ABSTRACT
The title of this paper works both with the literal sense of 'what George Eliot saw' (at its most literal, detailed itineraries of her travels in Continental Europe), and with the more colloquial and analytic sense of 'what she saw in Europe': what she made of it, what it meant to her. Readers of her journals, from Henry James on, have taken the view that these journals are bland, offering not much more than lists of where she went and what, in the literal sense, she saw. Thus James reviewing George Eliot's Life as related in her letters and journals, compiled by her widower John Cross:
James, always a creative reader of George Eliot, tacitly requires more conspicuous writerliness than he finds in the selections from her journals available to him. He apparently regrets that the journals are not the polished kind of travel-writing represented by his own Transatlantic Sketches (1875), which dwell on the alterity of the experience of travel, contrasting 'abroad' where imaginative and emotional energies are stimulated, with the
authenticity of 'home', typified by the mundane and routine, at once stable and constraining.2 Read complete, George Eliot's travel journals, for all that they are 'private' writing, not prepared for publication, turn out to be texts as self-conscious as James's own. Their piecemeal publication has distracted attention from the craft of their construction.
