It is strange to think that some of the most unforgettable citizens of early 19th century England never really existed. At least in the conventional sense. The hapless linen weaver Silas Marner; the lovesick carpenter Adam Bede, whose sweetheart got pregnant by another man; Dorothea Brooke, the passionate and idealistic heiress ignored by her studious husband, the Rev. Mr. Edward Causabon; Tom and Maggie Tulliver, the brother and sister who quarreled over an old mill and were re-united in death during a flood—all of them were imagined by the great novelist George Eliot. But then Eliot himself never existed either, in the conventional sense.
As most high school graduates learned, if they were paying attention, the novels ascribed to the non-existent Mr. Eliot were actually written by a middle-aged woman with the rather disappointing name of Mary Ann Evans.
A very remarkable woman, it is now universally acknowledged: Virginia Woolf considered Evans/Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch, to be one of the few English novels written for grownups; and TIME magazine ranked it among the 10 greatest books of all time.
So who was this woman, this Mary Ann Evans, and what had happened to her in the long decades before she could no longer resist putting her vivid imaginings down on paper and setting them before the public—under someone else’s name? It was these questions, more than her much-studied and argued-over novels, that obsessed Ruby Redinger, and led the Baldwin-Wallace College English professor to spend 15 years of her own life writing a single book. When George Eliot: The Emergent Self, was published in 1975 by Alfred Knopf (distributed by Random House), it was widely reviewed. Some critics dismissed it as “Women’s Lib” claptrap (this was, remember, the 1970s). But others, like Thomas Pinney, writing in the journal Nineteenth-Century Fiction, recognized it for what it was: “an account of the process whereby Mary Ann Evans, a passionate, egotistic, anxious, and frustrated person incapable of sustained creative effort, became George Eliot the successful author.”
It was a painful love affair, Redinger showed, as were the lessons learned from it that brought Evans face to face with her passionate nature and illuminated “the conflict between the instinctive and the reflective” impulse, said Knopf, and taught her to revere “the truth of feeling.”
Redinger found overlooked clues in two lesser, generally ignored works by the author, the brief Brother and Sister sonnet sequence and the short story “The Lifted Veil.” Redinger traces Evans’s life and growth from a naïve and conventionally raised country girl “with a conservative, indecisive father, a semi-invalid yet dominating mother” and a brother, Isaac, who scorned Mary Ann’s vivid imagination and put down her ideas, through her affair and disastrous marriage to her final emergence as “a woman prepared to accept scandal as the price of a generous emotional life.” The unhappy girl who distrusted novels as “egotistical and delusional” exercises would, by confronting her demons, become a great novelist whose works are “permeated by a rare grandeur of mind and magnanimity of soul.”
In presenting Redinger with the 1977 Cleveland Arts Prize, the Committee also recognized her own semi-autobiographical novel, The Golden Net (Crown Publishers, 1948), a portrait of campus life at a mid-western college. Its heroine is a young English teacher who is more concerned about the people in her life than the characters in the books, and is stung to realize that one female student she has envied for her efficiency (“because she managed her life without personal ties”) sees her as “remote, independent, and aloof.”
After Redinger, who also won the Strosacker Award for Excellence in Teaching, retired in 1980 after almost 30 years on the faculty of Baldwin-Wallace College (B-W), an annual prize was established in her name. Awarded to the graduating senior in English with the highest grade point average in English courses taken at B-W, the Ruby V. Redinger Prize has been claimed, fittingly, by a series of remarkable young women.
—Dennis Dooley