George Eliot’s Precarious Afterlives

Abstract

This article examines three types of interconnected afterlives that have their roots in George Eliot’s well-known insistence that the diffusion of the work is what mattered, not the identity or personality of the writer who produced that work. It suggests, however, that Marian Evans’s efforts to shape the terms in which she would be remembered were riven with a sense of the precariousness of the potential outcomes for legacy building on the basis of written work or good deeds. Her complicated relationship with the idea of an afterlife is a core preoccupation of her final collection of poetry, The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, Old and New (1878). The poems were originally published in magazines and are not typically read consecutively. Collectively, however, they can be seen to reinforce her understanding that legacy building by abjuring ego is a paradoxical and possibly pointless activity. Two other types of afterlife confirm Evans’s anxieties about remembrance. Obituaries and memorial essays that followed in the days and weeks after her death and twenty-first century biofictional representations of the writer, despite their generic distinctiveness as ‘afterlife’ modes, both present reactionary personalized but partial pictures of the woman behind the work in ways that signal a limited capacity to appreciate the complexity and the conflicted and radical nature of both the woman and her work.