'But the facts must be accepted as they stood.' (Felix Holt, the Radical, George Eliot)

‘But the facts must be accepted as they stood, and, after all, the chief thing was to have her son back.’

Why do I find George Eliot’s prose so reassuring? Because her narrator stands right beside us peering over our shoulder. Because we can hear her knowledge of her characters breathing down our neck. Because the surety of that knowledge infects her prose, thus turning it into a form of everyday moral philosophy we feel we can live by. Here are tenets we should recognise if not know.

The speaker here is Mrs. Transome, a 56 year old woman whose melancholy is perhaps the most distilled emotion of the novel precisely because of her maturity. Mrs. Transome knows herself, and her creator knows her, and because of this Eliot draws us as close as she can into the sad kernel that is Mrs. Transome’s private ‘consciousness’ (Eliot’s word). We find her in a moment of painful apprehension. Her son, Harold, is about to return after fifteen years away. Mother and son are to be reunited. And so Mrs. Transome paces between her sitting room and the entrance of her home ‘quivering and listening’ to the sound of the carriage wheels on the stones outside. What will he make of her after all this time?

Eliot is careful to distribute her verbs of emotional apprehension. Not too many and just the right ones in combination. Mrs. Transome ‘trembled’ as she ‘listened'.’ Listening is used twice, but always with a verb of emotional agitation: ‘quivering.’ Several times we are reminded that Mrs. Transome is ‘far beyond fifty:’ her age follows her about like her loneliness. Finally, as we enter into the heart of the matter, Eliot does not spare this lonely woman (I can be forgiven for forgetting at times that Mrs Transome is a wife) from frank biographical summary:

‘To feel that the doubtful deeds of her life were justified by the result, since a kind Providence had sanctioned them? — to be no longer tacitly pitied by her neighbours for her lack of money, her imbecile husband, her graceless eldest-born, and the loneliness of her life;’

Pithy biography is Eliot’s form of emotional verisimilitude. A list of raw biographical facts hang about her neck in this sentence as Eliot sentences her to our pity: her lack of money, her imbecile husband, her graceless eldest-born and her loneliness.

Eliot is a portrait artist and her frank miniature portraits define the precise emotional state of her most seen characters, just as a portrait of the young Mrs. Transome hangs over her in that sitting room as a cruel reminder of her youth. ‘But the facts must be accepted as they stood . . .’ and it is not long before we are reminded again of Mrs. Transome’s maturity and the shabbiness of her condition as an aging woman whose closet confidante is her loyal servant, Denner.

So why is this reassuring? Because it is not kind but it is true. And because within the repeated mentioning of her age, Mrs. Transome is also given the sort of physical description that makes her intensely real to us —- as real as any unforgiving portrait or a photograph without strong light. ‘She was a tall, proud-looking woman, with abundant gray hair, dark eyes and eyebrows, and a somewhat eagle-like yet not unfeminine face.’ We stand close to Eliot’s agitated mother and wife and find that, despite the humiliating circumstances of her life, she still holds herself well; she is bearing up; she is still here — well drawn and unpretentiously portrayed — so we can see her clear as day. Mrs. Transome is not shrouded in ethereal light, but she is given to us as a woman, or indeed as any of us might find ourselves upon first waking, looking hard at ourselves in the bedroom mirror, before we pass through into what we hope is a more forgiving day.

For Violet.