I’ve long been a fan of literary priests, like Septimus Harding, the unlucky precentor of Barchester Cathedral; or William Collins, the sycophantic suitor of Elizabeth Bennet; or Father Brown, the ama teur detective with a deep insight into the psychology of sin. Then there’s The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos, and the Gilead novels by Marilynne Robinson, and the whisky priest of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Whether pious and pompous, or saintly and sombre, I’m pleased each time a member of the clergy appears in the novel I’m reading.
I’m also a lover of George Eliot. When asked to name my favourite English novel, I always answer Middlemarch. But I admire the rest of her novels, too: from the touching sibling saga of The Mill on the Floss to the grand ambition of Daniel Deronda. I’ve also worked my way through most of her essays, not to mention the translations of German religious thinkers. So why did it take me so long to read Eliot’s first work of fiction, the three novella-length stories collected in Scenes of Clerical Life?
To be honest, I worried it would be boring. Most blurbs describe Scenes as a portrait of various Anglican vicars in a Midlands town during the late Georgian era, as they struggle with the tension between the Established and Dissenting churches. I feared the book was a formal exercise, with Eliot paying her literary dues via some earnest stories about provincial priests. The modest title, the narrow scope, the worthy subject matter: together they gave the impression of a trial run, in the same way that the graduate of a modern creative writing course might publ
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Subscribe now or Sign inI’ve long been a fan of literary priests, like Septimus Harding, the unlucky precentor of Barchester Cathedral; or William Collins, the sycophantic suitor of Elizabeth Bennet; or Father Brown, the ama teur detective with a deep insight into the psychology of sin. Then there’s The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos, and the Gilead novels by Marilynne Robinson, and the whisky priest of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Whether pious and pompous, or saintly and sombre, I’m pleased each time a member of the clergy appears in the novel I’m reading.
I’m also a lover of George Eliot. When asked to name my favourite English novel, I always answer Middlemarch. But I admire the rest of her novels, too: from the touching sibling saga of The Mill on the Floss to the grand ambition of Daniel Deronda. I’ve also worked my way through most of her essays, not to mention the translations of German religious thinkers. So why did it take me so long to read Eliot’s first work of fiction, the three novella-length stories collected in Scenes of Clerical Life? To be honest, I worried it would be boring. Most blurbs describe Scenes as a portrait of various Anglican vicars in a Midlands town during the late Georgian era, as they struggle with the tension between the Established and Dissenting churches. I feared the book was a formal exercise, with Eliot paying her literary dues via some earnest stories about provincial priests. The modest title, the narrow scope, the worthy subject matter: together they gave the impression of a trial run, in the same way that the graduate of a modern creative writing course might publish some sterile stories before embarking on a novel. But three years ago I sat down with a copy. Within a few pages I realized how badly I had misjudged the book. Yes, Scenes of Clerical Life is set around the imaginary town of Milby, with the church politics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries providing the social context. However, none of these stories could be called apprentice work, because the mature author was evident from Eliot’s earliest efforts. And the third story in the collection, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, was surely her first fictional masterpiece. Mary Ann Evans came to fiction late. When she started writing stories, she was already known for her regular contributions to the Westminster Review, and had recently published a long essay attacking the sentimental narratives of contemporary authors, entitled ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’. She was also known for a scandalous relationship: openly living with the writer George Henry Lewes, even though he was married to someone else. Then there was her reputation for freethinking, having translated Ludwig Feuerbach’s influential critique of Christianity and condemned the Evangelical movement in her writing. All this helps to explain why she published her first stories anonymously. It was Lewes who encouraged his partner to begin writing fiction, hoping it would earn some extra money. He also submitted her stories to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and they were printed over the course of 1857. From the start, the critical response was positive, mixed with curiosity about the author’s identity. Many assumed he must be a parson drawing on personal experience; it was Dickens, writing to praise the anonymous author, who guessed that she might be a woman. The following year the three stories were published in a new edition under her masculine nom de plume. Early critics also commented on Eliot’s faithfulness to experience. This can be seen in the first of her stories, ‘The Sad History of the Reverend Amos Barton’. Its priest is an ageing and impoverished man, much troubled by questions of doctrine. Eliot calls him ‘the quintessential abstract of mediocrity’, yet the reader comes to feel a deep sympathy for this underwhelming figure over the course of the story. However, the narrator opens with the amused, teasing tone that she would perfect in Middlemarch: she mentions another priest called Mr Gilfil, ‘who smoked very long pipes and preached very short sermons’, as well as a doctor called Mr Pilgrim, who gives ‘late dinners with enigmatic side dishes and poisonous port’. At times she also writes with playful abandon:Reader! Did you ever taste such a cup of tea as Miss Gibbs is this moment handing to Mr Pilgrim? Do you know the dulcet strength, the animating blandness of tea sufficiently blended with farmhouse cream? No, most likely you are a miserable town-bred reader . . . unacquainted with the highest possibilities of tea.
The guests at the tea party have gathered to discuss their priest. Amos Barton is already unpopular with his parishioners, his attempts to keep up appearances and tend to his flock’s souls often resulting in humiliation. The situation grows worse when a countess comes to stay at the rectory and the locals presume their priest must be having an affair. She leaves only after Barton’s wife falls ill; when his wife dies, the parishioners finally soften, although he is plunged into grief and has to leave for good. If the story has a flaw, it’s that Eliot’s witty narrator struggles to change register. She’s so entertained by human folly that the emotional impact of Barton’s tragedy is blunted. Perhaps Eliot recognized this mistake, because her second attempt at fiction raises the emotional stakes. In ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’, Eliot introduces the reader to another unassuming priest, before travelling back to the late eighteenth century, when he was a chaplain attached to the aristocratic Cheverel family. A few years earlier, the family had adopted an Italian orphan named Tina, whom they hope will one day marry their chaplain. However, Tina has fallen in love with the dashing army officer who is heir to the estate, even though her adoptive parents want the young man to marry the daughter of a family friend. The resulting story involves a sudden death, a suspicious knife, a possible suicide and a late-night flight. When compared with Eliot’s subsequent novels, this material seems unwieldy, the aristocratic set ting and operatic emotions better suited to a novel by Dickens or Balzac. But, in the final pages of the story, Eliot retreats from Gothic melodrama by returning to the older priest, describing how his heart break is disguised behind a bluff exterior: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.
In this way, the acute intelligence turns into a tool not of comedy but of compassion. With the third story in the collection, Eliot worked out how to blend her witty and wistful narrative voices. ‘Janet’s Repentance’ introduces the reader to a young, idealistic priest named Edgar Tryan, appointed to the chapel of ease in the market town of Milby. The town is divided over their new priest’s Evangelical beliefs, with opposition led by a hard-drinking lawyer named Robert Dempster. The lawyer is often abusive towards his wife Janet, who also begins drinking in secret, until her husband throws her out of the house. In desperation, she turns to Tryan, who encourages her sobriety and her return to faith. The material here is no less dramatic – abuse, addiction and an unexpected coach accident, too – yet the account never seems manipulative. Instead, the reader has the sense that Eliot is describing honestly the events taking place behind the formal façade of Victorian life, writing not to sensationalize but to normalize. ‘Janet’s Repentance’ shows Eliot’s increasing abilities as a writer, as well as a growing distance from the incidents of her own past. Scenes drew on the author’s childhood in Warwickshire, with ‘Amos Barton’ and ‘Janet’s Repentance’ both inspired by local events. As a young woman, Eliot moved from the broad-church Anglicanism of her family to the severe Evangelicalism of a local priest, before abandoning her faith at the age of 22 and refusing to attend church anymore. This rejection was worked out in her non-fiction, so that by the time she turned to novels, she could reimagine her past without bitterness or blame. ‘History, we know, is apt to repeat herself,’ Eliot writes in this last story, ‘and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.’ When she describes Janet Dempster’s return to faith, it’s easy to hear the spiritual longing the author once felt herself:That walk in the dewy starlight remained forever in Janet’s memory as one of those baptismal epochs, when the soul, dipped in the sacred waters of joy and peace, rises from them with new energies, with more unalterable longings.
And that affectionate recasting of personal experience would provide the material for several novels, including Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, as well as Middlemarch. Early in the Scenes, Eliot writes, ‘I wish to stir your sympathies with commonplace troubles.’ Later she adds that ‘Sympathy is but a living through our own past in a new form.’ By living through her own past in a new form, Eliot discovered her voice, her subject and her style. Considering the influence of her biography on her fiction, Virginia Woolf argued: ‘We understand how it was that her first book was Scenes of Clerical Life, and not Middlemarch.’ But reading the first book does not feel like a dutiful academic exercise; instead, it’s like learning that a favourite museum has a room you have never visited before, with pieces no less memorable than the rest of the collection. ‘The blessed work of helping the world forward’, Eliot claims towards the end of the book, ‘happily does not wait to be done by perfect men.’ Imperfect priests need not be figures of fun, and by writing with sincerity about these provincial clergymen, Eliot rescues them from caricature. They are neither the absent-minded scholars nor the fawning social climbers that feature so often in English fiction. Instead, Eliot teaches the reader to see the hopes and dis- appointments hidden within these provincial lives and in the process, she becomes a great novelist: patient, wise and infinitely under- standing.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 91 © Guy Stagg 2026
About the contributor
Guy Stagg’s most recent book, The World Within, is about the role of retreat in creative and intellectual lives. It features poets, philosophers, mystics and monks, but alas no provincial clergy.
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