George Eliot: ‘So much happiness’

Abstract

This chapter will show that, for Eliot, happiness was connected to thinking, truthfulness, and seeing the world clearly—but also that her work plays out concerns about the political significance of a form of happiness so much grounded in individual perception. The chapter begins by thinking about Eliot’s journals and letters from her time in the Scilly Isles, Ilfracombe, and Tenby with G. H. Lewes, and examines a form of happiness linked to the study of natural history. It then traces how this form of happiness is explored further in Adam Bede, thinking about this text in relation to Eliot’s understanding of religion, and her reading of Cowper and Comte. A section on Middlemarch considers tensions between individual and communal happiness in relation to political economy, before the final section shows how Eliot saw writing itself as entwined with happiness, something evident in her descriptions of Autumn, her favourite season.