In 1919, Virginia Woolf wrote an essay for the Times Literary Supplement defending George Eliot, whose reputation at the time was waning. More than just a chronicler of 19th Century English class distinctions, Woolf argued, Eliot was a profound empath who understood the “melancholy virtue of tolerance; her sympathies are with the everyday lot, and play most happily in dwelling upon the homespun of ordinary joys and sorrows.”
Which is to say that Eliot was a social novelist with a heart. It’s interesting that Woolf, a confirmed novelist of the individual and interiority, would be the author to make such an assertion. But perhaps we oversimplify Woolf now as much as Eliot was oversimplifed a century ago. And all novels are social novels, even Woolf’s: Society thrusts a set of expectations upon us, and fiction is typically about how we challenge, flout, and reject those expectations. Without friction against what we ought to do, the novel could hardly exist.
Woolf’s and Eliot’s shared engagements with the social novel — if divergent approaches to it— emerges in a pair of titles in Ig Publishing’s “Bookmarked” series, short books exploring a particular classic much in the way Bloomsbury’s “33 ⅓” series does with classic albums. It’s no stretch, of course, to think of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) as a social novel, as Pamela Erens does in Middlemarch and the Imperfect Life. Few novels have the English class system so richly and intimately woven into its sentences. The surprise and pleasure of Erens’ assessment may be located in how thoughtfully she integrates Middlemarch into her own life and our present society, the way it reveals how a melancholy virtue of tolerance can endure for a couple of centuries and change. Similarly, Robin Black’s assessment of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) repositions the book from a pioneering stream-of-consciousness novel into one that bears down on how we comprehend and avoid what society imposes, especially when it comes to motherhood.
Woolf didn’t use the term “stream-of-consciousness” when she was writing Dalloway. Rather, she called her method of getting into the minds of her characters a “tunneling process.” A interesting term: It implies that she wasn’t just moving through a character but through a whole environment. And no question, her two leads are a function not just of who but where they are. Clarissa is a society matron planning a party in her London home that evening; Septimus Smith is a shellshocked World War I vet who’ll ultimately kill himself. The interiority of both is so deep that it can seem disengaged with broader society, except perhaps for considerations of Clarissa’s class. But Black, author of the novel Life Drawing and story collection If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, finds that the novel’s title character is more integrated with the world we might expect. A moment early in the novel where Clarissa fusses over whether her hat is “not the right hat for the early morning” is, for Black, is a prompt for how we fit in — sartorially, socially, mortally. Clarissa’s hat anxiety exposes “the question of how an individual, given a life that is going to end, aware of that mortality, lives in society.”
We hardly ever do that living comfortably, Black observes; both Clarissa and Septimus fall short. Both, “from start to finish, service in the war, for the man, rules about whom one must marry, for the woman, as trapped in that system. He certainly gets the worst of it, they do not suffer equally, but they are equally trapped.”
The anxiety is personal for Black. She often returns to her history of ADD, her two-decade bout of agoraphobia, her late-in-life decision to pursue an MFA, and her troubled relationship with her father. She is particularly attuned to not fitting in, and Dalloway is commodious enough to accept being read that way. It is “a book so reliant on interpretation, so generous in the degree to which it invites a reader’s collaboration, that it is something of a moving target.” But if it’s a stretch to connect picking the wrong hat with fear of death, she is very persuasive on Woolf’s treatment of one of its underplayed characters, Clarissa’s daughter, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth plays only a modest role in the book, which Black suggests is Woolf’s intention. Motherhood, in itself, wasn’t a particularly interesting subject to Woolf. But to write a married woman character who was not a mother would only draw attention to the absence. So the novel becomes deliberately “stony cold” whenever Elizabeth is mentioned; she is a presence, but an intentionally unimportant one. In the process, Dalloway becomes “that rarest of works of literature: a novel about a woman who is a mother that has absolutely no interest in being a novel about being a mother.” Society has expectations of its social novels, too, and Dalloway becomes one through its inversions.
Erens’ book brings a similar personal experience and fluid interpretation of the social novel to Middlemarch. By her lights, it’s not just that Dorothea makes the poor decision to marry the fusty academic Casaubon. It’s that such errors are part of social living — and that Eliot’s understanding of those errors is at once clear-eyed and empathetic. The novel is, Erens writes, “a detailed, compassionate exploration of what happens when, bit by bit, life encroaches on a person’s fantasies of fulfillment, whether those fantasies have to do with artistic success or saintliness or intellectual insight or wealth or love.”
Such questions are personal for Erens — like Black, her criticism regularly returns to her own experience, whether it was measuring up as an student (she was a preternaturally high achiever), person (in therapy, in marriage, as a parent), and as a novelist who aspired to apply Eliot’s social sophistication her own books. We operate as individuals, but Erens recognizes, through Eliot, that interconnections and our cravings for them are essential to our character. “She wants to show us how human behavior creates our world,” she writes, “how the things we do every day forge chains of results that have a powerful impact on others.”
That grasp of interconnection was part of the reason why Woolf, in that TLS essay, called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” For all the social breadth of Middlemarch, Eliot grasped interiority as well as Woolf did, just in a different mode; she knew that living in a society meant carrying aspects of the various personalities that occupy it. Even the aspects that seem to contradict the image we present. As Erens notes, when a friend asked Eliot who the model was for Casaubon, she pointed to herself.
[Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Bookmarked, published by Ig Publishing on April 19, 2022, 184 pages, $14.95 softcover. Middlemarch and the Imperfect Life, published by Ig Publishing on April 19, 2022, 164 pages, $14.95 paperback