Reviews and essays

Even in her early letters, it is evident that Mary Anne Evans was a natural born critic. She read constantly and extensively and wrote to share her opinions about what she read with friends, as when she observed that L. Vernon Harcourt's Doctrine of the Deluge – one of many attempts to uphold the veracity of the biblical flood in the face of geographical evidence refuting it – seemed to “shake a weak position by weak arguments” (GEL, I:34). In these letters, she exercised her critical mind even more than her creative imagination, and it seemed inevitable that when she considered a career, she thought of participating in the lively literary and intellectual exchanges taking place in the thriving Victorian periodical press.

In the review essays that Marian Evans wrote for various periodicals between 1849 and 1856, we can follow several strands of thought that help us to understand why she began to write fiction and also how she thought fiction ought to be written. Her journalism was the training ground for the penetrating analysis of her narrators. Her reviews and essays are important because they display the impressive range of her reading and knowledge by the time she was in her thirties, and because in them she works out some of the ideas about realist representation that she would later practice. She measured the writing of others according to a standard of “truth” and argued passionately for the moral necessity of such truth.