Distraction inevitably arrived during Book 3 of The Iliad. Admiring the dedication of habitual rereaders is not sufficient inducement to become one. Nabokov’s injunction remains daunting: “A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” Dilettante status must suffice, for now. Ellis Sharp’s Twenty-Twenty continued to exert its pull, held in the mind alongside Gabriel Josipovici’s 100 Days, both listed among Steve Mitchelmore’s favourite books of last year. There has been quiet pleasure in dipping again into the latter.
A return to George Eliot began with Scenes of Clerical Life. Before writing fiction, Eliot taught herself Latin and translated Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, the first English translation, unpublished in her lifetime. Only after this intellectual apprenticeship did she begin to write stories. In a letter to Dr. Payne in 1876, Eliot wrote: “My writing is simply a set of experiments in life—an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of—what stores of motive. . . give promise of a better after which we may strive to keep hold of as something more sure than shifting theory.”
Clare Carlisle has argued that Eliot is a philosophical novelist, and it is compelling to trace how her ideas moved from ethics into fiction. A rereading of Middlemarch lies ahead as part of this chronology—if distraction does not prevail, as it so often does, amid the silent temptation of unread books.
Re-reading takes a lot of effort, I find, when there are so many unread ones calling your name. But I tend to think Nabokov was right and that we should make the effort to go back to those books which mean a lot to us.
Agreed, it’s always an intention.
George Eliot was certainly quite the intellectual and Scenes from Clerical Life is probably the hardest to find of her works. Will be interested to follow you reading and rereading of her.
I don’t reread very often nowadays, but last year I reread a bit more… and in most cases those were the best books of the year.
Her immersion in the work of Auguste Comte, Feuerbach and Spinoza is so intriguing, and all before she wrote a word of fiction. I’ve got the Oxford Classics edition of Scenes from Clerical Life. But I’ll read her translation of Ethics first and maybe her translation of Strauss’ Life of Jesus.
She was into Comte? Is that reflected in her novels?
Apparently so, yes, but I’ve no direct evidence (yet). There is a book: George Eliot and Auguste Comte: Influence of Comtean Philosophy on the Novels of George Eliot, by David Maria Hesse
Hi, I believe Dodd’s biography of Eliot, An Intellectual Life, deals with her relationship with Comte.
Love the blog!
Hi, thank you for that info. I’ll read that. I’m pleased you enjoy the blog!