Read Sophie and the Sibyl for Free Online

for generations of writers and readers still unborn. The Sibyl’s extraordinary manifesto in defence of realism, which appears in the famous Chapter 17 of Adam Bede , that chapter ‘in which the story pauses a little’, seems to me to be exceedingly revealing. She equates realism not only with accuracy, but honesty. Her fiction mirrors a world without perfection. Her characters speak and act, as we do, not as heroes in ideal worlds. They make alarming mistakes, with evil, lasting consequences. She creates figures overflowing with human flaws, forgiven at the last by their author, given her complete understanding of all their circumstances, and her benign compassion. Her much quoted epigram, ‘Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult,’ gives me pause. Why should the truth be difficult to write or to speak? The truth is often cruel and unforgiving, unless we cloak reality in a sentimental humanitarian patina, which the Sibyl certainly seemed inclined to do. The truth is only difficult when it results in exposure, humiliation and pain, and neither the author nor her characters have the guts to face it.
    She uses the famous Chapter 17 to deliver a lecture on ‘the secret of deep human sympathy’, in which I, for one, have never believed. And were that all the Sibyl had to offer I might never have returned to her books. But she presents her readers with other lavish gifts, her garnered knowledge and her massive, cunning intelligence; she never abandoned her jolly taste for melodrama, and we love her for it. Yet the Sibyl insisted on maintaining genteel fictions in her life that she seldom countenanced in her novels. She was never really Mrs. Lewes; that respectable identity, as the old Countess well knew, was a sham. She answered to a multitude of names, Mary Ann Evans, Marian Evans Lewes, Polly, Mutter, Madonna, and she wrote under a masculine pseudonym, her most famous name of all. And the one that lasted. No one describes Charlotte Brontë as Currer Bell, unless they are constructing a literary argument in a learned journal. The Sibyl turned out to be a master of pretence. Her fiction championed the honesty she preached, but never practised.
    Realism of course, as a literary mode, has largely degenerated into tired commercial cliché, produced by lazy writers out to make a fast buck and consumed by readers in airports. That high moral purpose, championed by the Sibyl in 1859, doesn’t cut much ice now. And we are swamped by what she so memorably described as ‘silly novels by lady novelists’. The tendency to discipline and punish errant or ignorant characters lasted all through her writing life, and therein she was no different from her contemporaries. But the sexual sins which resulted in grisly deaths for most of the fictitious ladies in male masterpieces – Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, Tess of the D’Urbervilles – I could go on and on – were by and large excused by the Sibyl, indeed often accommodated and forgiven. Tessa, the chubby little contadina in Romola , never knows that she wasn’t really married to Tito Melema, and the Sibyl’s portrait of Florence in the 1490s is riddled with coded references to sodomy, for which the city appears to have been famous. Take another careful look at Nello the Barber and his coterie, and there you will find the Sibyl’s queer community. Adultery, no, thou shalt not die for adultery, not in her novels. But you will be punished mercilessly for greed, misplaced ambition, hypocrisy, domestic cruelty, and moral betrayal. I am deeply impressed by the sins she refused to forgive. Grandcourt gets away with keeping a mistress and fathering four illegitimate children, but his creator refuses to condone his failure to marry Lydia Glasher when at last he could have done so. The discarded mistress turns all her thwarted rage on the new wife, Gwendolen. And the latter deserves all she gets, because she married him knowing that his wealth was infected