Scenes of Clerical Life by George Eliot

I count George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss as one of my all-time favorites, so I was eager to start Scenes of Clerical Life as my Spin #38 pick for Classics Club Challenge. I was also fortunate to find the Librivox Recording by Bruce Pirie (available in Podcast formats too) and it was so good — highly recommended!

Scenes of Clerical Life has 3 stories, each one progressively longer and more impactful.

Amos Barton was only mildly interesting at first, as Eliot showed us the economics of life for a poor Parson. But then the story shifted into themes of local human politics — which, really, are the same everywhere — and it was suddenly very engrossing.

Then, Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story, was so deeply moving. We can never tell from a person’s outer appearance what trials and sorrows that they have suffered privately, and so the story was a powerful reminder to not judge too quickly and to have more empathy.

And finally, Janet’s Repentance, which was so painful but also so beautiful. It reminded me of the main reasons I like Eliot’s work – dripping with irony and keen observations of people, and flawed characters attempting to do better with their lot in life. I also cannot recall any other classic work in which domestic violence has been portrayed so openly but also so sensitively.

There’s so much brilliant writing in here, for all that it was Eliot’s debut work as author. There were paras upon paras that I was highlighting and bookmarking, and I will leave these in as notes below.

But now she was gone … Spring would come, and she would not be there; summer, and she would not be there; and he would never have her again with him by the fireside in the long evenings. The seasons all seemed irksome to his thoughts; and how dreary the sunshiny days that would be sure to come! She was gone from him; and he could never show her his love any more, never make up for omissions in the past by filling future days with tenderness.

Poor grey-haired woman! Was it for this you suffered a mother’s pangs in your lone widowhood five-and-thirty years ago? Was it for this you kept the little worn morocco shoes Janet had first run in, and kissed them day by day when she was away from you, a tall girl at school? Was it for this you looked proudly at her when she came back to you in her rich pale beauty, like a tall white arum that has just unfolded its grand pure curves to the sun?

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; and the trivial erring life which we visit with our harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb is withered.