Comments on: Macaroni and Cheese

By: Rohan Maitzen

Rohan Maitzen — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:05:52 +0000

Anonymous: another excerpt from the essay here that I think shows how much you and I actually agree:

“And does it in fact, make Eliot a lesser novelist that most of her novels are thus imperfect? My answer, as you probably expect, is no, and Lewes himself (who, after all, became Eliot’s husband) hints at why. “There are heights and depths in human nature Miss Austen has never scaled nor fathomed…”

By: Rohan Maitzen

Rohan Maitzen — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:47:03 +0000

Anonymous - Oh, I'll take Eliot too, every time. As I say early in this essay, there's an alternative essay I could have written that brings out all of Romola's strengths and makes the case for why it is indeed a novel well worth our time. I think this essay shows some of this off too, in all the ways it gives the novel credit: you agree, clearly, with my assessment that "It contains moments of psychological acuity and dramatic intensity unsurpassed in Eliot’s other fiction." Perhaps you take my opening paragraph a bit too literally? Admitting the imperfections in her novels seems to me one way of understanding just what makes her such a great novelist overall -- the enormous intellectual reach of them, for one thing -- which seems entirely consistent with your point that other truly great writers also show "imperfections." But if you find Romola perfect as is, OK!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 01:25:16 +0000

I don’t agree with any of this. Jane Austen is a great writer, but I’ll take George Eliot’s breathtaking sweep and incomparable intellect any day over Austen’s two inches of ivory.

I don’t care if Eliot is less perfect than Austen; Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky are full of imperfections. Eliot is the one female novelist in history who has a truly Shakespearian breadth and depth to her work. I finally got around to reading Romola and was stunned at how wonderful it was. It’s criminally underrated, and every charge levelled against it could be, with even greater justice, levelled against today’s most acclaimed novelists, such as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. If critics are going to hold DeLillo and Pynchon up as great artists, it doesn’t seem fair to me that they berate Eliot for a few minor flaws.

As historical fiction, I’ll take Romola any day over Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, or Against the Day, and I say that as a Pynchon fan. I greatly admire the man. But Pynchon can’t hold a candle to Eliot as a thinker or as a creator of character. And why is it that when Eliot saturates her canvas with her enormous erudition, everyone leaps on it as this enormous flaw, yet Pynchon and DeLillo do the exact same thing in every novel they’ve ever written without being taken to task for it. It seems to me that Eliot is held to a standard of perfection that
virtually none of today’s most acclaimed novelists could ever meet.

By: “She is in love with life”: Winifred Holtby’s Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir » Novel Readings - Notes on Literature and Criticism

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 00:04:14 +0000

[...] of expression. It marked the end of her apprenticeship to tradition.” (Another exhibit for our case that failure is necessary to [...]

By: PaulOnBooks

PaulOnBooks — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 12:41:59 +0000

Beautifully written and erudite defence of the author’s lapses and excesses (and successes) but Romola will remain one of the few books I was unable to finish and to which I will never return.

By: The OED and Me: On Choosing Your Words | Something More

The OED and Me: On Choosing Your Words | Something More — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 23:53:26 +0000

[...] country, not the 21st Century in costume. That’s a tricky balance for a writer to strike, as Rohan’s recent essay on the failures of George Eliot’s Romola, a historical novel set in Italy, makes clear. [...]

By: Tony

Tony — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 12:32:16 +0000

It certainly is a book to appreciate and plough through in equal parts. I agree with what you said about ‘Felix Holt’ as well – it’s hard to call a book a success when the titular hero is made of cardboard…

Still, ’tis better to have given it a crack and failed heroically than to have played it safe and succeeded in a minor way

By: Rohan Maitzen

Rohan Maitzen — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 20:03:15 +0000

Thank you for your generous comment, Stephen. Those are certainly the qualities I look for in criticism and aspire to in my own.

By: Stephen Kennamer

Stephen Kennamer — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 17:25:03 +0000

This is what literary criticism should be. You can go down the list of what you want in a critical essay and check off every box–style, substance, and A. E. Housman’s most important quality, repression of self-will in the service of the text. Rohan Maitzen is the antidote to the Blooming, buzzing confusion that garners notoriety these days.

By: Book News: George Eliot’s Failure, Shakespeare Before the Globe | celebrities

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 14:35:06 +0000

[...] of, rather than a problem for, our standard of artistic greatness.” Rohan Maitzen on “Romola,” George Eliot’s biggest [...]

By: Sarah

Sarah — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 00:48:05 +0000

As mad Janeite, I’ll heroically desist from starting The Great Limitation Debate and say how thoroughly I loved the greater understanding of Eliot this gave me. It also made me very interested in “Romola”, yet I’m still struggling with the idea that to read it in its entirety would be wasting my time, since “that arm is wrongly put”. But if “its soul is right” perhaps it’s time to apply my own Browning-and-Eliot-derived philosophy of the “celebration of failure” to this novel, rather than just my own life. Maybe I should read “Romola” just to celebrate this example of the reach of a soul exceeding the artist’s grasp.
Also love the title of this. I would never have imagined something so awful could be in an Eliot novel!

By: Amateur Reader (Tom)

Amateur Reader (Tom) — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 21:59:59 +0000

Without getting into the semantics of peaks and valleys - because in a sense you are absolutely right, not 100% right only because of Homer - a number of great writers have had amazing runs at least. Maybe not their entire body of work, but some coherently meaningful chunk of it. Of course, whatever the books' flaws or limits, the Adam Bede through Silas Marner run is also impressive and coherent. What good news, a separate Silas Marner essay!

By: Rohan Maitzen

Rohan Maitzen — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 23:04:04 +0000

Tom, I had a bit in there originally on Silas Marner but I ended up editing it out, to keep the focus clearly on the larger-scale novels, but I agree (and said so there): another masterpiece. I plan to give it its own essay, before too much longer. As for the safe / unsafe provocation, well, the "consistent" makes a difference to the claim too, but the "if" is significant, and sincere. Is there a writer whose oeuvre is really consistent and thus lacks both peaks and valleys? I find myself thinking ... Trollope?

By: Amateur Reader (Tom)

Amateur Reader (Tom) — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 15:46:20 +0000

What a great defense of this novel. So I will just skip everything you say about Romola itself. Only one masterpiece? In another sense, one is a lot of masterpieces. And I notice that you sort of slide past the other perfect George Eliot novel, the little fairy tale. Silas Marner may provide a clue. Eliot trims pack the scope and scale of the first two novels and does achieve something like perfection. Rather than thinking "Ah, this is how I should write novels, this works well" she abandons that direction and turns to big, messy, ambitious subjects and forms. If consistent “mastery” requires playing it safe - a significant "if"! I can think of some unsafe masters.