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292 The nineteenth century
by Dickens as certainly by a female hand, to the massive Middle-march
(1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), she touches on many of the
major issues of her day. Such issues have not lost their pertinence over
a century later: how a wife copes with a drunken husband (Janet’s
Repentance in Scenes of Clerical Life); what happens when an unmarried
girl is accused of murdering her infant child (Adam Bede, 1859); how
an orphan child brings humanity to a miserly social outcast (Silas Marner,
1861); and how a sister and brother achieve reconciliation in the moment
of tragedy after bankruptcy, moral compromise, and ostracism have
separated them (The Mill on the Floss, 1860). Janet’s Repentance is
particularly vivid in its evocation of the woman’s plight:
Poor Janet! how heavily the months rolled on for her, laden with
fresh sorrows as the summer passed into autumn, the autumn
into winter, and the winter into spring again. Every feverish
morning, with its blank listlessness and despair, seemed more
hateful than the last; every coming night more impossible to
brave without arming herself in leaden stupor. The morning light
brought no gladness to her: it seemed only to throw its glare on
what had happened in the dim candle-light – on the cruel man
seated immovable in drunken obstinacy by the dead fire and
dying lights in the dining-room, rating her in harsh tones,
reiterating old reproaches – or on a hideous blank of something
unremembered, something that must have made that dark bruise
on her shoulder, which ached as she dressed herself. Do you
wonder how it was that things had come to this pass – what
offence Janet had committed in the early years of marriage to
rouse the brutal hatred of this man?
These are the themes of Eliot’s early novels, and show her concern for
the outsider in society. Her search for illustration illuminated the moral
areas of experience which more traditional Victorian thought would
have tried to handle in absolute terms – black and white, wrong and
right. The moral simplicity of early Victorian thinking and writing,
influenced (as indeed Eliot was) by Scott’s return to a mediaeval ethos,
had to change with the times, and encompass a much wider range of
problems and experience.
George Eliot’s novels are largely set in the realistically presented