An exploration of how Collins’s prose style contributes to suspense and mystery by destabilising language and therefore creating ambiguity and ambivalence

After the publication of The Mill on the Floss in the spring of 1860, George Eliot took a trip to Italy, where she started research for what she believed would be her next work of fiction, Romola. Although she had not begun the actual composition of this novel by the autumn of 1860, the ‘ambitious project’ had become such an unremitting conceptual focus for her that the writing of another work before Romola could not help but be viewed by the novelist as a sort of creative interruption. Indeed, George Eliot charges Silas Marner with reaching ‘across my other plans by a sudden inspiration’. Yet there is still some debate as to how early the actual specifics of Silas Marner occurred to the writer. Andrew Brown argues that George Eliot was thinking of ‘a quite different English novel during August and September 1860—a novel subsequently supplanted by Silas Marner’ and that ‘her sudden inspiration for Silas came as something of a self-fulfilling prophecy as regards her declared intention of postponing Romola’.

It is not difficult to infer why Silas Marner—a much-shorter work, set in a personally more familiar time and place—would have been a kind of compositional relief to George Eliot. But thematically as well, in contrast with the dauntingly tough story of Romola, Silas Marner offers a vision of a simpler and purer goodness.

‘A Conductor of the Mind’: The Varying Languages of Realism

In an essay first written for the National Review in 1860, R. H. Hutton explained that George Eliot's strength and appeal as a realist novelist came not only from her ability to create compelling individual characters, but also from her commitment to revealing

This ‘depth and mass’ is synonymous with the complex undercurrent in George Eliot's novels—the almost unexplainable emotional and moral difficulties of life which are made manifest through the microscopic movements of her intricate syntax. These collective complexities become that whisper amidst ‘the roar of hurrying existence’ which George Eliot's language allows sensitive readers to begin to discern. As such, they are crucial components of her personal conception of a deeper realism, without which she would not have felt that her novels were able to ‘express life’ fully. But in recognizing George Eliot's vital contribution to the development of realism as a literary tradition, one must not forget that hers was not the only approach taken by realist novelists of the period.

Associations of Force

Romola is by far George Eliot's least accessible novel, a fact that even the author herself recognized and admitted during the arduous writing process. The general conception has always been that it is the meticulously researched and often overwhelmingly descriptive historical setting that introduces the intensified level of distance and difficulty to the work. It was probably this that fellow novelist Anthony Trollope was considering when he cautioned George Eliot against focusing on too narrow an audience. In a letter responding to his charge, George Eliot wrote:

It is likely that George Eliot was conscious of something more complicated in Romola than the struggle of her readers with the novel's geographically and temporally remote setting. Indeed, there is something particularly demanding about the syntax-about the reading and comprehension of Romola at the most basic level. As I have argued, the sentence structure in The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner is one that demands the reader's awareness of subtle vibratory movements or the rhythmic pulse of the text. But the syntax of Romola, the novel that comes after these, is not just about heightened awareness, but about direct pressure.

The Syntax of ‘Too Early Yet’

As has been well-documented in Jerome Beaty's Middlemarch from Notebook to Novel, the work commonly regarded as George Eliot's masterpiece was initially composed in sections. This sectionalization was characteristic of the entire writing process, as Middlemarch was published serially from December 1871 to December 1872, with George Eliot still writing as late as October 1872. Beaty focuses specifically on the initial phases of the novel's composition, however—before what we now know as Middlemarch had turned its various linear storylines into a cohesive web of multiple dimensions. As Beaty explains, ‘the first eighteen chapters of Middlemarch are a fusion of the beginnings of two separate prose works’. George Eliot documented the beginning of one of those prose works in a letter to her publisher on 2 December 1870, writing that the tale concerned ‘a subject which has been recorded among my possible themes ever since I began to write fiction, but will probably take new shapes in the development’. The subject in question was the study of Dorothea Brooke, a nineteenth-century ‘Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing’. But George Eliot had actually started Middlemarch more than a year before, with what most critics describe as the Featherstone and Vincy parts. The original writing lagged, and Dorothea's tale would ultimately launch the novel in two senses: as the literal opening and as a new inspiration for the novelist herself.

This book has its origin not in George Eliot's literary beginnings, but at a summative point in the middle of her career—specifi cally, with her 1866 novel, Felix Holt, The Radical. In a passage from the introduction of Felix Holt that stands as an obvious precursor to the famous lines from her masterpiece, Middlemarch, regarding the ‘roar which lies on the other side of silence’, the narrator observes that in spite of the universality of human suffering, the actual particulars of individual sorrows

The disparity between the intensity of the word ‘agonies’ and the subtle ‘whisper’ becomes symbolic of that level of ‘alertness to the world’ required both of the characters existing within George Eliot's stories, and of the readers experiencing the stories through them. Even more importantly, I would argue that these lines about personal deafness to the larger pain around us, coming nine years into her fi ction-writing career, stand as George Eliot's earliest explicit explanation of that most crucial theme in her work: the fundamental need for, but ultimately limited nature of, human sympathy. Imperfect consciousness is presented here as almost biologically innate, but through the worlds of her novels, we can discern that George Eliot clearly felt it was possible to make ourselves notice the ‘whisper’ with acts of increased attention.

This book is developed from the hypothesis that George Eliot wanted the public to read her sentences almost as carefully as she wrote them-to find and respond subconsciously to those places in the prose where vibrations within the syntax itself deliver subtle shocks to the system beneath the contextual level of story and character. My argument is that by doing so, the novelist was fighting the statement she made herself in Middlemarch, that ‘we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual’. Through examination of her texts with reference to her manuscripts, I hope to show that George Eliot's active process of writing, rereading and revision is evidence of her commitment to shaping these syntactical vibrations in order to make her readers respond to the pain in even the quietest, most ordinary moments of life.

The introduction explains how I first encountered the vibratory movements within the grammar, as well as the overall methodology of the research. From there I begin with George Eliot's second novel, The Mill on the Floss, using contrasting editions of the work to discuss in more depth the importance of punctuation in creating those vibrations, with particular reference to manuscript revision. Because of the autobiographical links between the young Marian Evans and the character of Maggie Tulliver, I feel that The Mill on the Floss is a natural place to begin the exploration of how George Eliot chose to shape her sentences when entering a character's mind.

We have seen how George Eliot's search for ‘a language subtle enough to follow the utmost intricacies of the soul's pathways’ results in complex syntactical presentations of consciousness, from the intensely personal and concentrated focus on Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss to the wider community of individualized thought-processes in Felix Holt. The carefully constructed passages of psycho-narration throughout the works increase the potential of full sympathetic connection between character and reader. But a clearer sense of individuality is not everything, for we must also come to understand that individuality in the context of human relationships. I would like to return to a previously cited observation made by critic Gillian Beer:

It is in Beer's discussion of ‘imbalances of feeling’ that some of those most difficult moments in George Eliot's fiction become particularly relevant. We need only remind ourselves of those subtle shifts between Romola and Tito as Romola begins to sense the irreconcilable distance between herself and her husband even as he remains her husband, or of the empty emotional space between Mrs Transome and Harold as the mother longs for the love of a son who has never fully existed.

Middlemarch is a novel that focuses on the difficulty of existing within a marriage that lacks both love and intimacy—the pain of a relationship, like the family relationships in Adam Bede, where the two people involved should be close. But George Eliot also had an interest in relationships that were not so outwardly straightforward. We see a hint of this in Middlemarch, when she chooses to introduce the character of Tertius Lydgate at a dinner-party celebrating Dorothea Brooke's engagement to Edward Casaubon. Lydgate and Dorothea are observed by fellow guests to be having ‘a very animated conversation’ about ‘cottages and hospitals’, but there is no indication that the characters’ first meeting involves the discussion of anything more personal than a shared interest in philanthropy. This particular chapter then closes, and the beginning of the next continues, with narratorial announcements that further block the possibility of a deeper mutual intimacy between the pair in the most traditional romantic sense—announcements of Dorothea's actual marriage and Lydgate's attraction to a very different kind of woman. Still the narrator breaks in soon after with an observation from the opposite angle, offering a possible future link between them in spite of their present distance:

Prosaic Rhythm

Felix Holt is generally seen as a novel of solid political and social commentary; this story of a ‘Radical’ whose beliefs are revolutionary only in the sense that they are not what is traditionally accepted as radical is also understood by many critics to be a political failure. Terry Eagleton seems to view the title as something of a naïve misnomer, citing the novel's ultimate lack of political action due to a ‘reformist trust in moral education’ coupled with ‘a positivist suspicion of political change’. Eagleton, along with other critics both Victorian and current, also finds the title-character himself quite troubling, for like Romola, Felix's consciousness fails to emerge from the text as vividly as that of a Maggie Tulliver, a Silas Marner, even a Tito Melema. In the introduction to the Clarendon edition of the novel, Fred C. Thomson hypothesizes that the political aspects of the text were actually a secondary thought and that George Eliot's first inspiration for the work was the tragedy of the Transome family, an argument that would help to explain the perceived distance between Felix and readerly sympathy, as well as between Felix and political action. Yet I would like to argue that Felix's is more of a constructive failure than that which we see in Romola, and not only in the fact that Felix himself manages to escape Romola's state of permanent personal isolation.