Hardy, Barbara. The Novels of George Eliot. London: Athlone Press, 1963. Hardy’s splendid critical work remains the best introduction to Eliot’s fiction. Despite Eliot's title for this story, Gilfil is not our primary interest. Apart from his grief at the death of his wife, Caterina, only six months after their marriage – the fact is revealed in the opening chapter – Gilfil is not a complex character demanding our attention. He loves Caterina, which is in contrast to Wybrow’s ill-usage of her. It is Caterina’s “marble tablet, with a Latin inscription in memory of her”, and represented by the vague memories of the oldest town residents, which is the ‘wood-ash’ we are to sift...... The second work in Scenes of Clerical Life is titled "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story" and concerns the life of a clergyman named Maynard Gilfil. We are introduced to Mr Gilfil in his capacity as the vicar of Shepperton, 'thirty years ago' (presumably the late 1820s) but the central part of the story begins in June 1788 and concerns his youth, his experiences as chaplain at Cheverel Manor and his love for Caterina Sarti. Caterina, known to the family as 'Tina', is an Italian orphan and the ward of Sir Christopher and Lady Cheverel, who took her into their care following the death of her father. In 1788 she is companion to Lady Cheverel and a talented amateur singer. [21] Arbury Hall, where Eliot's father was estate manager, and the model for Cheverel Manor [22]

Eliot, George (October 1856). "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists". Westminster Review. No.66. pp.442–61. Archived from the original on 21 September 2008. PDF The culmination is reached in “Janet’s Repentance.” By this time your heart has been pummeled by the first two “scenes,” and you are ready for a happy ending. But Eliot, true to form, has created a real life heroine and hero. They struggle with their own “sins” and their purgatory is harrowing, but this final installment ends with a beautiful triumph of the soul. If stable character is based upon a coherent view of the world, then the clergyman protagonists of Scenes of Clerical Life, living in English provincial society during the first half of the nineteenth century, are at risk. They all embody radical discontinuities in communities which are themselves seriously divided. These gaps are ultimately bridged not by religious faith in any orthodox sense but by faith redirected to certain human continuities. The cost, however, is high: new life only emerges from pain, suffering, and death. That final discontinuity has to be experienced in each case before coherence in character and community can be achieved. These are George Eliot's most theological stories, engaged as they are in questioning, displacing, and then recovering the language of biblical hermeneutics for her own humanistic purposes. Simply beautiful stories in a prose style that is both dense and poetic but also extremely readable.a b Ward, A. W., and Waller, A. R., eds. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes. New York: Putnam, 1907–21

Each of the three stories that make up the book, 'Amos Barton', 'Mr Gilfil's Love-Story', and 'Janet's Repentance', are notable for their psychological penetration, and together they treat of love, grief and domestic violence. Mrs. Higgins, who was an elderly widow, 'well left', reflected with complacency that Mrs. Parrot's observation was no more than just, and that Mrs. Jennings very likely belonged to a family which had had no funerals to speak of."

Eliot uses her characteristic empathy to look behind the “scenes of clerical life” portrayed in this volume. She tells three stories, connected in that they take place in and around the fictional English town of Milby and each concerns a certain Anglican clergyman whose religious views are under criticism. Even if one knows nothing of the author it is easy to suspect post finishing the book that this is an autobiographical tale, and it mainly at heart is a very deeply loving daughter's heartbreaking tribute to her very beautiful and universally loved mother who was also a very good person, along with the outward story that is a factual exoneration of her father of a false blame and suspicion harboured by silly neighbours of the parish who could not imagine a beautiful woman taking an extensive stay with a family of a man of cloth even if his own wife was beautiful, much loved by all including himself, and very much present on premises. Local lawyer Robert Dempster opposes Tryan and his kind of religion. Dempster hatches an anti-Tryan plan at the Red Lion pub, where he drinks steadily and heavily every night. Janet Dempster, Robert’s wife, supports her husband in his crusade until she meets Tryan one day. When they exchange glances, Janet recognizes the soul of a fellow sufferer. This is not technically a novel, but a collection of three stories that are all centered around the clergy in the same area of Milby and Shepperton, England. We meet, and are told the stories of, three separate clergyman who serve the district at separate times. The emotions, I have observed, are but slightly influenced by arithmetical considerations: the mother, when her sweet lisping little ones have all been taken from her one after another, and she is hanging over her last dead babe, finds small consolation in the fact that the tiny dimpled corpse is but one of a necessary average, and that a thousand other babes brought into the world at the same time are doing well, and are likely to live; and if you stood beside that mother—if you knew her pang and shared it—it is probable you would be equally unable to see a ground of complacency in statistics.

a b c Litvinoff, Adrian (11 June 2008). "George Eliot: Review of Scenes of Clerical Life" . Retrieved 11 November 2008. During the period that George Eliot depicts in Scenes of Clerical Life, religion in England was undergoing significant changes. While Dissenting (Nonconformist) Churches had been established as early as the Church of England itself, the emergence of Methodism in 1739 presented particular challenges to the Established Church. Evangelicalism, at first confined to the Dissenting Churches, soon found adherents within the Church of England itself. Meanwhile, at the other end of the religious spectrum, the Oxford Movement was seeking to emphasise the Church of England's identity as a catholic and apostolic Church, reassessing its relationship to Roman Catholicism. Thus in the early 19th century Midlands that George Eliot would later depict, various religious ideas can be identified: the tension between the Established and the Dissenting Churches, and the differing strands within Anglicanism itself, between the Low church, the High church and the Broad church. [19] Plot summary [ edit ] "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton" [ edit ] His wife wanted to discuss caste system of India, and was nonplussed when pointed out that her not requiring her sons or husband to help her in the kitchen but requiring or expecting any woman around irrespective of age, including any casual visitor or invited guests or new acquaintances, was caste system.

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And, finally, the crowning glory is Janet’s Repentance, a story of reclamation and salvation and hope. This one brought me to tears, for I could not fail to feel Janet’s desperation and Mr. Tryan’s martyrdom at the hands of a society that purposely failed to appreciate or understand him. There is a sweetness and a sense of feeling that permeates this story that reminded me of why I loved The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch so much. There is moral instruction, without preaching, and there is example that is uplifting and yet ever human. But it is with men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow, which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding into plenteous beauty… Eliot, George (1998). Scenes of Clerical Life. Jennifer Gribble. New York: Penguin. ISBN 9780140436389. Reverend Edgar Tryan – the recently appointed minister at the chapel of ease at Paddiford Common. He is young, but in poor health. Theologically, he is an evangelical. He explains to Janet Dempster that he entered the Church as a result of deep grief and remorse following the death of Lucy, a young woman whom he enticed to leave her home and then abandoned.

Act II, Scene 1 — various scenes: 1) between the Captain and his fiancée; 2) between Tina and the Captain; 3) between Tina, the fiancée, the Captain and Gilfil, out of which is explained their relationships to each other, Tina's jealousy, the fiancée's jealousy, the truth of the captain's situation, everyone's worsening health, Tina's rudeness, the challenge of her explanation from the Lord, her decision to leave him for Gilfil, Gilfil's suffering and jealousy, etc. All of this should take place in the park. Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story” is also sad, but is more high romance than tragedy, full of chivalry and unselfish passion. Hertz, Neil. George Eliot’s Pulse. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Hertz offers a brilliant reading of the ways that Eliot uses particular narrative techniques to develop specific themes.Mr and Mrs Crewe – Mr Crewe is the long-established curate of Milby. Initially somewhat ridiculed by his parishioners, who laugh amongst themselves at his brown wig and his odd speaking voice, he gains support as the anti-Tryanite campaign mobilises. Mrs Crewe is old and deaf, and a great friend of Janet Dempster's. She pretends not to notice Janet's drinking problem. Gray, Donald. 'George Eliot and her publishers' in ed. Levine, George. The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. pp. 186–187. [2] Renaming herself "Marian" in private life and adopting the penname "George Eliot," she began her impressive fiction career, including: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), and Middlemarch (1871). Themes included her humanist vision and strong heroines. Her poem, "O May I Join the Choir Invisible" expressed her views about non supernatural immortality: "O may I join the choir invisible/ Of those immortal dead who live again/ In minds made better by their presence. . ." D. 1880.