Brooks-Ward, Isabella; (2022) Systems of Self-Help in the Works of George Eliot and George Meredith. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

George Eliot and George Meredith sought to write instructive literature that would teach without teaching and that would point towards the moral without moralising. Such contradictions are also present in the self-help discourse, which negotiates an uneasy boundary between textual prescription and the encouragement of a strenuous individualism. These two novelists navigated this conflict through an attention to physiological form: as this thesis argues, both explored the idea that the body, along with its unique and unstable patterns of feeling, might convey a personalised ethical system to the individual self. Systems of Self-Help in the Works of George Eliot and George Meredith draws on a variety of interlocking discourses in order to re-think the Victorian culture of self-help. Rather than confirming self-help ideology as inherently masculinist, class-based, and inflexible, this thesis seeks to reinvigorate it through a close engagement with texts that offer a reformative view of its practices. This is the first full-length study to consider exclusively the canonical Eliot alongside the under-studied Meredith. Such a juxtaposition is revelatory of a decided sympathy in their ideas about the nature of wisdom and how it interacts with the body. Refracting these insights through a wide variety of genres – from fiction, philosophy, poetry, the aphorism, physiology, comedy, and the critical essay, to the dietetic – each chapter offers a fresh reading not only of major works, but also of rarely encountered texts such as Eliot’s poetry or Meredith’s short stories. In the physiological system, Eliot and Meredith found a new form through which to mediate wisdom. This thesis seeks to develop a correspondingly adaptable mode of literary criticism that can adequately respond to the diverse ways in which these novelists engaged with self-help, working to suggest a new form for feeling.

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