“Middlemarch” (post 10) by George Eliot (post 21): Complete quotation of the novel's joke on authorship as being “always done by somebody else”

Why shouldn’t the following passage from the novel’s Finale be taken at face value, as nothing more than a humorous way to report what eventually happened to these two characters?

“All who have cared for Fred Vincy and Mary Garth will like to know that these two made no such failure, but achieved a solid mutual happiness. Fred surprised his neighbors in various ways. He became rather distinguished in his side of the county as a theoretic and practical farmer, and produced a work on the ‘Cultivation of Green Crops and the Economy of Cattle-Feeding’ which won him congratulations at agricultural meetings. In Middlemarch admiration was more reserved: most persons there were inclined to believe that the merit of Fred’s authorship was due to his wife, since they had never expected Fred Vincy to write on turnips and mangel-wurzel.

“But when Mary wrote a little book for her boys, called ‘Stories of Great Men, taken from Plutarch,’ and had it printed and published by Gripp & Co., Middlemarch, every one in the town was willing to give the credit of this work to Fred, observing that he had been to the University, ‘where the ancients were studied,’ and might have been a clergyman if he had chosen.

“In this way it was made clear that Middlemarch had never been deceived, and that there was no need to praise anybody for writing a book, since it was always done by somebody else” (1, p. 779).

Comment

First, for fiction writers, authorship and the creative process is one of the most serious things in their life. Second, as documented in past posts, George Eliot acknowledged having “double consciousness,” which means she had the subjective experience of having more than one thinker in her mind. Therefore, the issue as to which of these thinkers should get the praise and credit for her writing, was, to her, an unresolved puzzle and no joking matter.

1. George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans]. Middlemarch [A Study of Provincial Life] [1872]. Edited with Notes by David Carroll. With an Introduction by David Russell. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019.

Added April 16: By the time Middlemarch was published, readers felt that they were not to be deceived by the pseudonym, “George Eliot,” and they gave credit for authorship to Mary Ann Evans. But the author may have kept using “George Eliot” on her books, because that was the collective name for her writing personalities, and her Mary Ann Evans personality had relatively little to do with it.