International Women’s Day on 8th March is an opportunity to celebrate women who are an inspiration.
One of the women who inspired me many years ago was author George Eliot whose real name was Marianne Evans. Why does she inspire me?
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Top of my list is the sentence she wrote which is probably my second favourite quote of all time. I am still shocked by its impact, and its modernity, even though it was published in 1871. “We are all of us so well wadded with stupidity that we cannot hear the grass grow.”
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Other reasons for admiring her include the fact that she took a man’s name in order to get her books published. There was no messing about, she went straight for a “proper” man’s name. I find this inspirational because sometimes you have to do what you have to do to get your voice out there. By contrast the Bronte sisters who were published at roughly the same time chose names that were ambiguous: Ellis Bell (Emily – Wuthering Heights), Currer Bell (Charlotte – Jane Eyre) and Acton Bell (Anne – The Tenant of Wildfell Hall).
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George Eliot was cleverer than she was attractive. Her man (George Lewes) was the other way round: very attractive and a little less endowed in the brain department. Did she hide her intelligence in conversations? Did she worry every time he looked at another woman? Takes a lot of confidence to be comfortable with yourself when your partner is a lot more attractive.
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She lived with him without marrying him. This was at the height of Victorian England. It can’t have been a casual decision. (To be fair she ended up marrying somebody else.)
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She wrote some great books. Middlemarch is long but one of my favourites. It features – among other themes – dried up husband versus young man, pretty silly capricious woman versus intelligent woman. All very relevant today, and I find her a more sympathetic author than Dickens. “The Mill on the Floss” and “Adam Bede” are slighter books and gave me a new appreciation of nature when I read it.
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George Eliot was definitely a pioneering woman, but I think the quote about our ability to hear the grass grow if only we could lose the wadding of stupidity is an inspiration to be able to do anything if we let go of our preconceived ideas.