Scenes of Clerical Life

Before Middlemarch, before anyone had guessed that George Eliot was a woman named Mary Ann Evans, there were these three stories from one shabby English parish. A curate nobody admires goes on preaching while his wife quietly works herself to death keeping his house. A caustic old vicar, remembered by his flock for his sour tongue and the sugar-plums in his pocket, is revealed to have spent his youth inside one long unbearable love. A lawyer's wife drinks because her husband beats her, and the consumptive preacher the whole town despises is the only person who will not look away. Eliot stops the story to ask something of you directly: learn to see the poetry and the pathos in a soul that looks out through dull grey eyes. Dickens read the first two and wrote at once to the unknown author, certain the hand was a woman's. It is the sound of a great novelist discovering, in a country parish, that ordinary suffering is the only subject she will ever need.