George Elliot

I am getting into the habit of reading biographies of people whose books I used to read. Something I did not used to do; must be advancing years, desperate to find out how they did it before it is too late. But I have learned that most famous authors are fairly odd coves, with the exception of Trollope who seems to have been fairly normal.

So today's read was Brenda Maddox on George Elliot, the third biography of hers that I have read (ask for Maddox in the other place). An easy, short read which, as I have come to expect from Brenda, is much more concerned to tell one about George's love life than her literary life. But a handy summary which might both prompt and help along a re-read of the proper biography by Gordon Haight (bought some years ago in a famous Whitehaven bookshop. Notable, inter alia, for its collection of Russian and Polish titles and as being a good source for materials about the aboriginal language of the Cumbrians).

Brenda, in this book, goes in for snappy plot summaries, which sometimes rather jar, of the books in the oeuvre. But she points out that the tragic brother and sister relationship in the Mill on the Floss was drawn, in some part, from her relationship with her own brother. That like Hardy, and with marriage problems of her own, she was very alive to the terrible damage done by the unforgiving rules on marriage in her day. Two straightforward points which I had previously overlooked.

I also got to wondering about the merits of having a professional biographer write a biography of a literary person rather than a literary academic. Or of having a professional biographer write a biography of a historical person rather than a historian. I suppose there are pros and cons. The professional writer will be able to soak up a good wadge of secondary sources and churn out a digestible summary which will reach lots of people. But will perhaps be open to error and be unlikely to add anything much that is new. Perhaps be too keen to wrap up what was really a messy business into a nice neat story, nicely livened up with more or less invented details from the private life of the subject. Perhaps be a bit too shallow for the more discerning reader. But I think I need my breakfast and carp; I do read Brenda and do find her interesting.

PS: over breakfast I read (in yesterday's Guardian, naturally) about a Chechen who was shot dead by the police in the course of a long interview in his flat in Orlando, Florida. It may well be that the Chechen had a murky background and had criminal if not worse tendencies, but to find it necessary to shoot him dead ( a shooting which involved seven bullets) in the course of an interview strikes me as incompetence if not worse. Our own record on police shootings is not that clever, the reports of the Duggan shooting in the same number of the Guardian notwithstanding, but I do not recall one quite like this.