ABSTRACT
John Cross’s Life of George Eliot appeared two years after the ‘Eminent Women’ biography George Eliot by Mathilde Blind (1883). Blind referenced articles of 1881–82 that had claimed intimate knowledge of Eliot including those by Edith Simcox, Frederick Myers and Charles Kegan Paul. The design of Cross’s Life allowed him present Eliot in the first person but his method drew attention to withheld evidence and isolated Eliot from her correspondents. Chapter 7 first explores George Eliot’s views on life writing and considers how Blind and Cross used Eliot’s own commentaries to replace her life within periodical culture and to justify their auto/biographical approaches. In the context of the recovery narrative evident in other life writing of the period, Cross’s Life is then discussed as a riposte to other claimants on Eliot’s biography. The chapter reviews Cross’s use of Eliot’s own words and the production of a generic hybrid auto/biography in letters. In parallel with Elizabeth Gaskell’s recuperation of Charlotte Brontë, Cross represents Eliot’s domestic role using his own family who were retrospectively cultivated into Eliot’s life and Life.
