ABSTRACT
Deceptively simplistic as this account of the beginning of George Eliot’s career as a writer of fiction might appear to be if we remember that it came from a woman who was already, in 1857, a well-respected translator, editor and literary critic, it does, nonetheless, convey something about the nature of her early works that was to make her, within a few years, one of Britain’s most popular and most respected novelists. It is the sense of spontaneity, the feeling of immediacy and directness in the observation and rendering of ordinary, day-today events in the lives of ‘commonplace people’ (p. 81) that first attracts the attention of the reader of the three stories which form George Eliot’s first volume of fiction – Scenes of Clerical Life. There is, indeed, nothing contrived about the atmosphere of familiarity that the stories generate: almost all of the major characters, as well as the locations in which their stories are played out, are, in fact, drawn either from the author’s own recollections of her Warwickshire childhood (see Life and contexts, pp. 2-3), or from the living memory of the community in which she grew up. Thus, to offer but a few examples, the eponymous hero of the first story in the collection, Amos Barton, is a portrait of John Gwyther, the curate of the Evanses’ home parish of Chilvers Coton in the 1830s; the Cheverels of Cheverel Manor, in ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’, are based on the family of Robert Evans’s employers, the Newdigates of Arbury; the town
of Milby, the setting of the last of the stories, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, is a thinly disguised picture of the market town of Nuneaton, just a few miles north-east of the Evans family home.
