The Transferred Life of George Eliot
by Philip Davis, OUP, £25
If there is no God, George Eliot will do, author Philip Davis’s mentor used to joke – by which he meant that she was “the best version of what a novel’s omniscient narrator might really stand for”. The woman herself might have balked at comparison to the deity – or she might not have. With followers of Feuerbach one never knows.
George Eliot’s peculiar worldview is the subject of Davis’s intellectual biography, which aims to show how Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans’s life taught her to think like a novelist. The intersection of fiction and real life is Davis’s speciality. A professor at Liverpool, he also works with The Reader, an organisation promoting the use of literature for socially beneficial purposes – sponsoring book clubs for prisons, training psychologists in “bibliotherapy”, etc.
