch, trans. and appendix Evie Georgouli, Athens: Indictos. (2007b) Μίντλμαρτς. Μια μελέτη της επαρχιακής ζωής (M), trans. and intro. Cleopatra Leondaritou, Athens: Katarti. MF (1881) La famille Tulliver ou Le moulin sur le Floss, trans. F. d’Albert-Durade, Paris: G. Fishbacher.

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Bibliography  433 (1988) Ο νερόμυλος στον Φλος (MF), trans. and intro. Elli Philokyprou, Athens: Synchroni Epochi. MG (1887a) ‘Ο εφημέριος Τζίλφιλ’ (MG), trans. Aristotelis P. Kourtídis, Eστία, Athens, 24: 666–71, 686–90, 704–08, 718–21, 733–39, 754–60, 773–76, 790–94, 807–12, 824–28, 838–43, http://xantho.lis.upatras.gr/test2_pleias.php?art=79167 (accessed 18 July 2014). (1930) Πριν προφθάση ν’ ανθήση! (MG), trans. Aristotelis Kourtídis, Athens: Eleftheroudakis. SCL (1887b) Scènes de la vie du clergé: Tribulations du révérend A. Barton; Roman de M. Gilfil, trans. F. d’Albert-Durade, Paris: Hachette. SM (1905?) Silas Marner: Le tisserand de Raveloe, trans. Auguste Malfroy, Paris: Librairie Hachette. (1980) Σίλας Μάρνερ (SM), trans. Yannis Spandonis, Athens: Odysseas. (2007c) Σίλας Μάρνερ (SM), trans. and appendix Grigoris Kondylis, illus. Angeliki Svoronou, Athens: Maḯstros. Other works cited

‘“Adam Bede” By George Eliot [and] “Scenes of Clerical Life” By George Eliot’ (1859) Edinburgh Review 110: 223–46. Athanasopoulos, Vangelis (1997) ‘Ο ρεαλισμός ως μέσο της ηθικής παραδειγματικής λειτουργίας της διήγησης: Η περίπτωση του ιδεολογικού ρεαλισμού του Λουκή Λάρα’, in Vayenas, Nasos (ed.) Από τον Λέανδρο στον Λουκή Λάρα: Μελέτες για την πεζογραφία της περιόδου 1830–1880, Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, Herakleio. Balzac, Honoré de (1972) ‘Preface (Avant-propos) to the Human Comedy’, in Kettle, Arnold (ed.) The Nineteenth Century Novel: Critical Essays and Documents, London: Heinemann Educational Books, pp. 140–53. First Published 1842. Barry, Catherine A. (1973) ‘“La Revue des Deux Mondes” in Transition: the Death of Naturalism to the Early Debate on Literary Cosmopolitanism’, Modern Language Review, Cambridge, 68: 545–50. Beaton, Roderick (1999) An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature, rev. edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beauvoir, Simone de (1987) ‘Πώς έγινα συγγραφέας’, trans. Kostas Poletis, H λέξη, Athens, 69–70: 912–13. First Published as ‘Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée’ in 1958. Brunetière, Ferdinand (1896) ‘Le Naturalism Anglais: Étude sur George Eliot’ (‘English Naturalism: a study of George Eliot’) (1881), in Le Roman Naturaliste, Paris: Calmann Lévy, pp. 205–51. Eliot, George (2001) ‘The Natural History of German Life: Riehl’, in Regan, Stephen (ed.) The Nineteenth Century Novel: A Critical Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 26–36. First Published 1856. —(2007a) ‘Evangelical Teaching’, in Hitchens, Christopher (ed.) The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer, Philadelphia: Da Capo, pp. 75–92. Episkopópoulos, Nikolaos (2011) ‘Μία έλλειψις’ Άστυ, (4 June 1894), ‘O ΙΘ΄αιών. Β΄Το ρεύμα του θετικισμού’ Άστυ, (14 December 1895) and ‘Το νέον έργον του Εφταλιώτη’ Άστυ, (14 May 1900), in Mavrelos, N. (ed.) Επιλογή κειμένων

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434  Bibliography από το Άστυ και το Νέον Άστυ, Athens: Idryma Kosta kai Elenis Ourani, 1: 145–47, 291–95, 660–64. Farinou-Malamatari, Georgia (2014) ‘Η διηγηματογραφία του Παπαδιαμάντη και η ολλανδική ζωγραφική’, in Το σχοίνισμα της γραφής: Παπαδιαμαντ(ολογ)ικές Μελέτες, Athens: Gutenberg, pp. 53–67. Gill, Stephen (1998) Wordsworth and the Victorians, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 146–67. Gosse, Edmund (1897) A Short History of Modern English Literature, London: Heinemann. Hyde, William J. (1957) ‘George Eliot and the Climate of Realism’, PMLA, New York, 72: 147–64. Karampini-Iatrou, Michaela (2003) Η βιβλιοθήκη Κ.Π. Καβάφη, Athens: Ermis. —(2012) ‘Relics of a Library: How C. P. Cavafy’s Library Survived through Auction, Sales, Book Loans, and Relocations’, JMGS, Baltimore, 30: 277–98. Kasinis, K. G. (2006) Βιβλιογραφία των ελληνικών μεταφράσεων της ξένης λογοτεχνίας, ΙΘ΄-Κ΄αι: Αυτοτελείς Εκδόσεις; Τόμος Πρώτος 1801–1900, Athens: Syllogos pros diadosin ofelimon vivlion. Kitsi-Mitakou, Katerina (2005) ‘Aquatic Spaces and Women’s Places: A Comparative Reading of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Alexandros Papadiamandis’s Η Φόνισσα’, BMGS, Birmingham, 29.2: 187–202. Kourtídis, Aristotelis (1887) ‘Γεωργία Έλλιοτ’, Eστία, Athens, 24: 665–66. Lalagianni, Vassiliki (2005) ‘Γυναίκα, ανάγνωση και μυθιστόρημα: Αναγνώστριες και αναγνώσεις του έργου της Γ. Σάνδη στην Ελλάδα του ΧΙΧ αιώνα’, in Close, Elizabeth, Michael Tsianikas and George Frazis (eds) Greek Research in Australia: Proceedings of the Biennial International Conference of Greek Studies, Flinders University, April 2003, Adelaide: Flinders University of South Australia, pp. 631–56. Lemaître, Jules (1896) ‘De l’influence récente des littératures du nord’, in Les Contemporains: Études et portraits littéraires; Sixième Série, Paris: Lecène, Oudin, pp. 225–70, http:// gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6125181b (accessed 18 July 2014). Lewes, George Henry (2001) ‘Realism in Art: Recent German Fiction’, in Regan, Stephen (ed.) The Nineteenth Century Novel: A Critical Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 36–39. First Published 1858. Mackridge, Peter (2013) Γλώσσα και εθνική ταυτότητα στην Ελλάδα 1766–1976, trans. Grigoris Kondylis, Athens: Patakis. Mansell, Darrel, Jr (1965) ‘Ruskin and George Eliot’s “Realism”’, Criticism, Detroit, 7: 203–16. McDonagh, Josephine (2001) ‘The Early Novels’, in Levine, George (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 38–56. Montégut, Emile (1859) ‘Le roman réaliste en Angleterre’, Revue des Deux Mondes, Paris, 21: 867–97. —(1883) ‘George Eliot: I. L’âme et le talent’ and ‘George Eliot: II. Les œuvres et la doctrine moral’, Revue des Deux Mondes, Paris, 56: 77–99, 305–46. Nikolaḯdou, Eirini (1903) ‘George Eliot’, Εφημερίς των Κυριών, Athens, 6 April, 744: 4. Nikoletopoulos, N. B. (1940) ‘Φιλολογικαί Χρονολογίαι: 22/9/1856: Το πρώτο διήγημα της Γεωργίας Έλιοτ’, Νέα Εστία, Athens, 28: 1228. Palamás, Kostis (1892) ‘Τα πρώτα διηγήματα του Καρκαβίτσα’, in Άπαντα, Athens: Idryma Kosti Palamá and Govostis, 2: 163–74. —(1895) ‘Εξ αφορμής μιας λέξεως’, in Άπαντα, Athens: Idryma Kosti Palamá and Govostis, 2: 374–78. —(1896a) ‘Το ελληνικόν διήγημα: Βιζυηνός’, in Άπαντα, Athens: Idryma Kosti Palamá and Govostis, 2: 150–62. —(1896b) ‘Καθημεριναί εντυπώσεις’, in Άπαντα, Athens: Idryma Kosti Palamá and Govostis, 14: 25–27.

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Bibliography  435 —(1897) ‘“Η Λυγερή”’, in Άπαντα, Athens: Idryma Kosti Palamá and Govostis, 2: 175–78. —(1899) ‘Η μούσα του Παπαδιαμάντη: Όταν εζούσε’, in Άπαντα, Athens: Idryma Kosti Palamá and Govostis, 10: 310–19. —(1922) ‘Τι βιβλία θα έπαιρνα σ’ ένα ερημονήσι’, in Άπαντα, Athens: Idryma Kosti Palamá and Govostis, 14: 117. —(1925) ‘Το ζήτημα του φεμινισμού: Ο ποιητής κ. Παλαμάς’, in Άπαντα, Athens: Idryma Kosti Palamá and Govostis, 14: 157–58. —(1928) ‘Σημειώματα στο περιθώριο’, in Άπαντα, Athens: Idryma Kosti Palamá and Govostis, 10: 65–134. —(1936) ‘Απόκριση σε κάποια ρωτήματα’, in Άπαντα, Athens: Idryma Kosti Palamá and Govostis, 14: 348–63. —(2002) ‘Αγγλίδες συγγραφείς’, in Kasinis, K. G. (ed.) Κωστή Παλαμά άρθρα και Χρονογραφήματα, Athens: Idryma Kosti Palamá, 3: 62–64. First Published 1915. Papakostas, Yannis (1982) Το περιοδικό Εστία και το διήγημα, Athens: Ekpaideftiria Kostea-Geitona. Parrén, Kallirhoe (1897) ‘Γεωργία Έλιοτ’, Εφημερίς των Κυριών, Athens, 486 (27 April): 1–2. Rignall, John (2011) George Eliot: European Novelist, Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Rizaki, Eirini (2007) Οι ‘γράφουσες’ Ελληνίδες: Σημειώσεις για τη γυναικεία λογιοσύνη του 19ου αιώνα, Athens: Katarti. Roḯdis, Emmanuel (1978) ‘Αι γράφουσαι Ελληνίδες’, in Angelou, Alkis (ed.) Εμμανουήλ Ροΐδης Άπαντα, Athens: Ermis, 5: 121–31. First Published 1896. Schérer, Edmond (1891) ‘George Eliot: “Silas Marner” (Études sur la Littérature Contemporaine, vol. i)’ (1863), ‘George Eliot: “Daniel Deronda” (Études sur la Littérature Contemporaine, vol. v)’ (1878), ‘George Eliot’ (Études sur la Littérature Contemporaine, vol. viii)’ (1885), in Essays on English Literature, trans. George Saintsbury, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, pp. 1–12, 51–69, 251–309. Sealy, R. J. (1971) ‘Brunetière, Montégut: And George Eliot’, Modern Language Review, Cambridge, 66: 66–75. Vikélas, Dimitrios (2001) ‘Και έμπορος ατελής και ατελής λόγιος’: Τα τετράδια των αναγνώσεων του Δημητρίου Βικέλα, ed. Alkis Angelou and Maria Valasi, Athens: Syllogos pros diadosin ofelimon vivlion. Vogüé, Eugène-Melchior, vicomte de (1886) ‘Préface’ to Le roman russe, Paris: Plon-Nourrit, pp. vii–lv. —(1967) ‘On Russian and French Realism’, in Becker, George J. (ed.) Modern Literary Realism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 310–43. Xenópoulos, Grigorios (2002) ‘Αι περί Ζολά προλήψεις’ (1890) and ‘Το διήγημα και τα “Λόγια της Πλώρης”’ (1899), in Farinou-Malamatari, Georgia (ed.) Γρηγόριος Ξενόπουλος: Επιλογή κριτικών κειμένων, Athens: Adelfoi Vlassi, pp. 83–97, 136–55. Xourias, Yannis (2010) Κατάλογος της Βιβλιοθήκης Κωστή Παλαμά, Athens: Idryma Kosti Palama.

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Index The letter f following an entry denotes a figure Aakjær, Jeppe 127 Aasen, Ivar 134–5, 147 n.28 Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua 254, 255 n.82 Adam Bede see under Eliot, George Adlersparre, Sophie 108, 118 Aftenposten 135, 138 Agatha see under Eliot, George Agger, Bodil Moltesen 129–30 Agrégation (France) 164 Alba 230, 234 Albaicín (Granada) 213, 217 Albert Bonnier and Sons 110 d’Albert-Durade, Alexandre Louis François 164, 165, 220, 230, 233, 238, 243, 318 Alcott, Louisa M. (author of Little Women) 6, 224 Alfonso II of Asturias 210 Algemeen Dagblad van Nederlandsch Indïe 95 Algulin, Ingemar 113, 116 Alhambra (Granada) 210 Alicante 210 Alighieri, Dante 181 All The Year Round 68 Amador de los Ríos, José 215 Amos Barton see under Eliot, George Amsterdammer, De 95 Anaconda Verlag 64 Andersen, Hans Christian 306 Andreeva, Iu. A. 278 Anglophilia 217, 220 Anikst, A. A. 276, 279 Ansgar forlag 143, 144, 145 anti-Semitism 11 see also Jews Arbonès I Montull, Jordi 248–50 Ardov, Evgenii (Blumberg Elena) 264 Aribau, Bonaventura 239 ‘Armgart’ see under Eliot, George Argentina 215, 216, 227 Ars Vivendi Verlag 63, 64 asceticism see under Eliot, George Asenjo Barbieri, Francisco 213 Ateneo científico literario y artístico de Madrid 215 Athenaeum, The 76 Atlantic Monthly, The 201 n.28 Aufbau Verlag 42, 43, 47f, 48, 49, 50, 57 Augspurg, J. 47f, 49, 56 Austen, Jane 6, 43, 52, 53, 55, 61–2, 104, 112, 116, 123, 125, 127, 130, 135, 146, 148, 149, 179, 219, 220, 226,

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248, 279, 281, 283, 284, 296, 323, 332, 334, 347 autonomous communities 237 Ave Phoenix 251 Ávila 232 Axis powers 220, 233 Babits, Mihály 342 Bacchelli, Riccardo 178 Backman, Carl Johan 104 Bakhtin and Bakhtinian 217 Baldini & Castoldi 168 Balsem, N. C. 95 Balzac, Honoré de 4, 34, 81, 148chbef, 215, 285, 297, 319, 345, 349, 359, 363, 365, 366, 373 Barcelona 210, 213, 220, 222, 223, 224, 227, 231, 235 Barkassy, Géza 336–7, 340 Barnes, Julian 132 Bartos, Tibor 346 Bártová, Emilie 310 Basch, Françoise 163 Bassi, Emilia 179, 184, 192 Bastei Lübbe 64 Bautz, Annika (contributor) 2 Bauzá 220 Beauvoir, Simone de 7–8, 162–3, Bech, Claus 129, 132–3 Beecher Stowe, Harriet 266, 269 Beer, Gillian 163 Belinskii, Vissarion 265, 272 Bel’skii, A. A. 278 Benedictsson, Victoria (author of Pengar [Money]) 6, 7, 105, 107 Benešová, Božena 312 Benjamin, Jessica 176 Beran, Zdeněk (contributor) 8, 11 Bergensposten 135 Bergson, Henri 160, 161, Bergstedt, Carl–Fredrik 105, 107 Bergsten, Staffan 112 Berlin 305, 309 Berlingske 124 Besedy Času 312 n.8 Biagi, Guido 173, 181, 182, 190–3, 194 Biarritz 210 Bible, the 2 Biblioteca Catalana 240 Biblioteca de Catalunya 238 Biblioteca Literària 240 Biblioteka dlia chteniia 265

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438  Index Bibliothek for de tusen hjem 139 Biedermeier 174, 175, 180 Bielsa Rodríguez, Fernando 255 Bignami, Marialuisa (contributor) 8 Bildungsroman (novel of education) 4 Billiani, Francesca 173 de Billy, Robert 160 Bing, Just 147–8, 149 Biographical History of Philosophy, A (Lewes, George Henry) 79 Bizet, Georges Carmen 9 Blackburn, Henry 210 Blackwood, John 210, 212 Blackwood’s Magazine 68, 92, 93 Blind, Mathilde 151, 219 Blumberg Elena 264 Boborykin, Piotr 265, 271 Bodelsen, C. A. 126 Bodichon, Barbara 4, 211 Boekzaal der geleerde wereld 94 Bofarull, Ángel 233 Bøgholm, Niels 126 Bogotá 227 Böhl de Faber, Cecilia (pseud. Fernán Caballero) 212 estrella de Vandalia, La 212 gaviota, La 212 Bohn, Erven F. 69, 93, 100 Bolton, Françoise 163, Böök, Fredrik 114, 116 Bordeaux 210 Borges, Jorge Luis 216 Borowy, Wacław 327 Borrow, George Zincali, The 213 du Bos, Charles 160, 161 Bosboom-Toussaint, Anna Louisa Geertruida 77 Boström, Christopher Jacob 104 Bourgois 165 Bourgois, Christian 165 Bourl’honne, Pierre 161 Bouterwek, Friederich Geschichte der Spanischen Poesie und Beredsamkeit 210 juez de los divorcios, El (German Trans.) 210 Brandes, Georg (Danish critic) 6, 121 Bremer, Fredrika (Swedish woman novelist) 4, 6, 105 Familien H 6 Hertha 6 Bremond, Henri 160 Březina, Otokar 303 Brezzi, Signor 179 British Film Institute 9 n.12 Brock, Ana Maria 47f, 50, Brontë, Anne 123, 125, 127, 148

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Brontë, Charlotte (author of Jane Eyre) 6, 43, 52, 53, 61, 87, 123, 125, 127, 131, 148, 219, 226, 282, 284, 288, 296, 297, 328, 330, 332, 334, 343, 363 Brontë, Emily 123, 125, 127, 148, 284 Brontës, the 323, 328, 330, 332, 334, 343 Brooke, Dorothea 212, 217, 218 Brooke, Mr see Clarín Brother Jacob see under Eliot, George Browning, Elizabeth 87, 121, 187, 201, 204, 355 Browning, Robert 9, 122, 182, 187, 190, 201, 204 ‘My Last Duchess’ 9 Ring and the Book, The 9 Brummer, Therese 121–2, 127 Brundsted, Birgit 131 Brunetière, Ferdinand 7, 159, 165, 370–1 Brunn, K. 127 Brusendorff, Aage 126 Bruyn, Piet 70, 74–5, 94, 95 Brændeland, Sverre 145 Büchner, Ludwig 2, 5 Buenos Aires 216, 227, 234 Bugge, Christian A. 140, 146 Bull, Francis 148 Bulwer, E. G. 123 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward (author of The Last Days of Pompeii) 8 Buchclub65 47f Bunyan, John 200 Pilgrim’s Progress, The 137, 243 Burchiello, Il (Domenico de Giovanni) 182 Burney, Fanny 127 Burton, Frederick William 233 Bushkanets, Irina 278 Busken Huet, Anne see Tholl, Anne van der Busken Huet, Conrad 2, 67, 69–70, 72, 73, 76, 77 n.7, 78, 79, 82, 84–8, 92, 94–5, 96, 98 Butler, Samuel: Hudibras 209 Byatt, A.S. 132 Byron, George Gordon 1, 87, 123, 209, 319, 373 Caballero, Fernán see Böhl de Faber, Cecilia Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens 164 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 9 Màgico Prodigioso, El 9 Calpe Press Publishers 219, 227, 228 see also Espasa–Calpe Capuana, Luigi 171 Caraës, Colette 163–4 Caras y Caretas 216 caritas (charity or love) 2, 10 see also sympathy Carlyle, Thomas (translator of Goethe, Wilhelm Meister) 2, 319 Carmen see Una Cristiana: La prueba

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Index   439 Carmoly, Eliakim: Histoire des médecins juifs anciens et modernes 213 Carner I Puig-Oriol, Josep 240–4, 246–7, 253 Carpio, Bernardo del 210 Casares Quiroga, Santiago 226 Castro, Rosalía de 218–19, 234 hija del mar, La 218–19 Catalan 223, 225, 234, 235 Catalan bourgeoisie 239 Catalonia 237–9, 242, 246, 247 Catholicism 66, 81, 86, 126, 161, 165, 198, 223, 228–9, 233, 243, 250, 364, 370 Cavafy, C. P. 363 Cazamian, Madeleine 161–2 Cecil, David 326, 328, 332 Čejka, Josef 309 censorship 41, 42–3, 45, 145, 174, 220–1, 225, 228–30, 231, 233, 235–6, 252, 266, 318, 322, 327 see also censorship under George Eliot Cerro González, Tomás Mario: Silas Marner (Trans.) 227 Cervantes, Miguel de 9, 210 Don Quixote 209, 215 gitanilla, La 213 Chaffurin, Louis 160 Chandler, Raymond 45 Chapman, John 305 characters in Eliot’s novels Alcharisi 10 Klesmer 10 Romola 5 Charity Hospital (Seville) 211 Chasseguet, Janine 176 Chaucer, Geoffrey 121, 126 Chernyshevsky, Nikolay 10, 262, 263–4, 267, 272 Chto delat? 267 Chodorow, Nancy 176 Chorváthová, Verona 314 Christianity 311, 314 see also Christianity under Eliot, George cinema, Italian 9 Ciugureanu, Adina (contributor) 11 Claesson Pipping, Git 105, 110, 113 Clarín (Leopoldo García-Alas Ureña) 217, 234 regenta, La 217 Colibri 285, 289, 292 Colombia 227 Columna 247 Comte, Auguste 3–4, 107, 108, 113, 160, 167, 168, 176, 271 Comunitat Valenciana 254 Congreve, Mrs. Richard 212 conservatism 293, 296, 300 Contact 70, 92, 101 Contemporary Review 186

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contributors Bautz, Annika 2 Beran, Zdeněk 8, 11 Bignami, Marialuisa 8 Ciugureanu, Adina 11 Dobosiewicz, Ilona 11, 12 Gorbunova, Natalia V. 11, 282–3 Hurtley, Jacqueline 9 Jumeau, Alain 7, 164, 165 Katsarova, Vesela 3, 11 Klitgård, Ebbe 5 Lorenzo-Modia, Maria Jesús 9 Marucci, Franco 8 Ortega Sáez, Marta 9 Proskurnin, Boris 10, 266, 283 Röder-Bolton, Gerlinde 2, 8 Sørbø, Marie Nedregotten 5 Szegedy-Maszák, Mihaly 11 Werven, Diederik van 2 conventionalism 354 Convorbiri literare 349, 352 Cordova (Spain) 210 Cornhill Magazine 68, 70, 85, 92 Couch, John 157–62, 164–5 Cross, John Walter 88, 117, 269, 320, 328, 341 Csukássi, József 339 Cuba 215, 216 Cuba contemporánea 216 Curentul nou 352, 354 Czytelnik 323, 330 Dagny 113 Dagsposten 140 Daily News 197 n.23, 200 d’Albert-Durade, Alexandre Louis François 164, 165, 220, 230, 233, 238, 243, 318 Dancy, Hugh 234 Daniel Deronda see under Eliot, George Danish Women’s Society 121 Dante Alighieri 181, 340, 373 Darwin, Charles 3, 5, 106 Darwinism 218, 277, 337, 343 d’Aumonville Alegría, Anna 227 Silas Marner (SM) (Trans.) 227 David, Ernest 164 Davidova, Lidiia 261, 267, 268, 270 Davidson, Angus 180 De Logu, Pietro 175, 183 De Roberto, Frederico 171 De Stasio, Clotilde 175 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe 209 Delo 265 Demidova, O. R. 282 Den norske bokklubben 145 Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat de Catalunya 252

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440  Index Depping, George Bernard Histoire générale de l’Espagne 210 juifs dans le moyen âge, Les 210 Romancero castellano 210 Deutsch, Emanuel 304 Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 63 Deventer, Julius Christiaan van 69, 92, 98 dialect writers (Italian; in Milan and Rome) 6 Diario de Barcelona 221 Diario de Las Palmas 234 Dickens, Charles 8, 10, 21, 31, 43, 53, 55, 68, 112, 115, 116, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 143, 147, 148, 149, 158, 160, 173, 174, 175, 186, 213, 216, 217, 220, 240, 248, 253, 261, 271, 276, 277, 279, 285, 293, 296, 297, 298, 303, 304, 310, 319, 323, 325, 328, 330, 332, 333, 334, 343, 345, 349, 352, 353, 354, 355, 359, 360, 363, 366, 373 niña Dorrit, La 222 Oliver Twist 222 Pickwick Papers, The 217, 251 dictatorships 233 Dobosiewicz, Ilona (contributor) 11, 12 Doctorow, E. L. 132 Domènech i Montaner, Eduard 222 Domènech i Montaner, Lluís 222 Domènech i Saló, Pere 222 D’Ors I Rovira, Eugeni 239 Dorsman-Vos, W.A. 70, 92, 101 Dostoevskii, Fiodor 10, 265 n.14, 332, 363, 373 Crime and Punishment 265 n.14 Dostoevsky, Fiodor see Dostoevskii, Fiodor Downs, Brian W. 120–1 Dresden 314 Drouet-Richet, Stéphanie 164 Druzhinin, Alexandr 265, 269 Dürer, Albrecht 5 Dutch painting 31–2, 266, 272, 293, 373 n.29, 374 Dyboski, Roman 326, 327–8 E. Doménech 238 Echegaray, José 215 Eco di Savonarola 197 Economist, The 68 Edgeworth, Maria 6, 104 Edinburgh Review 68 Editorial Catalana 240 Edward Wende 321 Eibe 124 Eisenhower, General Dwight David 221 Ekaterinoslav 269 Eliot, George 3, 8 accent/dialect, use of 5–6, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 146, 178, 338, 346 Amsterdam 88

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asceticism 171 Biedermeier 175 bourgeois society 50–2, 53–5, 58, 277, 336, 343 Calvinism 242, 243 censorship 145–6 centenary 143 characterization 107, 110, 115 Christianity 3, 52, 107–8, 112–13, 150, 160, 311, 314 class 19, 20, 21, 22–3, 48, 50–2, 53, 54–5, 58, 135, 139, 144, 146 comedy/humour 166 determinism 280 dialogue 178, 179 didacticism 179, 278, 346 double standard 163 ethics 107, 108–9, 148, 149, 152, 241, 258 feminism 4, 5, 140, 141, 148, 152, 328, 329, 334, 365 feminized language 251 gender 43, 46, 51, 52, 55, 58–60, 61–2 heroism 279, 280, 281 international status 178 Jews 145–6 language (rural) 5, 134–5, 138, 139, 141, 144, 146, 152 metaphors 282 morality 143, 147, 148, 150–1, 153, 241, 257, 258 see also morality narrative comments 137, 139, 144, 146–7 Naturalism 7, 78, 108, 113, 116, 159, 170, 278, 279, 280, 312–13, 343 philanthropy 52–3 philosophy 107–9, 113, 115, 150, 158, 311 see also philosophy positivism 168, 169, 170, 171, 176, 276, 278, 280, 343 prejudices 258 Protestantism 11 psychologism 282, 283 public morality 241, 257, 258 rationalism 150, 169, 176 realism 26–7, 28, 29–32, 34, 35, 43, 52–4, 57, 61, 71, 72, 74, 77, 78, 80, 86, 88, 107, 108–9, 110, 111, 114, 115, 116, 148, 150, 152, 158, 169, 170–1, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 308, 312, 312 n.8, 313, 314, 344 religion 51, 52, 54, 59, 107–8, 112–13, 143, 148, 150, 160, 242, 243, 283, 364, 368 Romanticism 277 Rotterdam 88 scandals 145 school textbooks 135, 152 suspicion of the outsider 258 sympathy 158, 159, 160, 161

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Index   441 time and memory 160, 161 verismo 170–1, 178, 179 village life 134, 143 women 5, 137, 148, 149, 151–2, 343 see also feminism under Eliot, George Works Adam Bede (AB) 1, 10, 30, 31, 33, 34, 53, 59, 60, 71, 72–3, 74, 75–6, 80, 81, 86, 87, 90–1, 94, 95, 98, 105–6, 108, 113, 114, 118, 122, 127, 148, 158, 159, 160, 162, 164, 178, 179, 209, 251–2, 263, 265–6, 273, 277, 282, 289, 292–4, 296, 299, 304, 311, 316, 320–1, 329, 331, 332, 337, 342, 353–4, 359, 363, 367, 368–71 Bulgarian translation 292–3 Catalan translation 237, 238, 251 Czech translation 313 Danish translation 120, 123, 133 Dutch translation 66, 67–8, 70, 80, 84, 92, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102 French translation 164, 165 German translation 16, 18–19, 24, 25–6, 27–8, 32, 47, 50, 53, 59, 63, 64 Greek translation 362 Hungarian translation 314, 337–9, 346 Italian translation 169–70, 173, 184 Norwegian translation 134–5, 141–2, 143, 144–5 Polish translation 319, 321 Romanian translation 358, 361 Russian translation 262, 274 Spanish translation 220, 222–5, 232, 235 Agatha 81 Amos Barton (AmB) 122, 175 Danish translation 120, 125–6, 127–8 Greek translation 362 Italian translation 172 Norwegian translation 142–3 Spanish translation 235 ‘Armgart’ 81, 333 Brother Jacob (BJ) 149–50, 252, 256 Catalan translation 237, 252, 254–5 Danish translation 120, 124, 125 Dutch translation 69, 92, 99–100 Spanish translation 234, 235 Daniel Deronda (DD) 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 76, 82, 85, 86–7, 91, 95, 107–8, 110, 122, 131, 148, 159, 164, 172, 176, 210, 213, 214, 215, 217, 264, 265, 266, 268, 269, 276, 280, 298, 299, 300, 301–2, 304, 320, 333, 335, 337, 345, 346, 357, 359, 360, 367–8

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Dutch translation 3, 69, 93, 99, 101 Danish translation 120, 133 Norwegian translation 147 French translation 164, 165 Hebrew translation 10 Italian translation 184, 186 Romanian translation 361 Russian translation 262 n.3, 268 Spanish translation 234 Ethics (translation of) 79, 81, 89 Essence of Christianity, The (translation of) 83, 89 ‘Evangelical Teaching’ Greek translation 362 Felix Holt (FH) 3, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 83, 84, 86, 87, 94, 95, 107, 110, 114, 118, 122, 128, 148, 175, 218, 262, 263, 265, 266, 277, 283, 297–8, 299, 359, 360 Danish translation 120 Dutch translation 2, 69, 72, 93, 98, 100, 102, 133 French translation 165 Hungarian translation 339 Italian translation 167, 175, 184 Norwegian translation 147 Romanian translation 358 Russian translation 262 n.3 Spanish translation 220, 221–2, 233, 234, 235 Impressions of Theophrastus Such (ITS) 11, 87, 278, 283, 328, 337, 351 Dutch translation 69, 93, 100 Romanian translation 361 Spanish translation 235 Janets Anger (JR) 262 see also Eliot, George, ‘Janet’s Repentance’ Norwegian translation 140–1, 153 ‘Janet’s Repentance’ (JR) 276, 337 Russian translation 262 n.3 Spanish translation 231, 235 ‘Legend of Jubal, The’ Dutch translation 69, 81, 93 Lifted Veil, The (LV) 8, 149–50, 177, 252, 276, 283, 304, 306–7, 309, 317, 328, 333, 337 Catalan translation 237, 252, 254 Danish translation 120, 124, 125, 127, 128 Dutch translation 92 Greek translation 362 Norwegian translation 135, 138–9 Spanish translation 233, 235 Middlemarch (M) 4, 6, 7, 11, 17, 20, 23, 34–6, 37, 38, 46 n.20, 47, 48, 50, 53, 54–5, 57–8, 59, 60, 61, 63, 76, 85–6, 87, 95, 107, 110, 112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 122, 131, 133,

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442  Index





145–6, 148, 149, 158, 159, 160, 161–2, 164, 176, 177, 213, 217, 218, 247, 249–51, 262, 265, 266, 270, 277, 279, 281, 282, 290–2, 298, 314, 315, 324–5, 330, 333, 334, 335, 342, 343, 345, 346, 359–60 Bulgarian translation 3, 285, 289–91 Catalan translation 237, 247, 249–50 Czech translation 314 Danish translation 2, 120, 124, 129, 132, 136 Dutch translation 69, 70, 93, 99, 101, 102 French translation 164, 165 German translation 17, 20, 23, 34, 37, 38, 39, 47, 48, 50, 55, 57–8, 63–4 Greek translation 362 Hungarian translation 337, 339–40, 346 Norwegian translation 135–8, 145 Polish translation 324, 325, 332 Romanian translation 358, 360, 361 Russian translation 262 n.3, 277, 279 Slovak translation 314 Spanish translation 232–3, 235 Swedish translation 111, 112 Mill on the Floss, The (MF) 5, 7–8, 16, 18, 19, 24, 28–9, 31, 33, 34, 38, 47, 49, 53, 58, 60, 62, 63, 94, 114, 115, 117, 121–2, 127, 130, 148, 159, 160, 162–3, 164, 173–4, 178, 213, 218, 264, 265, 266, 276, 277, 281, 282, 283, 287–8, 289, 296–7, 299, 327, 329, 331–2, 333, 334, 337, 343, 345, 353–4, 356, 359, 365 Bulgarian translation 285–8 Czech translation 313 Danish translation 120, 124–5, 127, 128–9, 133 Dutch translation 92, 97, 100, 101, 102 French translation 164, 165 German translation 16, 18, 19, 24, 28, 47, 49, 57, 62, 63, 64 Greek translation 362 Hungarian translation 341, 347 Italian translation 173–4, 184 Norwegian translation 140, 146–7 Polish translation 322, 323–4, 330–1, 332 Romanian translation 351–2, 357, 358 Russian translation 262 n.3, 277 Slovak translation 314 Spanish translation 220, 228–31, 235 Swedish translation 109, 111–12

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‘Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!, The’ 20, 333, 357 ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ (MG) Czech translation 313 Danish translation 120, 122 Greek translation 362, 366 Italian translation 184 ‘O May I Join the Choir Invisible’ 150 Romantische Werken 95 Dutch translation 73, 75, 98–9 Romola (R) 4, 5, 7, 8–9, 20, 34, 63, 64, 65, 74, 85, 86, 87, 89, 94, 95, 107, 114, 122, 148, 172–3, 177, 178–83, 184–208, 265, 270, 283, 297–8, 299, 301, 304, 320, 330, 332–3, 337, 342, 356, 359, 360 Czech translation 313 Danish translation 120, 125 Dutch translation 69, 92, 98 French translation 164, 165 German translation 20, 63, 64, 65 Hungarian translation 341 Italian translation 167, 168, 170, 182–3, 184–91, 193, 194 Norwegian translation 147 Polish translation 321, 322, 332 Romanian translation 361 Russian translation 262 n.3 Scenes of Clerical Life (SCL) 68, 71–2, 84, 86, 87–9, 94, 148, 158, 160, 262, 277, 278, 281, 289, 299, 331, 337, 354, 359, 366 Danish translation 120 Dutch translation 66, 69, 92, 96 French translation 164, 165, 366 Greek translation 362 Polish translation 319, 322 Spanish translation 231–2 Silas Marner (SM) 7, 12, 34, 39, 48–9, 53, 72, 76–7, 91, 94, 105, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 122, 127, 148, 159, 160, 178, 179, 239, 241–2, 245, 262, 264, 273, 274, 281, 282, 299, 313, 322, 326–7, 330, 337, 353–4, 359, 365 Catalan translation 237, 238–9, 240, 243–4, 247, 253 Czech translation 313 Danish translation 120, 124, 126, 127, 129, 132–3 Dutch translation 69, 72, 92, 97, 98, 101 French translation 164, 165 German translation 34, 39, 47, 48–9, 55–7, 61, 63, 64, 94 Greek translation 362 Hungarian translation 337, 340–1, 347

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Index   443

Italian translation 184 Norwegian translation 139, 143–4, 145 Romanian translation 357, 358 Russian translation 262 n.3, 277 Slovak translation 314 Spanish translation 219, 225–8, 235 Swedish translation 111, 112 ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ Spanish translation 235 Spanish Gypsy, The (SG) 9, 171–2, 329, 344 Dutch translation 93 Italian translation 184 Norwegian translation 147 Study of Psychology (edited) 215 ‘Sweet Evenings Come and Go, Love’ Danish translation 129 Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings 354 Eliot, T. S. 317, 345 ‘Prufrock’ 9 Enckell, Mikael 118 Engelbrecht, Andrea 121 Enlightenment, the 4, 10, 12 Entsagung (renunciation) 4 Episkopópoulos, Nikolaos (Ségur, Nicolas) 363 época, La 215, 216 Esclasáns, Agustín 224 see also Esclasans I Folch, Agustí, Esclasans I Folch, Agustí, 251 Espasa-Calpe 226 see also Calpe Press Publishers Essence of Christianity, The (Feuerbach, Louis) 83, 89 Essence of Christianity, The (translation of) 83, 89 Estatut d’Autonomia 247 n.52 ethics (Spinozan) 7 Ethics (Spinoza, Baruch) 79, 81, 89 Ethics (translation of) 79, 81, 89 Euripides: Iphigenia 214 ‘Evangelical Teaching’ see under Eliot, George Evans, Maria 219 see also Eliot, George Evans, Marian 3 see also Eliot, George Evans, Mary Ann viii, 60, 64, 66–7, 78, 79, 83, 127, 151, 167, 219, 222, 231, 253, 304, 312 n.8, 325, 329, 345, 367 see also Eliot, George Fabra, Pompeu 240 Normes ortogràfiques 240 Facultat de Traducció i Interpretació de la Universitat Jaume I (Castellón) 256 Farrán i Mayoral, Josep 231 Farrán y Mayoral, Josep 231 von Feilitzen, Anna 110 von Feilitzen, Urban 107, 110

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Felix Holt see under Eliot, George feminism 105, 107, 108, 113, 116–17, 216, 218, 226, 248, 291, 293, 298, 299–300, 309–10, 316, 354–5, 356, 361 see also Eliot, women; George; women’s studies Ferrán de Pol, Luis: Silas Marner: El hilandero de Raveloe (trans.) 227 Ferrier, Susan 6, 104 Fetter, Olga and Erich 47f, Feuerbach, Ludwig 2, 3, 5, 52, 59, 67, 73, 79, 83, 89, 113, 186, 283, 288, 291, 314, 331 Wesen des Christentums, Das 5, 83, 89 Fielding, Henry 137, 290, Fischer Verlag 47f, 48 n.24, 55–7, 62 Flaubert, Gustave 86, 88, 105, 149, 297, 341, 349, 350, 370, 371 Florence 8, 173, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189, 190, 191 n.18, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198, 199, 200–7 folk literature 210, 213 Fontane, Theodor (author of Der Grüne Heinrich) 4 For kirke og kultur 142 Ford, Richard: Handbook for Travellers in Spain and Readers at Home, A 10, 210 Foreign Quarterly Review 197 n.22 ‘foreignization’ 5 Fortnightly Review 79 France 210, 212 Franceschini, Emilia 182, 193 Francí Ventosa, Carmen 228, 230, 234 El molino del Floss (trans.) 228 Franco years 237, 249 Francoism 220, 228, 232–3, 235 Frese, Julius 18–19, 24, 25–6, 28, 33–4, 47f, 56, 64 Frost, Simon 131 Gallimard 160, 165 García-Alas Ureña, Leopoldo see Clarín Gaskell, Elizabeth 328, 339, 359, 360, 363 Gattégno, Jean 165 Génestet, Petrus Ausgustus de 67–8, 94 Genette, Gérard 253 n.74 Genoa 8, 36, 195, 198 genre expectations 103, 107, 114, 116, 119 Gerber, Richard 63 German Review of Arts, Literature and Science 215 Germany 1–2, 15–40, 41–65, 70, 77, 209, 210, 220, 225, 305, 354 see also publications, Germany; publisher, Germany Gide, André 160 Gids, De 70, 78, 85, 94, 95 Gilbert, Sandra 131 Giornale delle donne 190, 191

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444  Index Girton College, Cambridge (first women’s college) 4 see also Eliot, George, feminism; Eliot, George, women Gish, Lillian 9, 321 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 1, 4, 9, 32–3, 75, 78–9, 80, 82, 87, 113, 296, 314, 328, 340, 365, 373 Faust 9, 215, 222, 296 Werther 215 Wilhelm Meister 4 Gogh, Vincent van 88–9 Gogol, Nikolai 272 Gómez de Baquero, Eduardo 215 Goncharov, Ivan 10, 262, 263, 272 Obryv 263 Gorbunova, Natalia V. (contributor) 11, 282–3 Gosse, Edmund 365 Graham, Billy 143 Granada 210, 211, 217 Grand, Sarah 216 Greco, El 9 Greguss, Ágost 340 Gritchuk, M. A. 277 Grödal, Hanne Tang 130, 131 Grove, P. V. 124, 126 Gubar, Sandra 131 Guerra, Ángel 216 Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag 43 Gyldendal 132 gypsies 9, 210, 211, 213, 214 Hachette 164, 165 Hagberg, Knut 115 Haight, George H. 130 Haight, Gordon 331 Hálek, Vítězslav 310 Halldén, Ruth 114, 115, 116, 117 Hamsun, Knut 252 Hansen, Adolph 121 Hanušová, Dora 308–9, 310, 312, 317 Hardy, Barbara 130, 163 Hardy, Thomas 303, 311 Harrington, Henry George 10, 210 ‘Travelling in Spain in the Present Day’ 10 Harrison, Frederick 210 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 180, 189 Hedberg, Johannes 115 Heine, Heinrich 81 Hennell, Sarah 209, 304 Heraldo, El 212 Hertel, Lisbeth 131 Hewitt, Karen 266 Hidalgo, Pilar 233 historical novels 178, 179, 185, 187, 198, 352–3 historiography 179, 183 Hogg, James 44

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Holland 210, 213 Hollandsch Uitgeversfonds 70, 101 Hollywood 9 Holmberg, Claes-Göran 105 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 179 Horn, Frederik Winkel 125, 126 Hornát, Jaroslav 313 Hovelaque, Émile 160 Hugo, Victor 10 humanity 291, 299 Hurtley, Jacqueline (contributor) 9 Ia, R. 269 Ibsen, Henrik: Doll’s House, A 7 Icelandic Sagas 134 idealism 3, 29–30, 59, 71, 78, 104, 113, 170, 184, 267, 287, 288, 310, 315, 334, 349, 352, 353, 361, 372 idealistic realism 349, 352, 353, 361 Il Costituzionale 202 n.30 Il romanziere contemporaneo illustrato 168, 186–8, 190 Il romanziere illustrato 186 n.5, 189 Illustrerte klassikere 145 imparcial, El 215 Impresiones de un tal Teofrasto (trans.) 235 Impressions of Theophrastus Such (ITS) see under Eliot, George Institució de les Lletres Catalanes 247 Institut d’Estudis Catalans 240, 254 intellectualism 291, 298, 300 intelligentsia, the 265, 272 Ischl 304 Isla, P. José Francisco de 212 Italy 5, 6, 8–9, 167–77, 178–83, 184–208, 210, 214, 220, 297, 304 see also painters, Italian; publications, Italy; publishers, Italy Ivasheva, Valentina 266, 277, 278 James, Henry 87, 132, 176, 264, 280, 325, 332, 341, 346, 360 Jameson, Fredric 4 Janda, Jiří 313 Janés 235 Janés i Olivé, Josep 224–5, 235, 251 Janés y Olivé, José 251 see also Janés i Olivé, Josep ‘Janet’s Repentance’ (JR) see under Eliot, George January, Uprising of 1863 318, 333 Jean, Dominique 165 Jensen, Bo Green 133 Jespersen, Otto 121, 126 Jews 9, 145–6, 213, 214, 218, 220, 268, 269 Jougan, Sylvie 164 journals and newspapers see publications Judaism 269, 304–6, 308, 356–7 see also Jews

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Index   445 Julliard 165 Jumeau, Alain (contributor) 7, 164, 165 Junimea (the young writers) 349, 350 Junta de ampliación de estudios (Madrid) 216 Kacziány, Géza 340–1 Kalogerópoulos, D.I. 365 Kampen, P. N. van 69, 70, 72, 92, 97, 101 Kampmann, Christian 130 Kant, Immanuel 5 Karásek, Jiří 306 Karelskii, A. V. 281 Karkavítsas, Andréas 371, 372 Karup, Carl 123 Katona, Anna 344–6 Katsarova, Vesela (contributor) 3, 11 Keller, Gottfried grüne Heinrich, Der 4 Kemény, Zsigmond 338–9 Kempe Valk, C. van 69, 93, 100 Ken, Bishop Thomas 223 Key, Ellen 103, 107, 108, 110 Kipling, Rudyard 121, 126 Kisfaludy Society 339, 341 Klaczko, Julian 333 Klitgård, Ebbe (contributor) 5 Klotz, Günther 47f, 48, 49, 50–1, 52, 53, 54 Kondratiev, Iurii Mikhailovich 277–8 König, Eva Maria 47f, 57, 59–60, 64 Koropchevskii, Dmitrii 267 Kourtídis, Aristotelis 366, 367–8 Kovalevskii, Maksim 264 Krabbe, Henning 148, 149 Krásnohorská, Eliška 309 Krasovskii Publishing House 262 Kraszewski, Józef Ignacy 326–7 Kringsjaa 150 Kruseman, A. C 67, 68, 69, 70, 79, 92, 96, 97, 98 Kruseman, Arie Cornelis 67, 68, 70 Kruuse, Jens 130 Krzyżanowski, Julian 326 Książnica-Atlas 322 Kuz’min, Boris 266, 275–6 La Riforma 186 La Romola 183, 204 n.34 Lacko, Ivan 316 Ladislaw, Will (character in Eliot’s novel Middlemarch) 11 Laertes 252–3 Læssøe-Müller, Paul 128 Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine 355 Lagerlöf, Karl-Erik 115, 116 Lagerlöf, Selma 106, 143 Lanaro, Giorgio 167 Larra, Luis Mariano de 213 conquista de Madrid, La 213

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Oros, copas, espadas y bastos 213 Larra, Mariano José de 213 Lassen, Anna 141 Lawrence, D. H. dialect (Nottingham miners’) 6 n.6 Leader, the 195–9 Leavis, Francis Raymond 87, 115, 131, 296 Leben Jesu, Das (Strauss, David Friedrich) 2, 3, 52, 67, 85, 89 Leeskabinet, Het 71–2, 94, 95 Leffler, Anne Charlotte 106 Lega della democrazia 189 ‘Legend of Jubal, The’ see under Eliot, George Lehrer, Eva 131 Leighton, Lord Frederick Maid with the Golden Hair, The 233 Under the Plane Tree 233 Lemaître, Jules 364 Lérida 210 Lesage, Alain-René: Gil Blas de Santillana 209, 212 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 3 Levine, George 107 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 159–60 Lewes, George Henry 1–2, 8, 9, 10, 15–17, 18–19, 24–5, 29–30, 32–3, 38, 39, 51–2, 59, 76, 79, 81, 84, 89, 92, 117, 118, 161, 167, 168, 173, 179, 181, 185, 186, 188, 190, 192, 195–6, 197, 198, 199, 200–1, 202–3, 204, 205, 209–17, 218, 264, 276, 296, 304, 305, 309, 312, 320, 325, 328, 331, 341, 345, 367, 372 Biographical History of Philosophy, A 3, 79, 215, 216 ‘espiritualismo y el materialismo, El’ 215 Life of Goethe 1 On Actors and the Arts of Acting 215 Physiology of Common Life 84, 92 Spanish Drama: Lope de Vega and Calderón, The 9, 210 Study of Psychology 215 Lewes, Thornton 11, 318, 333 Leweses, the 209, 211, 212, 214, 217 Lewis, Linda M. 307 Lewis, Sarah 209 Leyris, Pierre 165 Liestøl, Knut 143, 151 Life of Goethe (Lewes, Geroge Henry) 1 Life of Jesus (Strauss, David Friedrich) 2, 3, 52, 67, 85, 89 Lifted Veil, The see under Eliot, George Lindgren, Hellen 109 Link, Elke 63 Liszt, Franz 8 Litz, A. Walton 130 Llei de Normalització Lingüística, La (The Law of Linguistic Normalization) 250 n.64

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446  Index Llorente, Juan Antonio: History of the Inquisition in Spain 210 Loisy, Albine 165 Løkke, Jakob 152 London, Jack 126 Lope de Vega y Carpio, Félix 9 López Muñoz, José Luis 232 El velo alzado (trans.) 234 Lorenzo-Modia, Maria Jesús (contributor) 9 Lotman, Lidiia 272, 273 Lubbock, Sir John 215 Origin of Civilization, The 215 Lugais, Astra 266, 280–1 Lukács, György 344 Lundblad, Jane 115 L’Unità d’Italia 186 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth, William) 293 McDermot, Doireann 228 Macmillan’s 68, 93 Madrid 210, 211–12, 215–16, 235 Madsen, N. P. 127–8 Málaga 210, 226 Mallarmé, Stéphane 180 Mancomunitat de Catalunya 239, 240 Mann, Thomas 332 Manzoni, Alessandro 171, 178, 187, 369 Marco, Josep 256–7 Marrené, Waleria 319–20, 321, 332 Marroni, Francesco 175, 183 Marryat, Frederick 123 Marucci, Franco (contributor) 8 Marxism 11, 273, 344–5, 347, 358–9 Matthis, Yvonne 111, 117 Mary, Saint see Virgin Mary Mary I of England 228 materialism 3, 78, 84, 291, 345, 349 Maupassant, Guy de 4, 170, 351 Mazzini, Giuseppe 8, 168, 185–6, 189, 196–200, 206 Medusa 231–2 Meilbo, Q. 128–9 Melberg, Arne 131 Mémoire en faveur de la liberté des cultes (Vinet, Alexandre Rodolphe) 67, 79 Mérimée, Prosper 349 Carmen 213 Mexico 227 Middlemarch see under Eliot, George Midttun, Olav 143, 151 Mikhailov, Mikhail 265–6, 269, 270 Mikkelsen, Aslaug 126–7 Milan 168, 171 Mill, John Stuart 75, 121, 167, 186, 355, 358 Mill on the Floss, The see under Eliot George Miller, Arthur 132 Milner, Ian 307, 315–17 Mineo, Ady 177

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Misset 70, 92, 100 ‘Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!, The’ see under Eliot, George Moderna Språk 118 Modernism 320, 360 modernity 355 moeurs de province 363 Moleschott, Jacob 84 Møller, Lis 131 Møller, Niels 121 Moltke, L. 124 Mondadori 173, 175 Monod, Sylvère 165 Montégut, Emile 68, 74, 158–9, 364, 367–8, 371 Montenegro, [A] 227 Monthly Record of the Society of the Friends of Italy 196 Moors 210, 214, 232 Mora, José Joaquín de gaviota, La (trans.) 212 Morales, María Luz molino junto al Floss, El (trans.) 228–9 morality 105–6, 107, 109, 110, 111, 115 see also Eliot, George, morality Mordovtsev, Daniil 271 Mortensen, Peter 123 Mourek, Václav Emanuel 312 ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ see under Eliot, George Mroczkowski, Przemysław 329–30 Munich 304 Museo del Prado 9, 211–12 Museum of Bellas Artes (Madrid) 211 Mužák, Petr 310 Náprstek, Vojtěch 309 Naptsok, Bella Radislavovna 282 Nardi, Iacopo 182, 199 Narodna Kultura 285 narodniki movement (narodnichestvo) 273 narodnyi roman 273 national identity 239, 255 n.82 nationalism (in Europe) 238 Naturalism 7, 104, 108–9, 113, 116, 150, 170, 178, 218, 261, 271–2, 312–13, 320, 342, 349, 350–1, 359, 370–1, 372, 374 see also Eliot, George, Naturalism Nederlandsche Spectator, De 76, 77, 94, 95 Negri, Gaetano 168–72, 174, 175, 178–9, 184, 190, 191 Nekrasov, Nikolai 272 Němcová, Božena 310 Neruda, Jan 310 Netherlands, the 11 New Norwegian 5, 135, 142–3 New York Tribune, The 201 n.28, 203 Nickel, Irmgard 47f, 48, 50, 57, 58, 63, 64

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Index   447 Nielsen, Jørgen Erik 122, 123 Nietzsche, Friedrich 304 Nieuwe Recensent 94 Nikolaḯdou, Eirini 365 Nineteenth Century 186 Nissen-Drejer, Ruth 143–4 Normes ortogràfiques (Fabra, Pompeu) 240 Norstedts 105, 110, 115 northern Europe 238 Noucentisme 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 249 Nouvelle Revue Française 160, 161 Nováková, Teréza 310, 312 novelas tontas de ciertas damas novelistas, Las (Bustelo, Gabriela) 235 Nya Dagligt Allehanda 107 ‘O May I Join the Choir Invisible’ see under Eliot, George O’Brien, Flann 132 Olivetti, Cesare 172, 186 Oller, Narcis 248 n.56 Olona, Luis: Mis dos mujeres 213 Olsson, Bernt 113, 116 Onze Tolk 95 Ortega Sáez, Marta (contributor) 9 Ossolineum 329, 330–1 Østerberg, V. 125–6 Østergaard, Claus Bratt 131 Otechestvennye zapiski 265 Ottosen, Ingemann 128 Outlook Verlag 64 Oyarzábal, Isabel 220 see also Oyarzábal Smith, Isabel Oyarzábal de Palencia, Isabel see Oyarzábal Smith, Isabel Oyarzábal Smith, Isabel 226 see also Oyarzábal, Isabel sembrador sembró su semilla, El 226 SM: Novela (Trans.) 226–7, 235 Pacheco, Francisco de Asís 215 Page, Anthony 131 n.11 painters see also Dutch painting British Constable, John Water Meadows near Salisbury 231 Turner, Joseph Mallord William Frosty Morning 232 Dutch Rubens, Peter Paul 232 Greek Greco, El 9 Portrait of Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli 211 Theotokópoulos, Doménikos see Greco, El Italian Barbarelli da Castelfranco, Giorgio see Giorgione

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Caliari, Paolo see Veronese Caravaggio 232 Comin, Jacopo see Tintoretto Giorgione 212 Gregorio, Vecellio di see Titian Merisi, Michelangelo see Caravaggio Tintoretto Annunciation 214 Titian Bacchanal of the Andrians, The 212 Emperor Charles V on Horseback at Mühlberg 212 Virgin and Child between Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Roque, The 212 Veronese 212 Spanish Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban Escurial Immaculate Conception 211 Holy Family with a Little Bird, The 211 Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, The 211 Moses Striking the Rock 211 Saint Anthony’s Vision 211 Saint Thomas Giving Alms 211 Virgin Appears to Saint Bernard, The 211 Valdés Leal, Juan de 211 Velázquez, Diego Aesop 212 Meninas, Las 212 Menippus 212 Philip IV 212 Surrender of Breda or the Lances, The 212 Triton Fountain in the Garden of Aranjuez, The 212 Triumph of Bacchus, or the Drinkers, The 212 Zurbarán, Francisco de Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Apotheosis 211 ‘Països Catalans, Els’ (The Catalan Lands) 237–8 see also Catalonia Palamás, Kostis 363, 370, 371–4 Palma, César infortunios del reverendo Amos Barton, Los (T=trans.) 232 Pammrová, Anna 304 Panero Torbado, Leopoldo 225, 252 Papadiamándis, Aléxandros 371, 372–3 paratexts 253, 256 Pardo Bazán, Emilia 216, 218, 234 Cristiana: La prueba, Una 218 pazos de Ulloa, Los 218 Paris 164, 210, 217, 220 parliamentary democracy 237 Parrén, Kallirhoe 363, 364, 365 Parton, James 150–1

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448  Index Pascheles, Wolf 308 Patejdl, Václav 313 Pau 210 Paulhan, Jean 160 Pedersen, Viggo Hjørnager 131–2 Pellico, Silvio 179, 181, 195 Pereda, José María de 217, 234 Peñas arriba 217 puchera, La 217 Sotileza 217 Pérez Corrales, Gloria 226 Pérez Galdós, Benito 217–18, 234 Fortunata y Jacinta 217–18 Gloria 217–18 Misericordia 217–18 Tristana 218 Pérez Mateos, Francisco see Roch, León Pešina, Jaroslav 307 Péter, Ágnes 347 Péterfy, Jenő 341 philosophy 2, 3, 34, 37, 59, 70, 74, 75, 79, 81, 83, 88, 89–90, 91, 107–9, 115, 150, 158, 162, 167–8, 171, 176, 195, 215, 220, 266, 269, 281, 288, 291, 311, 325, 328, 331, 365, 368 see also Eliot, George, philosophy Physiology of Common Life (Lewes, George Henry) 84, 92 Piero di Cosimo 181, 193 n.20, 195 Pierson, Allard 2, 67, 69, 71, 72, 76, 78, 79–82, 94, 95, 96, 97, 101 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan, John) 137, 243 Pisapia, Biancamaria 176 Plon 165 Podlipská, Sofie 310 Poe, Edgar Allan 306, 317 pogroms 268 Polish Anglo-Saxon Studies 333 Polonskaia, Olga 268 Pond, E. J. 161 poporanism (ruralism) 353, 361 Porta, Carlo 171 Portefeuille, De 75, 95 positivism 176, 329, 330, 358, 363 see also Eliot, George, positivism Powell Frith, Julia: Lovers, The 233 Prado, Museo del 9, 211–12 Prague 8, 303, 304–10, 312, 315, 317 Prat de la Riba, Enric 239 n.7 Praz, Mario 172, 174–5, 180–1, 183, 184, 185 Prescott, William Hickling: History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella 213 Primo de Rivera regime 237 Proceedings of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences(Sprawozdania Polskiej Akademii Umiejętności) 327 Procházka, Martin 315

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Proskurnin, Boris (contributor) 10, 266, 283 Prószyński i S–ka 325 Protestantism 11, 66, 71, 72, 81, 165, 198 n.25, 200, 223, 224, 228, 263, 271, 364, 368, 370 Proust, Marcel 160–1 Prus, Bolesław 333 Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska, Anna (translator of Eliot) 11, 322–5, 330, 332 psychological insight 352, 355, 356, 360 psychologism 270, 273, 288, 294, 296 Publications (journals and newspapers) Britain All The Year Round 68 Athenaeum, The 76 Blackwood’s Magazine 15, 68, 92, 93, 168, 219, 231, 306 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 237 Contemporary Review 186 Cornhill Magazine 68, 70, 85, 92, 185, 187, 188, 189, 194, 200, 237 Daily News 197 n.23, 200 Eco di Savonarola 197 Economist, The 68 Edinburgh Review 68, 368 Foreign Quarterly Review 197 n.22 Fortnightly Review 79, 186 Leader, the 195–9 Macmillan’s 68, 93 Modern Language Review 120 Monthly Record of the Society of the Friends of Italy 196 Nineteenth Century 186 Punch 68 The Times 265 Westminster Review 1, 2, 68, 74, 168, 196, 265, 345, 347, 366 Catalonia Veu de Catalunya, La 240 Vindicación feminista 248 n.54 Czech Lands Besedy Času 312 n.8 Slovenské pohľady 314 Ženské listy 308, 309, 310 Denmark Fyns Venstreblad 127 Information 130 Jyllandsposten 130 Passage 131 France Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens 164 Nouvelle Revue Française 160, 161 Revue Bleue 158, 159 Revue des Deux Mondes 158, 159, 160 Temps, Le 158 Germany German Review of Arts, Literature and Science 215

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Index   449 Greece Efimeris ton Kyrión 364 Estía 366 Hungary Szépirodalmi Figyelő 338 Italy Giornale delle donne 190, 191 Il Costituzionale 202 n.30 Il romanziere contemporaneo illustrato 168, 186–8, 190 Il romanziere illustrato 186 n.5, 189 La Riforma 186 Lega della democrazia 189 L’Unità d’Italia 186 Rivista contemporanea: Rassegna mensile di letteratura italiana e straniera 189 Rivista di Studi Vittoriani 175 Netherlands Algemeen Dagblad van Nederlandsch Indïe 95 Amsterdammer, De 95 Boekzaal der geleerde wereld 94 Gids, De 70, 78, 85, 94, 95 Leeskabinet, Het 71–2, 94, 95 Nederlandsche Spectator, De 76, 77, 94, 95 Nieuwe Recensent 94 Onze Tolk 95 Portefeuille, De 75, 95 Tijdspiegel, De 72, 73, 94, 95 Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen 72, 73, 74, 94, 95 Wetenschappelijke Bladen, De 68, 79 Zondagsblad 94 Norway Aftenposten 135, 138 Bergensposten 135 Dagsposten 140 For kirke og kultur 142 Kringsjaa 150 Smaalenenes Amtstidende 150 n.37 Syn og Segn 143 Poland Polish Anglo-Saxon Studies 333 Proceedings of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (Sprawozdania Polskiej Akademii Umiejętności) 327 Tygodnik Powszechny 334 Wysokie Obcasy 335 Życie 319 Romania Convorbiri literare 349, 352 Curentul nou 352, 354 Revista idealistǎ 355 Viaţa Româneascǎ 353 Russia Biblioteka dlia chteniia 265 Delo 265 Otechestvennye zapiski 265

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Russkii Vestnik 265 Sovremennik 265 Vestnik Evropy 265, 268, 271 Voskhod 269 Spain Caras y Caretas 216 Cuba contemporánea 216 Diario de Barcelona 221 Diario de Las Palmas 234 época, La 215, 216 Heraldo, El 212 imparcial, El 215 Revista de Andalucía 215 Revista de Cuba 216 Revista de España, La 217 sol, El 216 Unión, La 217 Sweden Dagny 113 Moderna Språk 118 Nya Dagligt Allehanda 107 Tidskrift för hemmet 108 United States of America Atlantic Monthly, The 201 n.28 New York Tribune, The 201 n.28, 203 Publishers Bulgaria Colibri 285, 289, 292 Narodna Kultura 285 Catalonia Ave Phoenix 251 Biblioteca Catalana 240 Biblioteca Literària 240 Columna 247 E. Doménech 238 Editorial Catalana 240 Laertes 252–3 Tres i Quatre 255 Denmark Berlingske 124 Eibe 124 Gyldendal 132 Rosinante 132 France Bourgois 165 Gallimard 160, 165 Hachette 164, 165 Julliard 165 Plon 165 Germany Anaconda Verlag 64 Ars Vivendi Verlag 63, 64 Aufbau Verlag 42, 43, 47f, 48, 49, 50, 57 Bastei Lübbe 64 Buchclub65 47f Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 63 Fischer Verlag 47f, 48 n.24, 55–7, 62

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450  Index

Franz Duncker 18 Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag 43 Outlook Verlag 64 Reclam (Leipzig) 47f, 49 Reclam (Stuttgart) 47f, 48, 55, 57–8, 61–2, 64 Salzwasser Verlag 64 Tauchnitz editions 1, 11, 15–18, 20, 23, 24, 25, 74, 134 n.2, 147 n.28, 149, 336–7, 351 Weltbild Verlag 63 Hungary Kisfaludy Society 339, 341 Italy Baldini & Castoldi 168 Mondadori 173, 175 Sansoni 174 Treves 168, 182, 186–7, 188, 190, 194 Netherlands Bohn, Erven F. 69, 93, 100 Contact 70, 92, 101 Hollandsch Uitgeversfonds 70, 101 Kampen, P. N. van 69, 70, 72, 92, 97, 101 Kruseman, A. C 67, 68, 69, 70, 79, 92, 96, 97, 98 Misset 70, 92, 100 Spectrum, Het 70, 92, 101 Van Druten & Bleeker 68, 69, 92, 93 Norway Ansgar forlag 143, 144, 145 Bibliothek for de tusen hjem 139 Den norske bokklubben 145 Illustrerte klassikere 145 Poland Czytelnik 323, 330 Edward Wende 321 Książnica-Atlas 322 Ossolineum 329, 330–1 Prószyński i S-ka 325 Salomon Lewental 319 Trzaska, Ewert and Michalski 321 Russia Krasovskii Publishing House 262 Stasiulevich, Mikhail 263 Spain Alba 230, 234 Bauzá 220 Calpe Press Publishers 219, 227, 228 see also Espasa-Calpe Cátedra 233 Espasa see Espasa-Calpe Espasa-Calpe 226 see also Calpe Press Publishers Janés 235 Sweden Albert Bonnier and Sons 110 Norstedts 105, 110, 115

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United States of America University of North Carolina Press 157 Punch 68 Putykevich, L. K. 278, 279 Pushkin, Aleksandr 272 Quesnel, Léo 158 Ramberg, Mona Lyche 145, 146 rationalism 150, 176 see also Eliot, George, artionalism raznochinzy 272 realism 5, 104, 106, 107–9, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 170, 178, 212, 217, 218, 270–2, 278, 304, 308, 310, 312, 313, 319–20, 322, 329, 330, 331, 333, 334–5, 348, 349–50, 351–3, 354, 359, 360, 361, 363, 366, 368, 369, 370–1, 372, 373 see also Eliot, George, realism Reclam (Leipzig) 47f, 49 Reclam (Stuttgart) 47f, 48, 55, 57–8, 61–2, 64 Reimarus, Hermann 3 Renaissance France 9 Renan, Ernest: Averroès et l’averroïsm 213 Reshetnikov, Fiodor 273 Glumovy 273 Podlipovtsy 273 Revista de Andalucía 215 Revista de Cuba 216 Revista de España, La 217 Revista idealistǎ 355 Revue Bleue 158, 159 Revue des Deux Mondes 158, 159, 160 Ribot, Théodule: psychologie anglaise contemporaine, La 215 Richmond 304 Rieger, F. L. 310 Ripellino, Angelo Maria 315–16 Rivista contemporanea: Rassegna mensile di letteratura italiana e straniera 189 Rivista di Studi Vittoriani 175 Robertson Nicoll, William 220 Roch, León 216 Röder-Bolton, Gerlinde (contributor) 2, 8 Roḯdis, Emmanuel 363, 364–5 Roldán, Pedro 211 Romantic poets 121 Romanticism 78, 79, 213, 277, 288, 308, 332, 333, 350, 368, 370, 371–2, 373 Romantische Werken see under Eliot, George Rome 181, 183, 197 Romieu, Émilie and Georges 161 Romola (character in Eliot’s novel Romola) 5 Romola see under Eliot, George Ronda 214 Roos, Elisabeth de 70, 92, 101 Rose, Phyllis 131

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Index   451 Roselló, Francisco: Hilandero, El (trans.) 227 Rosenberg, Kai 129 Rosenberg, P. A. 129 Rosinante 132 Rossetti, Christina 121 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 121 Roth, Sabine 63 Rovda, Kirill 266, 275, 277 Rubinstein, Anton 10 Ruiz de Larios, Juan: Silas Marner (trans.) 227 Russia 10 Russian revolution 239 Russkaia Naturalnaia Shkola 272 Russkii Vestnik 265 Rytter, Henrik 142, 152 Saint-Exupery, Antoine de 45 St Petersburg 262, 272 Salamon, Ferenc 337–9 Salís, Marta: Escenas de la vida parroquial (trans.) 232 Salomon Lewental 319 Saltykov-Schedrin, Mikhail 10, 262, 272 Salzburg 304 Salzwasser Verlag 64 San Sebastián 210, 212 Sand, George 6, 75, 116, 152, 190, 212, 215, 216, 219, 266, 288, 296, 307, 309, 310, 325, 339, 340, 343, 349, 353, 363, 364, 365 Lettres d’un voyageur 212 Sandbach Dahlström, Catherine 112 Sandvad, Else 131 Sans Huelín, Guillermo: molino, El (trans.) 220, 228, 229 Sansoni 174 Santi di Tito 183 Sappho 219 Sardá, Rafael: Molino del Floss, El (trans.) 228 Sartre, Jean-Paul 7, 8, 162 Savonarola, Girolamo 5, 8, 179, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195, 198–9, 200, 202, 204, 206–7 Scenes of Clerical Life (SCL) see under Eliot, George Schauer, Hubert Gordon 313 Schérer, Edmond 74, 101, 158–9, 367–8 Schiller, Friedrich 10 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst Daniel 1, 5, 83, 293 ‘On Translation’ 5 Scholten, Jan Hendrik 72 Schreiner, Olive 216 Schumann, Eva 47f, 49, 56 Scott, Walter 5, 123, 158, 209, 213, 216, 323, 333, 363, 373 Quintin Durward [sic] 222 second-wave feminism 248 see also feminism

9781441190222_txt_print.indd 451

Ségur, Nicolas see Episkopópoulos, Nikólaos Seichepine, Marielle 164 Selboe, Tone 149 Selitrina, T. L. 278, 279, 280 Sephardics 210 Setmana Tràgica (Tragic week) 239 Sette, Miriam 168, 176 Sevigné, Mme de 355 Seville 210, 211 Shakespeare, William 87, 90, 107, 121, 125–6, 134, 183, 243, 244, 289, 312, 365, 373 Shamina, Natalya Viktorovna 284 Shashkov, Seraphim 265, 268, 269 Shelley, Mary 61, 190, 253 Frankenstein 234 Sheppard, Nathan 152 short stories 370, 371–2, 373, 374 Siebenhaar, Werner 64 Silas Marner see under Eliot, George ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ see under Eliot, George Sinclair, Upton 126 Sirvent, J. 227 Sismondi, Jean Charles Léonard de De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe 210 Skorodenko, V. 279 Skram, Amalie 149, 150 Slomovitz, Paul 118 Slonimskii, Leonid 271–2 Slovenské pohľady 314 Smaalenenes Amtstidende 150 n.37 Smithfield Market (London) 228 social criticism 354 Socialist Realism 359 sol, El 216 Solovieva, N. A. 282 Sørbø, Marie Nedregotten (contributor) 5 Sørensen, Johan 139 Sørensen, Marianne 131 Southey, Robert 209 Sovremennik 265 Spain 209–14, 220–1, 225, 231, 232–3, 235–6 Spanish 209, 212, 214, 217, 219–36 Spanish Civil War 220, 225, 235, 247, 251 Spanish drama 9, 210, 213 Spanish Generation of 1936 225 Spanish golden age literature 210 Spanish Gypsy, The see under Eliot George Spanish heritage 209, 213, 225 Spanish history 209–10, 213, 214 Spanish literature 209–10, 211, 213, 214–19, 220 Spanish opera 9, 213 Spanish state 237 n.2, 238, 248 Spectrum, Het 70, 92, 101 Spencer, Herbert 75, 160

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452  Index Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de) 2–4, 67, 79, 81, 82–5, 88, 89–91, 213, 283, 288, 291, 314, 331 Ethics 3, 79, 89, 91, 213 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus 3, 79, 82–3, 89 Staël, Germaine de 1, 6, 8, 216, 219, 355, 363 Corinee, ou L’Italie 1 L’Allemagne, De 1 Stalin, Joseph 322 Stasiulevich, Mikhail 263 Šťastná, Zuzana 314 Stendhal, Marie-Henri Beyle 149, 363 Stephen, Leslie 179 Sterne, Lawrence ix–xii, 68 Stevenson, Robert Louis: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The 234 Storm, Thora 140–1, 153 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 126 Strauss, David Friedrich 2, 3, 59, 73, 79, 83, 84, 186, 288 Leben Jesu, Das 2, 3, 52, 67, 85, 89, 196 Strömholm, Stig 115–16 Strømme, Olaf 142 Stubbs, George Gentleman Driving a Lady in a Phaeton, A 233 Haymakers 224 Study of Psychology see under Eliot, George Sundström, Gun-Britt 111–12 suspension of disbelief 183 Suttner, Bertha von 121 Svanberg, Birgitta 116 Světlá, Karolina (Czech woman novelist) 11, 309 n.6, 310–12 Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Dmitirii 275 Svobodová, Růžena 312 ‘Sweet Evenings Come and Go, Love’ see under Eliot, George Swinburne, A. C. 121 sympathy 7, 10, 28, 31, 32, 36, 67, 73, 82, 85, 88, 90, 113, 158, 159, 160, 161, 293, 299, 316, 334, 350, 355, 359, 364, 367, 368, 369, 371, 372, 373, 374 Syn og Segn 143 syndicalist struggles 239 Szala, Alina 331–2 Széchenyi, István 336 Szegedy-Maszák, Mihaly (contributor) 11 Szépirodalmi Figyelő 338 Szerb, Antal 342–3 Szinnai, Tivadar 346 Szobotka, Tibor 346 Szudra, Klaus Udo 47f, 49–50, 51, 52, 53, 54 Taine, Hippolyte 157–8 Tambs-Lyche, Hans 150, 151–2 Tang, Maria 164

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Tasso, Torquato 179, 181 Tauchnitz, Bernhard 336 Tauchnitz Editions Tauchnitz editions 1, 11, 15–18, 20, 23, 24, 25, 74, 134 n.2, 147 n.28, 149, 336–7, 351 Tegner, Ingeborg 113–14 Temps, Le 158 Tennyson, Alfred 122 Teresa of Ávila, Saint 212, 218 Libro de la Vida 212 Thackeray, William Makepeace 34, 43, 53, 55, 68, 115, 122, 123, 125, 147, 174, 175, 185 n.1, 186, 189, 248, 249, 251, 261, 276, 277, 279, 282, 283, 296, 303, 319, 328, 330, 343, 346, 352, 359, 366 The Times 265 Theisz, Gyula 342 Thibaudet, Albert 160, 161 Tholl, Anne van der (Busken Huet) 67, 69, 77, 84, 92, 96, 97, 98, 101 Ticknor, George: History of Spanish Literature 210 Tidskrift för hemmet 108 Tijdspiegel, De 72, 73, 94, 95 Tilschová, Anna Maria 312 time and memory 160, 161 Tkachev, Piotr 265, 267, 269, 270 Toledo 212 Tolstoy, Lev 10, 262–3, 272, 332, 351, 352, 353, 360 Anna Karenina 11, 222 War and Peace 11 What is Art? 10 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Guiseppe 175 Torok, Maria 176 Tosello, Maria 181–3, 184–5, 187, 193 Toussaint, Benjamine 164 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Spinoza, Baruch) 3, 79, 82–3, 89 travel books 10, 210 Tres i Quatre 255 Treves 168, 182, 186–7, 188, 190, 194 Triadú, Joan 247, 249 Trollope, Anthony 168, 174, 175, 199, 200, 203, 204, 308, 312, 328, 330 Trollope, Thomas 8 Trzaska, Ewert and Michalski 321 Tsebrikova, Maria 4, 265, 266, 267, 270 Tugan-Baranovskaia, Lidiia (Davidova) 261, 267, 268, 270 Tugusheva, Maya 266 Turgenev, Ivan 8, 10, 262, 264, 272, 273, 352, 353 Bezhin Lug 264 Nov 264 Zapiski okhotnika 273 Tygodnik Powszechny 334

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Index   453 Unión, La 217 Universitat de Barcelona 238 University of North Carolina Press 157 USA 221 utilitarianism 358 Váczy, János 341 Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen 72, 73, 74, 94, 95 Valencia Goelkel, Hernando 227 Valera Alcalá-Galiano, Juan 217, 234 Doña Luz 217 Pepita Jiménez 217 Vallvé, Manuel 224 Adán Bede (Trans.) 223 Van Druten & Bleeker 68, 69, 92, 93 Váňa, Jan 312 Vasari, Giorgio 181, 193 n.20 Veinberg, Piotr 265, 270 Venice 214 Ventós, Maria Dolors 252, 253–4 Venuti, Lawrence 123 Verga, Giovanni 171, 178 verismo 170–1, 178, 179 Vestnik Evropy 265, 268, 271 Veu de Catalunya, La 240 Viardot, Pauline 10 Viaţa Româneascǎ 353 Vicesecretaría de Educación Popular 252 Vienna 304, 305, 309 Vikélas, Dimitrios 363, 368–70, 373 Vilagrassa Sentís, Roser 228 Villa, Luisa 176 Villari, Pasquale 182, 189, 191, 193, 198, 200, 201 n.29, 202, 204–5, 206 Villarreal Rodríguez, Ariadna 255 Vindicación feminista 248 n.54 Vinet, Alexandre Rodolphe 76, 80, 81, 82, 85 Mémoire en faveur de la Liberté des Cultes 67, 79 Virgin Mary 211 Vizyinós, G. M. 371 Vloten, Johannes van 2, 67, 70, 78, 79, 82–4, 94 Vogüé, Eugène-Melchior de 370 von Sayn-Wittgenstein, Carolyne 8 Voskhod 269 votes for women 5 see also Eliot, George, feminism; Eliot, George, women Waterloo 229 Weber, Kuno 63 Weltbild Verlag 63 Werven, Diederik van (contributor) 2

9781441190222_txt_print.indd 453

Wesen des Christentums, DAS (Feuerbach, Louis) 83, 89 Wesenberg, Hans 152, 153 Wesley, John 223 Westermarck, Helena 103, 106, 108–9, 110, 113 Westminster Review 1, 2, 68, 74 Westrheene-van Heijningen, Mrs Jacoba van (Dutch translator of Eliot’s DD and FH) 2, 69, 70, 72, 77, 92, 93, 97, 98, 99, 101 Wetenschappelijke Bladen, De 68, 79 Wikborg, Eleanor 112 Williams, Raymond 175, 345 af Wirsén, Carl David 107 Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings see under Eliot, George Witt-Brattström, Ebba 116 Wolfe, Tom 132 Wollstonecraft, Mary 127 women’s rights 5 see also Eliot, George, feminism; Eliot, George, women women’s movement 5 see also Eliot, George, feminism; Eliot, George, women women’s studies 163–4 see also Eliot, George, feminism; Eliot, George, women Woolf, Virginia 179, 342–3 Wordsworth, William 178, 180, 203, 242–3, 369 Excursion, The 223 Lyrical Ballads 293 ‘Michael’ 226, 243 World War I 238 World War II 237 Wysokie Obcasy 335 Xenópoulos, Grigorios 363 Yasnaya Polyana 263 Zaragoza 211, 213 Zbierski, Henryk 12, 330 Ženské listy 308, 309, 310 Zerbst, Rainer 47f, 48, 57–8, 59, 59 n.72, 60, 61 Zionism 269, 355, 356, 357 Zola, Émile 7, 105, 108, 116, 159, 165, 170, 218, 320, 343, 351, 359 see also Naturalism Zondagsblad 94 Zwaardemaker-Visscher, Jacoba Berendina (Dutch translator of Theophrastus Such) 3, 69, 92, 99, 100 Życie 319

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