Frederick R. Karl George Eliot: Voice of a
Century
Norton, 708 pages, $30

reviewed by Alan Rutenberg

In this psychological study of George Eliot, Frederick Karl draws a
much more complex figure than the official portrait which Gordon
Haight presented in his authoritative biography published in 1968.
Haight, the editor of Eliot’s letters, confined himself to
a meticulously documented but largely deferential chronicle; here
Frederick Karl freely explores the often hidden patterns and tensions
of George Eliot’s private life. He proceeds, however, with an
attitude of freshening inquiry, not with the malice that has become
all too evident in such enterprises. As one might expect of the
author of biographies of Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka, he constructs
a detailed account of Eliot as
a nineteenth-century outsider,
profoundly ambivalent about her emancipation from
the conventional roles and ideas of the Victorian period.
Unfortunately, his acute psychological analysis is
all too often circuitous, tedious, and
awkwardly expressed.

The subtitle of the biography, “Voice of a Century,” is not quite
fair. Although Karl demonstrates a modest interest in a wider
historical inquiry, his clearest intention is to correct and deepen
the received view of Eliot as a serene intellectual and moralist. As
Karl writes, “Eliot is always characterized as our novelist of
moderation and balance. But her novels bespeak morbidity, death, and
forms of extreme behavior.” He notes further that “in her novels,
she revelled in failures, in wandering female characters, in
depicting poor choices, in cataloguing disastrous