“Middlemarch” (post 9) by George Eliot (post 20): “no need to praise anybody for writing a book, since it was always done by somebody else”

In the Finale at the end of this novel, there is a joke that only a superficial reading will take at face value. It is the author’s insight into the multiple-personality aspect of her creative process. “Somebody else” refers to the author’s alternate personalities:

“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).

The very last line of the novel ends as follows: “…the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts…owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs” (1, p. 785).

As I have discussed in many past posts, many alternate personalities are nameless. (Search “nameless,” “namelessness,” “pseudonyms.”)

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.

December 19, 2015

Mary Anne Evans had at least Nine Pseudonyms: George Eliot (post 4), Mary Ann, Marianne, Marian, Pollian, Clematis, Deutera, Minie, and Polly. Why?

George Eliot’s original name was Mary Anne Evans; her middle name ended with an “e” (1, p. 22).

In addition to George Eliot, she had the following nicknames or pseudonyms:

“Mary Ann, Marianne, or Marian Evans, Pollian (a pun on Apollyon, the Angel of Destruction), Clematis (Mental Beauty), Deutera, Minie, Polly…” (2, p. 452).

These nine nicknames or pseudonyms are fewer than Ernest Hemingway’s twenty-two (see past post), but they are more than enough to put to rest the usual rationalizations for why she persisted in using “George Eliot” long after everyone knew who she was. Evidently, she had more than one "I" or sense of identity, which is the essence of multiple personality.

Indeed, her multiple personality (aka dissociative identity) is well known—although not in those terms—to scholars and biographers. For example, in Fredrick R. Karl’s George Eliot: Voice of a Century (3), the biography’s index includes the following two subheadings under Eliot, George (Mary Anne Evans): “divided nature (dualism)” and “secret self of.”

You might think that mere differences in spelling—Mary Anne, Mary Ann, Marianne, Marian—don’t count. But in multiple personality, that is common:

“…Elizabeth Jane Doe might well have alter personalities with the first names of Elizabeth, Lizzy, Lizzie, Liz, Betsie, Beth, Bets, Jane, Janie, Lizzy-Jane, and so on” (4, p. 116).

1. Rosemarie Bodenheimer. “A woman of many names,” pp. 20-37 in George Levine (editor) The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

2. Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Second Edition. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979/2000.

3. Frederick R. Karl. George Eliot: Voice of a Century. New York, WW Norton, 1995.

4. Frank W. Putnam. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.