are willing to go any-
where on earth except
home.
It is a portrait not of Marian Evans the woman but of George Eliot the artist, and one is not surprised to learn that Lewes rejected it. The face is sad, the eyes are cold and weary, the expression superior, the mouth is sensual and cruel: not the cruelty of a torturer, but the cruelty of a judge. Why should it not be? No charge of hypocrisy laid at her door could compare with the double-dealing of the society which condemned her .. Human beings, particularly when they are artists, are too valuable, too disparate, too contradictory to be left in the hands of the critics or the psychoanalysts. Their poignancy rests in the peculiar force with which each spurns the ideal.
Janet Flanner
Genêt
The New Yorker©
October 30, 1948
Walking Since Daybreak
A Story of Eastern Europe,
World War II, and the Heart
of our Century
Houghton Mifflin, 1999©
Noel Annan
Heroine
A review of
George Eliot
Gordon Haight, 1968
The New York Review©
January 2, 1969
No comments:
Post a Comment