The discipline of the real

It is impossible to consider the history of realism in the novel, at least as that history passes through the English novel, without quickly naming Middlemarch as a landmark. In many respects it serves as the standard metre stick of the realist movement in fiction: George Levine has plausibly called it “the summa of Victorian realism.” To the impatient question, But what do you mean by realism?, it is tempting just to lift the novel high and to say, I mean This. And yet if Middlemarch is a work which confirms and dignifies a central literary tradition, it is also a work which shows the unsteadiness, even the self-contradictions, of the realist project. George Eliot can be usefully seen as that English novelist who most forcefully expresses the claims of realism and who most vividly shows its instability.

The craving for detail so evident in her researches for the novel, in the desire to reproduce the bumpy textures of actuality, and in the eagerness to record the sheer contingent fact that mushrooms can yield 60,000 spores in a minute – all this is a product of that root realist yearning to surrender to the world as it is, to that “supreme unalterable nature of things.” Some of the most celebrated passages in George Eliot's writing address the dignity and the urgency of the artist's engagement with ordinary life in all its homely familiarity.