BOOTH, Alison - Particular Webs. Middlemarch, Typologies, and Digital Studies of Women's Lives

Particular Webs: Middlemarch, Typologies, and
Digital Studies of Women’s Lives

ALISON BOOTH
[H]e was enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of
research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and
more exactness of relation . . . to pierce the obscurity of those minute pro-
cesses.
—George Eliot, Middlemarch1
T would be hard to discover a theoretical or aesthetic approach to

I George Eliot’s Middlemarch that is not already anticipated in some
way by the novel’s sagacious narrator. Possibly that persona, the quintes-
sential Victorian polymath, does not foresee digital humanities as we
know it. But critics have been struck as much by Eliot’s prototyping of
information systems, semiotics, and network analysis as by her humanist
ethics.2 Casaubon does not invent the database of myths any more than
Lydgate discovers DNA, or than Marian Evans Lewes rivals Ada Lovelace
and Charles Babbage. As I illustrate a kind of digital research that adjusts
to the minute particulars of narrative, I hope to keep sight of historical
distances between the 1830s, the 1870s, and the era of feminist
Victorian studies that I sketch here. Lydgate’s penetrative “invention,”
in the epigraph, is associated elsewhere in the novel with his actual
“flesh-and-blood” vitality: “He cared not only for ‘cases,’ but for John
and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth” (Middlemarch, chap. 15). He is as ded-
icated to evidence as the narrator, in many scientific analogies, counsels
readers to be, and yet he approaches his own life story and the characters
of women with a kind of prejudgment that filters out most data. Eliot’s
readers, seeing Lydgate’s errors, are flattered into believing we miss no
signals and see all analogies. Can contemporary readers appreciate
both numerical cases and individual stories of women? In this article I
try to outline a feminist criticism that encompasses both typological
Alison Booth, Professor of English and Academic Director of the Scholars’ Lab, University of
Virginia, has published studies of gender, reception, and narrative: Homes and Haunts: Touring
Writers’ Shrines and Countries (Oxford University Press), How to Make It as a Woman (Chicago),
and Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cornell). She directs Collective Biographies
of Women, a digital project.
Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 5–34.

© Cambridge University Press 2018.
doi:10.1017/S1060150318001286
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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classifications and flesh-and-blood individuality, both digital research and

interpretative advocacy.
In doing so, I represent my own research, which combines both fem-
inist Victorian studies and digital humanities. Recent studies read across
the grain of the text of Middlemarch, whether close, surface, or distant
readings of rhetorical and figurative patterns, and with these in mind,
I consider here some implications of counting, of quantification, in
this novel. This discussion will contribute a fresh outlook on a fairly long-
standing feminist approach to this text, as a representation of varied
women’s lives. The particular biographical source material of the novel
warrants a closer look than Lydgate actually gives to his cases and his
own circumstances. I hope to show that these textual and contextual con-
siderations about women represented in Eliot’s novel resonate with the
problems of typology that I have encountered in a database of biogra-
phies of women. Much as Eliot used the “Miss Brooke” plot or the
Gwendolen Harleth plot to engage readers in the profoundly intercon-
nected elements of provincial or cosmopolitan life, I will align a beloved
Victorian novel with one approach to feminist digital humanities. My
theme of quantification of persons will turn to apparently disparate
parts and topics, from prosopography, the Collective Biographies of
Women (CBW) project, and its method of mid-range reading, to the
typologies of women in Middlemarch and in collective biographies in
the CBW database, as all these elements, from today’s vantage point, illu-
minate each other.
Attention to one “Elizabeth” is much harder than the medical
gentleman supposes. No historical person should be confined to the
summarized facts and categories such as nationality and occupation
that researchers need for search, comparison, and analysis. While
Middlemarch seems to teach empathy for idiosyncrasies hard to represent
in binary 1s and 0s, the novel at the same time is a kind of instruction
manual for identifying individuals as types, because the community
(and historical research) demands such slighting comprehension.
Thus, characterization of heroines through allusions to historical or leg-
endary women contributes to the novel’s social processing of individuals
into components of the whole. Like the gossips in Middlemarch, the
narrator presses Dorothea into comparison with Saint Theresa, and
indeed into the category “many Saint Theresas.”3 The novel and
Middlemarchers relentlessly compare Rosamond Vincy and Mary Garth
as well. Obedience to predictive models is nevertheless the kind of soul-
less echo one hears in Rosamond’s piano playing. No one person in the

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novel, not even Will Ladislaw, is paying sufficient attention to avoid mak-
ing originals into imitations. “As if a woman were a mere colored super-
ficies!” he protests when the painter Naumann wants to cast Dorothea as
a Christian Antigone (Middlemarch, chap. 19), and yet Will goes on to
classify her in his way. Readers of Middlemarch and feminist digital
humanists should try to go beyond Will’s theoretical care for a misrepre-
sented woman and Dorothea’s hidden influence. Learning what every-
thing costs is a start, and then we take mindful collaborative action.
1. BUT WHY ALWAYS MIDDLEMARCH? OR, ENOUGH ABOUT ME

The conference in May 2017, “The Woman Card,” was both timely and
retrospective.4 It brought to mind the value of documenting the parallels
among individual lives in designated social roles, in other words, proso-
pography or collective biography. Speakers at the conference repre-
sented generations of feminist Victorianists, some of them strong
influences on my first published research. Middlemarch was central to
the second article I published, and formed a significant portion of my
first book, Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (1992). Of
course, Middlemarch has been a kind of touchstone of Anglophone fem-
inist criticism, some of the earliest examples of which focused on
Victorian women writers. Virginia Woolf spoke for a long tradition of
dissatisfaction with Eliot for ensuring that in the contest between a her-
oine’s aims and society’s demands, society wins. In Eliot’s heroines,
“the incomplete version of the story that is George Eliot herself,”
Woolf avers, “The ancient consciousness of woman. . .uttered a demand
for something . . . that is perhaps incompatible with the facts of human
existence.”5 Later feminist critics have shared Woolf’s disappointment in
Eliot’s answers to woman’s questions.6 Yet many feminist readers con-
tinue to have an affective attachment to Eliot’s novels. In the evergreen
Becoming a Heroine (1982), Rachel M. Brownstein asks whether it is possi-
ble “‘to be who one is while living a generic woman’s life?’”7 More
recently, Rebecca Mead published My Life in Middlemarch (2014), a
book that bears some formal resemblance to Brownstein’s more
wide-ranging critical study. Patricia Meyer Spacks, in “The Power of
Middlemarch,” also recollects the indelible effect of the novel in one’s
teenage years.8
Not only is Middlemarch a measure of feminist self-development nar-
ratives over the past three or four decades, but it also speaks to questions
of critical method in the twenty-first century, suggesting that “who one is”

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cannot be separated from a sliding series of represented lives.

Brownstein’s dated question touches on an enduring sore point of gen-
der/genre, that society constrains lives into generic narratives. But the
legible, gendered life, and, indeed, any accessible biographical history,
requires some interpretation through typological frames—that kind of
beauty; a female architect. In biographical history, women have been inter-
preted through gendered types. In digital humanities, the hybrid and
emerging field that responds to new ways of manipulating data and
accessing cultural heritage, we require metadata that reinforce such
types. Middlemarch helps us ask a more collective, current version of
Brownstein’s question: How do we recognize the detailed, unique narra-
tive of a woman’s life in a typological network of many women’s lives
changing over cultures and eras? We use strategic typologies in our
research, but neither to essentialize nor to hide the loss of individual par-
ticularity in the comparison. As in Lydgate’s medical research, we try to
recognize [Elizabeth—a woman] among many cases of [similar symp-
toms; vocational choices]. But we need to go further than the ambitious
scientist, recognizing our limits as researchers making daily choices inter-
dependently with other equivalent centers of self. There can be no unse-
lected, omniscient history of the lives of all humans. Looking more
closely at narratives of women’s lives, we can forestall the presupposition
of what a person gendered female can be and do.
Later twentieth-century feminists broke the sentence and sequence
and avowed the personal as political.9 In the spirit of the conference, this
essay includes more than usual mention of one’s own work. With a per-
sistent focus on collective biographical history, my research unites femi-
nist, Victorianist, and digital studies. My study of “the history of the
common life” in Eliot and Woolf (my first book) evolved into studies
of collective biography in the 1990s. In How to Make It as a Woman
(2004), I rediscovered collective biographies or prosopographies of
women widely available during the nineteenth century, a corpus of varied
female vocational achievement only dreamed of in the Finale of
Middlemarch or the peroration of A Room of One’s Own. The annotated bib-
liography was in fact too large to fit in the printed book, and we needed
more than a website for online searching; we needed ways to interpret
and compare some 14,700 diverse, value-laden short narratives about his-
toric women in the typological networks constructed by these books.10
With a database that interconnects thousands of women, including
George Eliot and contemporary and historical models for her heroines,
we have experimented with particular webs of texts, creating abstracts of

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elements distributed across the paragraphs of these narratives. The aim is

a digital collective portrait of the lives of many women as envisioned at
the time the collections were published. Will says women “change from
moment to moment” (Middlemarch, chap. 19). Our method is not one
of Naumann’s paintings, but an approach to multiple versions of the
same life and the changing British and North American conceptions
of notable female careers over time. This is feminist digital research at
mid-range between a single, close-read biography and today’s practices
of distant reading that actually overlook biographies of men or women
in the welter of digitized nineteenth-century books.
Continuing the CBW project and directing a digital humanities
research center, in 2017 I found Middlemarch on my plate again because
I was to teach it at the Dickens Universe.11 Rereading it (or rather, listen-
ing to it) led me to think about Eliot’s extraordinary metaphors for the
mind and perspective, which in turn shaped my contribution to the
PMLA forum of responses to Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading, a collec-
tion of polemical essays that he published in 2013. The forum was to
appear in an issue dated the same month as “The Woman Card” confer-
ence, May 2017, and actually became available in October. By early
November, Moretti was in the news for alleged sexual violence.12 At
the time of revising the lecture into this essay (spring 2018), the
#MeToo era continues to reach into academia, and debates about meth-
odology once again explicitly deal in sexual politics. The essays in the
PMLA forum, with Moretti’s response, now more than ever underline
the motif of gender representation and social justice in a debate ostensi-
bly about the pros and cons of a method, distant reading, that resembles
a kind of transhistorical epidemiology of literature. The work of the
Stanford Lit Lab or the research presented in Moretti’s books should
not be confused with digital humanities as a whole, with its array of meth-
ods and aims. If Moretti were a Lydgate, he would not be especially inter-
ested either in cases or in John or Elizabeth. My forum response took
into account only his admirable written work, in particular in Graphs
Maps and Trees, where Moretti wrote about a series of prose sketches,
Our Village, but ignored the author Mary Russell Mitford’s biography.
My essay, “Mid-Range Reading: Not a Manifesto,” was not an attack on
Morettian textual analytics, from mapping to topic modeling; work in
this line has great potential and often is collaborative, with open sharing
of data. But Morettian macroanalysis, “enamored of that arduous inven-
tion” like an empiricist of Lydgate’s era, too often tends to cast the inves-
tigator as lone hero, to clinch argument with word-vector visualizations,

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and to take as given the now thoroughly questioned data of library cata-
loging, titles, and almost every other standard device of literary studies,
including nation, period, and genre.13 Most experiments with large cor-
pora of digitized texts center on novels, falsely presume that an author’s
name reliably indicates an individual of the first or second sex, and hide
biography just as national maps omit streams and streets. The example of
Moretti now is an unwelcome reminder of the admonition that the work
cannot be separated from the life.
I insist instead on a more local method that is not bedazzled by the
expanding vistas of digitized literary history, as Dorothea Brooke is over-
awed by what she perceives as Casaubon’s immeasurable knowledge. My
approach retains biographical and textual specificity, including differ-
ences of gender, in what we call “mid-range reading,” to interpret bio-
graphical narratives in networks. The errors of excessive claims for data
mining in textual corpora do resemble the masculinist power to override
the local witness, and recent critiques of Moretti have made the connec-
tion.14 Just as the sufferings of “Mrs. Casaubon, born Dorothea Brooke”
on her honeymoon have to do with who is monarch, prime minister, and
mayor (Middlemarch, chap. 19), our critical methods should be sensitive
enough to zoom in to recognize biographical detail in the big picture
of disciplines and even nations. Indeed, I would align my approach to
collective biographies of women and prosopography with the way that
Middlemarch shifts between macro and micro scales, modeling a collective
history of representative individuals.
Prosopography is both a research method and a genre that assem-
bles parallel individual lives. It is an underlying form and rhetoric in
many cultural histories, from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives to medieval hagiog-
raphy, and it has been a device for advancing representation of nations
and distinct groups such as Methodist missionaries. It may aspire to
social-scientific statistics in the hands of some historians or classicists,
but in many publications, it remains detailed at the level of the particular
characteristics of selected lives. Anna Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art,
relating illustrated saints’ lives, served as a key to British tourists viewing
European art. Jameson was one source for Eliot’s and other Victorians’
vocabularies for self-sacrificing world-changers such as Saint Theresa.
The form of prosopography serves to support groups claiming a place
in the historic record, winners and oppressors as well as victims.15
Honor rolls or printed “galleries” of exemplary portraits reveal that any
list is partial; even the most exhaustive collection seems to give proso-
poetic voice to absences. Yet the printed English-language books in

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Collective Biographies of Women are characteristic of modern recogni-

tion, adding the names of women to historical rosters. Selective yet inclu-
sive, these books skew toward literate women of the West, but reveal
remarkable diversity and particularity beyond the prescriptions of the
novels and advice literature that were so instructive to Mary Poovey,
Nancy Armstrong, and other Victorianist feminist critics influenced by
Karl Marx and Michel Foucault. This genre, pervasive during the nine-
teenth century, continues to be useful; for example, Chelsea Clinton
has collaborated on two children’s books, She Persisted and She Persisted
Around the World, that follow the genre of collective biographies of
women. “The Woman Card” conference itself chose the poster, website,
and program design of a deck of cards featuring famous Victorian
women, which accords with prosopography’s formal elements of sets of
names and portraits. In light of the themes of the conference and the
ongoing interdependence of gender politics and the scale of research
method, I want to collaborate on a feminist digital humanities that
works at mid-range on the rich records of the nineteenth century.
2. COUNTING MIDDLEMARCH
Middlemarch can seem like an education in numeracy as well as literacy,
an interdisciplinary history as well as fiction before the divergence of
the two cultures, the sciences and the humanities. It doesn’t seem far-
fetched to apply computational approaches to a text that adopts the lan-
guage of “study” or “experiment.” Its characterization and plots instruct
us that desire, vocation, research, and social change are interdependent.
Though the fact-finders and would-be leaders fail in their family lives, the
example of Farebrother suggests that it is possible to collect, classify, and
even gamble for money without losing humility and wonder, as well as a
place in the social network. In any case, this novel lends itself to a quan-
titative approach that does not lose sight of the particularity of what is
being counted. A Victorian multiplot novel such as Middlemarch, as
Audrey Jaffe writes in The Affective Life of the Average Man, is committed
to thinking about probabilities and statistics. The novel delegates “the
many to set off the few.” Critics have seen that “central characters of
Eliot’s novel are under pressure to differentiate themselves from the
town’s ‘petty medium,’” while the narrator continually types them.16
A novel that concerns itself with the “particular web” and with the
effects of language on perception is a prime example for textual studies
using digital methods, with comparative quantities of person types at the

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ready. Although here I am concentrating on the typological characteriza-

tion that intersects with the research in Collective Biographies of
Women, we could pursue more data-driven linguistic approaches.17
With the digitized text of Middlemarch at our keyboards, studies of fre-
quency and distribution of words or “linguistic forms” have become
more inviting, not dramatically diverging from predigital concordances,
but adding dimensions to the game.18 One collaborative study mines arti-
cles about Middlemarch in JSTOR (1960–2009), analyzing the critical his-
tory and annotating a digital text of the novel with the rates of citation of
passages; as they note, “the novel itself engages with questions of partial
vs. total perception, parts and wholes, the afterlife of words.”19 Also fol-
lowing the cue to count linguistic patterns, Sarah Allison analyzes
Eliot’s “maxims against maxims,” her critique of generalization—approx-
imately 129 sentences in Middlemarch that hinge a narrative, past-tense
particular with “which,” followed by a present-tense “commentative” gen-
eralization, the first example being: “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty
which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”20 Such sentences
tend to indict characters’ projected desires, as in Lydgate’s extrapolation
of the kind of wife Rosamond will be.21
In keeping with the networks of female typology in CBW, I focus on
the recurrence of roles rather than linguistic data, though as the example
above indicates, the verbal tropes and characterization are intertwined.22
In a remarkable number of scenes, a chorus of townspeople collaborates
in tagging others, while they are themselves tagged as humours or
Theophrastan characters.23 Characters in the novel often object to
such labeling even as they employ it. Perhaps the oppressive casting
system, instead of consolidating society, has a centrifugal action: Jean
Arnold has counted thirty-four references to acts of leaving
Middlemarch, as most of the main characters do.24 Repeatedly, the nar-
rator reflects on the typical and the exceptional, recurring to problems of
interpretation that somehow entail statistics. Lydgate does not intend to
be like “the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations
in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of
their cravats.” Some of them “once meant to . . . alter the world a little.
The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be
packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness”
(Middlemarch, chap. 15). The Prelude of Middlemarch anticipates this per-
spective on Lydgate’s exceptionalism in the face of averages, with again a
reflection on society’s power to shape fashion as a signal of shared iden-
tity. First, we get the famous invitation to reread the biography of Saint

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Theresa as part of scientific research: “Who that cares much to know the
history of man, and how that mysterious mixture behaves under the vary-
ing experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of
Saint Theresa.” And almost in the same breath, the narrator satirizes
the desire to answer the question of women’s incapacity compared to
men, taking a numerical view of social determination: “If there were
one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count
three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scien-
tific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of
variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the
sameness of women’s coiffure and the favourite love-stories in prose
and verse” (Middlemarch, Prelude). Much as people follow fashions and
adjust to roles while imagining their unique selection for success or sal-
vation, observers classify them, with reading strategies suited to both the
newspaper and the Bible (source of so much Western typological
reading).
What if we approach the social lot of women by the gross, or at least
the typological set, without claiming more certainty in the ultimate inter-
pretation than is warranted? Middlemarch famously has three heroines.
Indeed, it usually has at least three of everything, ensuring that its multi-
plot thickness approximates a sense of the entire Middlemarch milieu:
three clergymen, high, broad, and low; medical men of elevating or low-
ering systems, degreed or merely apprenticed; kinship networks of main
characters (Brooks, Garths, Vincys) associated with the three love trian-
gles; three manipulative men with money to disperse to relatives; and
so on. In the speculative discussion of women’s biographies that follows,
I extend such replication into the realm of life writing to show that fem-
inist digital research can approximate the rich multiplicity of this trifold,
manifold novel. I trace descriptions of George Eliot, Sister Dora, and
Saint Theresa and compare the novel’s three heroines to biographical
counterparts. These things are not parables, but they are metonymies
of the kinds of representation in collective biographies and in this typo-
logical novel; they exemplify my method of feminist, mid-range reading.
By recognizing the biographical context that is marginalized in distant
reading of vast corpora or word distributions in sets of texts, while ren-
dering persons collectively and relationally in quantifiable ways, we can
complement the rich critical tradition of this novel and feminist studies
of Victorian representations of women.
The movement from idealization to deflating particularity, and from
person back to type, is more than the recurrent linguistic form that

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Allison highlights in Middlemarch. This dialectic, inherent in biography,

occurs in Eliot’s novel in comic scenes that never entirely give the refuta-
tion the last word. Celia deflates Dorothea’s analogy to great men, a par-
allel to the narrator’s comparison of Dorothea to Saint Theresa. The
imitator’s failure to match the original is humorous, but readers should
also learn to look past superficial description of idiosyncrasies—one
would think, the forte of a realist novel. Casaubon resembles the portrait
of Locke, says Dorothea. “Had Locke those two white moles with hairs on
them?” “Oh, I dare say! When people of a certain sort looked at him”
(Middlemarch, chap. 2).25 Celia sees the physicality of the particular cler-
gyman scholar, as if doing what James Boswell did to Samuel Johnson
(“warts and all” is a catch phrase of modern individualizing biography).
Dorothea classifies Celia with observers “of a certain sort.” Yes, Locke was
flawed, and if there were not one but two white moles with hairs on them
on the philosopher’s face, a novel and a modern biography would want
to tell us.26 We would care because Locke has joined a sequence of rep-
resentatives for a shared human tradition. But we would not naively mis-
take any single, local scholar for a forerunner of human thought, in spite
of the novelist’s encouragement to believe that slow progress in the prov-
inces has improved matters for later generations.27 Types not only collect
multiple examples in a set; the rhetoric of typology is also temporal.
Dorothea and Casaubon are anachronisms—Dodo and a hopelessly out-
dated scholar—living in the receding past of the novel’s first readers. If
they are failed facsimiles of St. Theresa and John Locke, typology
seems to predict a later, nearer incarnation.
3. INCALCULABLY DIFFUSIVE
In Greatness Engendered, I traced “the history of the common life” in Eliot’s
essays and novels, as noted above; this narrative mode is collective without
adopting the Utilitarian calculus of social science. My interest in intersub-
jective rather than individualist narrative has carried forward in my study
of collective biographical history. Here, let me turn to Collective
Biographies of Women (CBW) to further compare Eliot’s typological,
manifold social webs with those revealed in a study of this nonfiction
genre, connecting the portrayal of real and fictional women. Mid-range
reading, as I suggest, affords more nuanced representations of divergent
particulars than more distant, less granular models.28 Our editing
schema identifies types of agents, events, and settings, and stylistic, for-
mal, and ideological features of many nonfiction narratives interrelated

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in tables of contents in the bibliography. CBW studies a genre of multi-

ple, associated narratives that interpret exceptional individuals in social
context, with some attention to warts and peculiarities, as the brevity of
a single chapter and the purpose of the whole collection allow. The
female subjects in these collections include George Eliot herself and pro-
totypes for her heroines; I suggest that the saintly Victorian nurse, Sister
Dora, along with Saint Theresa and other representatives of female voca-
tion, offered models for the replication of female types in Middlemarch.
The scale of comparison allowed in CBW’s database adds dimensions
to Eliot’s work with a typical, Midlands sample. Eliot’s heroines, with
their historical analogs and sources, compose a cluster of arguments as
if in a running debate about female vocation throughout hundreds of
biographical collections during the novelist’s lifetime.29 Gertrude
Leslie Mumford begins one short biography of Sister Dora as if with a
precept from Eliot’s narrator: “Occasionally in searching for the develop-
ment of great natures one finds that from their very faults, from the very
temperamental obstacles against which they struggle, spring the sources
of their greatness.”30
It turns out that Saint Theresa herself dwelt on the lives of the saints,
and had a penchant for designing infrastructure. There is a different
short biography of St. Theresa of Avila in each of twelve different
books in the CBW bibliography, the earliest published in 1881, after
Eliot’s death.31 Through 1940, these books align Theresa in cohorts of
such titles as Great Women of Christian Faith, or Historic Girls, or even
Adventurous Women. This modern saint herself initiated the reproduced
narratives of her childhood, as in Grégoire’s short version (1881):
The little girl’s recent studies in the lives of the Saints convinced her that she
could compensate for the lost crown of martyrdom, by imitating the ancient
hermits in their solitude. Accordingly, Roderic [her brother] was again
called in for advice and assistance. . . .the two together took to building little
hermitages in their garden, to which they used to retire to perform the exer-
cises of devotion taught them by their parents. The operation of building, it
may be added, was almost constantly going on, for the hermitages used to
fall down, or require extensive repairs, almost as soon as they were put up.32
George Eliot could not have read this 1881 version, but the childhood
anecdotes come from a common source. Saint Theresa read romances
and lives of the saints, loved to build things (hermitages, and an entire
convent that provoked riots when she built it in secret), and above all
sought martyrdom. One appeal of her story is that she was a fairly

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ordinary girl of modern times. Eliot deplores the limited models for
women’s education (the Brooke sisters’ school in Lausanne or Mrs.
Lemon’s school) and occupations, acquainting us with society’s misinter-
pretation of the destinies of her female characters, the sort shapen after
the average, who will never be in biographical collections. What can
women do? A great deal more than Dorothea Brooke, Rosamond
Vincy, or Mary Garth, who, after much effect on cottages, hospitals, hus-
bands, and readers’ emotions, will rest in “unvisited tombs.” This may
ironically be the price a novel must pay for verisimilitude and for the
reader’s rational doubt that he or she will make it into the annals and
monuments.
Critics have noted the close connections between people and condi-
tions in Middlemarch and extratextual individuals and circumstances, con-
nections often backed up by biographical evidence, such as Eliot’s
reading or relationships. Indeed, in the thirty-two short biographies of
George Eliot in different collections in CBW, her novels are used as
sources of biographical detail, and the persona (Mary Ann Evans) is com-
pared to her heroines.33 For example, the American journalist and man
of letters James Parton (husband of the popular writer Fanny Fern)
derives his version of Eliot from Mathilde Blind. “Her biographer”
(Blind) confirms:
she learned in early life the priceless art of laboring with patient cheerful-
ness at homely tasks. Miss Blind tells us, that, “For some years after her moth-
er’s death, Miss Evans and her father remained alone together at Griff
House. He offered to get a housekeeper, as . . . he was always tenderly con-
siderate of ‘the little wench’. . . . But his daughter preferred taking the whole
management of the place into her own hands, and she was as conscientious
and diligent in the discharge of her domestic duties as in the prosecution of
the studies she carried on at the same time. One of her chief beauties was in
her large, finely shaped, feminine hands—hands which she has, indeed,
described as characteristic of several of her heroines; . . . one of them was
broader across than the other, [she said]. . . due to the quantity of butter
and cheese she had made. . . .”
Her appearance at this time is thus described: “She had a quantity of
soft pale-brown hair, worn in ringlets. Her head was massive, her features
powerful and rugged, her mouth large, but shapely, the jaw singularly square
for a woman, yet having a certain delicacy of outline. A neutral tone of col-
oring did not help to relieve this general heaviness. . . . Nevertheless, the play
of expression and the wonderful mobility of the mouth . . . gave a womanly
softness to the countenance in curious contrast with its framework.”34
Parton, like so many biographers of Eliot, attests that Eliot’s companions

always overcame the impression of unfeminine homeliness, particularly

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through “her voice, the latter recalling that of Dorothea, in being like the
voice of a soul that has once lived in an Aeolean harp. It was low and
deep, vibrating with sympathy.” Who shapes these blazon-like chains of
descriptive mirroring? Dorothea has strong maternal hands, and a
voice like a wind harp. Critics have been less likely to connect Eliot
with Dorothea than with Mr. Tulliver’s little wench in childhood and
with homely and conscientiously handy Mary Garth in womanhood;
Maggie or Mary, and thus Marian Lewes, resents the sinister beauty of
her cousin (Lucy or Rosamond). The comparison of author and hero-
ines, or characters generally with real-life precedents, is not a parlor
game that we necessarily want to continue playing, but undoubtedly it
predates the biography by Gordon Haight (1968). We know it’s reduc-
tive, as we know our computer models or theoretical concepts are reduc-
tive, yet at the same time productive of interpretation. And as we study
the extensive female biographical resources of Victorians, we can docu-
ment the powerful implications of persona description very much as
Blind and Parton deploy it.
Since the novel appeared, readers and critics have played this game
of finding real-life counterparts of Eliot’s characters, not without justifica-
tion in the novel’s own rules: a typological network of persons seems
essential to social formation. Many have discussed Mark Pattison, the
Oxford don, as the model for Casaubon (if the model was not Eliot’s
own scholarly self). Eliot was visiting with Pattison and his wife Francis
Emilia Pattison (later Dilke) at Oxford before the novelist added the
“Miss Brooke” material to the medical and industrial portions of the
emerging novel.35 Dinah Birch and others deny that the Oxford don,
author of a biography of Casaubon, was the source for the character of
the Rector of Lowick. It does not require a special research trip to
Oxford to find literary material in the story of a bookish older man mar-
rying a far more creative and ardent beauty. Nevertheless, another model
for the “Miss Brooke” material is less familiar and more resonant for
themes of vocational types of women. Jo Manton has documented that
Eliot found unusual material in the story of Mark Pattison’s sister,
Dorothy Pattison.36 Dorothy Pattison (1832–1878) became well known
as Sister Dora, a focus of my studies of collective biographies of women
before I even knew she was a sister of Mark Pattison.37 Sister Dora was
a type of devotee much like Dorothea Brooke as described in the implied
voice of a suitor in Middlemarch: “A young lady of some birth and fortune,
who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor by the side of a sick laborer
and prayed fervidly as if she thought herself living in the time of the

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Apostles” (Middlemarch, chap. 1). Sister Dora and Dorothea share the
plain dress, unfashionably-bound dark hair and white cap, the powerful
maternal hands, fanatical religiosity, passion for horseback riding, enjoy-
ment of the company of men, ambition to improve conditions for the
poor, and a form of self-sacrifice. Sister Dora is a Victorian contemporary
of Eliot, not of Dorothea Brooke in the 1830s. We know Eliot was inquir-
ing into medical practice, and would have been interested in the hospital
reform that Sister Dora facilitated, like Eliot’s hero Lydgate. Eliot could
not have read the first biographies of Sister Dora before writing
Middlemarch, but Sister Dora freely narrated her own experiences and
could well have related these to Mrs. and Mr. Pattison.
Other characters and the narrator tend to place Dorothea Brooke
alongside great art, in an aura of sainthood or allusions to great
women of history, as many have noted. This association is not other-
worldly, but rather in keeping with the contemporary response to
Sister Dora, in a network of eminent contemporary women. In 1880,
two years after Sister Dora’s death, Edith Simcox, the writer and labor
organizer who was in love with Eliot, reviewed the first biography of
Sister Dora, the innovator in surgical nursing and hospital administra-
tion, in terms inflected by Middlemarch: “Henceforward our Dreams
of Fair Women are likely to be haunted with the figure of this
modern, very human saint who had the art of making religion as roman-
tic and life as picturesquely interesting as in the days of St. Louis or
St. Theresa.”38 In a 1906 collection of short biographies of single
women, A. J. Green-Armytage writes that many will have “mentally brack-
eted Sister Dora with Saint Theresa.”39 William James in The Varieties of
Religious Experience (1902) indicates a belief circa 1900 that Sister Dora,
a modern saint, had become a foundress of something.40 Yet clearly
the follower of Florence Nightingale’s vocation breaks out of the mold
of sanctity that has been associated with Victorian repression since
Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) and the spread of popular
Freudianism during the twentieth century. Hilary Fraser insists that
Eliot’s allusions to saints recognize the Bernini-statue, erotic ecstasy asso-
ciated with Saint Dorothea and Saint Theresa.41 Dorothy Pattison’s life
offers great material to charge the saintly-nurse icon with intense hetero-
sexual passion. Large chunks of family scandal and romantic secrets were
left out of the two 1880 biographies by women who knew her: Margaret
Lonsdale and Eliza Ridsdale.42 Biographies of Sister Dora nevertheless
suggest a physically expressive woman who was in love with several men
in her short life; like Dorothea, Dorothy required a life of feeling, of

PARTICULAR W EBS 19
ardor.43 Mark Pattison apparently distrusted his sister’s passion for

renunciation.44
Characterization or explicit description of the biographical persona
can be documented across the twenty versions of Sister Dora’s life in the
CBW project, tagging terms to specific paragraphs; PersonaDescription
for Sister Dora resembles a heroine of Dorothea Brooke’s type. Bear in
mind that the following is based on a biography by a woman who knew
the recently deceased Dorothy Pattison, yet it reads like the blazon of a
fictional character.
6. About the time she came of age, Dora Pattison was very beautiful, being
tall and slender, about five feet seven inches in height, and with a perfect
figure. Her hands were small and exquisitely formed, her features regular,
and her forehead singularly wide and high. She had a small mouth with
full, red lips, a row of white teeth which remained perfect till her
death, and brilliant dark-brown eyes, which could either kindle with sympa-
thy, or twinkle with a merry humour. She had dark, tightly curling brown
hair . . . which waved all over her head. All these attractions, with her softness
and roundness of form, and her extreme delicacy of colouring and complex-
ion, made her a fascinating creature to look upon, and a favourite with all
classes. Yet . . . she had also the proverbial Yorkshire shrewdness of character,
together with “the faculty for hitting the right nail on the head, and for see-
ing to the bottom of a well.” But her strongest natural inclination was the
desire to aid others. . . . Having thus sketched Sister Dora, her biographer
goes on to observe:—
7. “It will be said that a perfect character . . . is here described; but . . .

Dorothy Pattison’s laborious life [shows not only]. . . the gradual develop-
ment of her vigorous and healthy moral nature, her vivid imagination and
power of realizing things unseen and immortal, the record also of human
weaknesses and infirmities not few or small, of struggles and grapplings
with moral disease and temptation . . . ; battles in which she by no means
always came off victorious, and of some of which she bore the scars to her
death-bed.”45
The diagnosis that a penchant for martyrdom is a bit neurotic does not
wait till the twentieth century. The insistence on the real-life, somewhat
unfeminine physicality of this saint—“She could run and jump, follow
the fox or hare, or join in a rat-hunt with all the enthusiasm of a healthy
lad”—is as explicit as Eliot’s portrayal of Dorothea as both femininely
beautiful and boyish: “Most men thought her bewitching when she was
on horseback” (Middlemarch, chap. 1).46 Rejecting Sir James Chettam’s
offer of a horse and deflecting his depiction of her as a model lady
who should be a “perfect horsewoman,” “Dorothea looked straight

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before her, and spoke with cold brusquerie, very much with the air of a
handsome boy, in amusing contrast with the solicitous amiability of her
admirer” (Middlemarch, chap. 2). These descriptive passages in the
early chapters of Middlemarch might almost prompt the biographies of
Sister Dora published after George Eliot’s death, except that the real
Victorian woman has a sense of humor, quite lacking (to good effect)
in the fictional character. To look again at Mumford’s contribution to
Heroines of Modern Religion, the frequent topic of Sister Dora’s boyish
romps is tied to her beauty and humor and to the biographer’s obligation
to foresee the future career—as a success that overcomes difficulties.
Note the recurrent word “picture,” much as in the analogies of
Dorothea Brooke to a painting. Sister Dora at twenty “was a picture of
health. . . . As she came back from a cross-country gallop, . . . she was
a picture at which all turned to look. To physical strength and beauty
were united high animal spirits and a sense of humor, which . . . were
to keep her sweet and strong through the trials of the years before her.”47
My point is not to fix Dorothea Brooke as a representation of
Dorothy Pattison, or to suggest that the depiction of the latter owes
much to types of fictional heroines, though there is truth in both.
Eliot, instead of replicating one contemporary, assigns types and func-
tions to her multiple female characters, while generally foreclosing the
fulfilled career, martyrdom, or actual accomplishment that made the his-
toric women noteworthy in biographies. Dorothy Pattison resisted mar-
riage in order to fulfill an influential vocation. In our database, we
compare her biographies typologically, but we assign each biographical
subject multiple types, based on the construction of these personae in
the various published versions, which tend to stretch the schematic pre-
dictability of narratives of women’s lives. By attending to the patterns and
variations we have catalogued, we can exhibit and interpret the collective
portraiture of women during the nineteenth century in both its prescrip-
tive tendencies and its surprising complexity. For instance, Sister Dora in
CBW joins a cohort of some ninety saints; she is also one of 315 nurse
types, of whom fifty-five are African American. Middlemarch has its
hired private nurse, Mary Garth. I propose that Eliot heard through
the Pattisons an anecdote that Dorothy Pattison retold of her early expe-
rience as a private nurse: a demented elderly woman nightly pressing her
to accept gifts of jewels. This could have provided an episode in Mary
Garth’s work as a private nurse, when she rejects Featherstone’s night-
time bribe. In CBW, nursing is a prominent category, including ten ver-
sions of Agnes Jones48 (also a saint, according to William James) who was

PARTICULAR W EBS 21
a pupil of the superstar Florence Nightingale (in sixty-one versions).49

Nursing often coincides with war and military service, as in the recently
revived Victorian counterpart to Nightingale, Mary Seacole.50 All of the
women I have just named have gained statues, windows, plaques, biogra-
phies, or websites, hardly “unvisited tombs.” Dorothea’s avocation, hous-
ing reform, was not only an echo of Saint Theresa’s childhood building
of hermitages, but also had a contemporary counterpart. Nightingale
wrote a review of Middlemarch, as Dorice Williams Elliott reminds us,
that objected to Eliot’s forestalling of her heroines’ vocations—a com-
monplace of feminist criticism in the 1980s. Eliot might have had in
mind, as Nightingale observed, the example of her friend Octavia
Hill,51 who developed housing for the urban poor.52 But in 1829, we
believe, there were fewer options, and fiction, like opera, prefers pathos.
Middlemarch may have three heroines, but it by no means covers the
spectrum of female typology that we can deduce from nineteenth-
century collective biographies of women. Yet an understanding of the
networks of female types in CBW shows how Middlemarch adapts the exist-
ing vocabularies for historical women. In a realist novel depicting plausi-
ble everyday life, there is little room to strut and fret in the spotlight of
history, where many of the frequent female subjects of biography made
all eyes turn to look: the kind of beauties who appeared in royal portrait
collections, the kind of performers who became royal mistresses, or
adventuresses. For example, Lola Montez, an Irish-born “Spanish”
dancer, a contemporary of Sister Dora who never appears in a collective
biography with her, led an internationally notorious life and captivated
Ludwig I of Bavaria less than a decade before Eliot and Lewes eloped
to Germany. But Middlemarch barely notes this woman’s types.53
Sexualized celebrities appear almost as frequently as queens and writers
in CBW, but are relegated to the backstory of Middlemarch (with more
prominence in Daniel Deronda). Rosamond is only a small-town femme
fatale, not losing her social caste or reputation, in spite of her musical
dalliance with Ladislaw. Besides the virtuous Mrs. Ladislaw, who chose
the stage over a criminal family business, the sole counterpart to Lola
Montez comes not from the bohemian-Polish backstory of Ladislaw but
from Lydgate’s more Rochester-like youth in Paris, where he was
entranced by the actress Laure: “She was a Provencale, with dark eyes,
a Greek profile, and rounded majestic form, having that sort of beauty
which carries a sweet matronliness even in youth, and her voice was a
soft cooing” (Middlemarch, chap. 15). Whereas Laure dramatically stabs
her husband to death onstage, Rosamond’s murder of Lydgate is more

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Lamia-like, or like a plant growing upon a dead man’s brains. Laure’s

“divine cow” type is the “very opposite” of Rosamond, the sylph, and,
again, unlike Dorothea’s Quakerish Madonna type. That sort of beauty is
a structure of comparison among women in Eliot’s novel, as it is in biog-
raphies, while beauty is an almost occupational title in collections such as
Famous Beauties of Two Reigns.54
Any one published “life” joins a chain of representations responding
to previous ones. As in the opinions of Middlemarchers about the lives of
Lydgate, Bulstrode, Dorothea, or others in their midst, the summaries
will judge according to types. Yet misrepresenting the unique, mortal per-
son as an avatar of another famous figure or a group helps to generate
the reproductive power of biography, as the audience is invited to repeat
the pattern of emulation, reproducing that type of life.55 The tropes and
epithets reveal the representational process that builds a collective narra-
tive. Much as Middlemarch demonstrates the convergence of many lots,
CBW, as a database of collective biographies, opens up a prosopography
of historical women. Feminist accounts of women’s history, from Woolf in
the 1920s to Carolyn Heilbrun in the 1980s, have often overstated the
absence or the conformity of written records of women. Novels and
advice books have given Victorianists the impression that all but a very
few women’s lives were confined to the separate sphere. In the particular
yet extensive webs of women created by tables of contents and our typo-
logical terms, CBW finds diverse cohorts or assortments of agency.56
These tables of contents and the narratives themselves of course skew
toward literate European American women and Western, Christian heri-
tage, but the premises that nonfiction adheres to fact, and that a collec-
tion tends toward variety, present a much broader range of achievement
and comparison than three heroines in a novel. I invite my reader to
explore the various networks of women in CBW, but my point here is
to encourage digitally assisted studies of literature by women,
Middlemarch included, that take into account practices of representation
of women in the Victorian period. Digital methods and prosopography,
whether or not we use the specific tools of CBW’s mid-range reading, can
fill in the context of Eliot’s model of gendered destiny. The proximity
and distance of personae, CBW shows, can be more directly pertinent
to feminist historical interpretation than the distribution of words in dig-
itized texts. Compilers of short biographies of women tacitly assorted and
segregated potential models for women’s lives, as the database can show.
Thus, for example, we discover that George Eliot and Sister Dora
both appear at least once each in a table of contents with Florence

PARTICULAR W EBS 23
Nightingale and with Saint Theresa of Avila, but never does a volume in
CBW’s database list George Eliot and Sister Dora together.57 Closer
examination of the types of collections that feature either of these
famous contemporaries—both of whom resisted their fathers’ dictates,
adopted professional pseudonyms, and had mutual connections in real
life through the Oxford Pattisons—suggests that a saintly, unmarried hos-
pital reformer and an agnostic novelist considered to have lived in adul-
tery were not commended to readers on the same terms. Yet the web of
associations of recent British women with either Eliot or Sister Dora
includes the atheist Harriet Martineau and the feminist, lesbian, animal
rights advocate Frances Power Cobbe, among reformers, writers, artists,
and scientists of many stripes. Exploration of the cohorts in CBW redis-
covers narrative assessments of newly recovered historical women, afford-
ing a composite portrait of women’s typologies in that era.
Such quantitative interpretation of narrative versions and textual
conjunctions of female personae should not be mistaken for objective
documentation of actual women’s lives at that period. Even with the
best conceivable future tools, we will not arrive at objective records of
all women, or of women’s cultural production, or of all gender identifi-
cations in an ideally inclusive history. All models lose specific data; a data-
base of historical biography harmonizes the noise of obscure “equivalent
centers of self.” No one can fix even the complexity of any one life or any
social cohort in a biography or a dataset. Yet like readers of Middlemarch,
we can admit that our categories have missed their mark—comically fig-
ured in the Finale’s misattribution of authorship between Mary and Fred
Vincy—and yet honor human endeavors: “That things are not so ill with
you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who
lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs” (Middlemarch,
Finale). The other half of progress, one supposes, is owing to published
assessments of historical figures whose graves are well marked and
counted.
4. FEMINIST VICTORIANIST DIGITAL HUMANITIES

A retrospective conference such as “The Woman Card” provides an
opportunity to reread how feminist Victorianists got to this point. Many
of the early successes of feminist criticism in the academy were by
Victorianists.58 Such triumphant early works as A Literature of Their Own
and The Madwoman in the Attic centered on canonized nineteenth-
century writers: Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, Woolf, with a few female

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poets.59 The limited canon pre-dated the impact of deconstruction and

of African American and postcolonial and queer theory, but feminist crit-
icism of the early 1980s did anticipate alternative sexualities and the
intersectionality of class, race, and gender. Academia was not, as I recall,
particularly welcoming of female holders of the doctorate who sought to
found something new. Feminist critics, regarded as willfully flouting the
tasks of literary scholarship, were almost forced to leave town—like out-
siders in Middlemarch making their neighbors uncomfortable with
their German (French) ideas, advocacy for housing reform, and willing-
ness to go into journalism and politics. In the second decade of the
twenty-first century, humanities departments often are much more
open to diverse identities and methodologies than in the Reform Era
of the 1990s, when I came up. Victorian studies so quickly benefited
from feminist and gender studies that, by now, their influence seems
incalculably diffusive. The groundbreaking feminist interventions on
behalf of obscure as well as eminent women writers, and the critique
of gender representation in Victorian literature and culture, are some-
what taken for granted as infrastructure. The advances have entailed
some inevitable forgetting. Studies of disciplines, professions, epistemol-
ogies, and publications can thicken a sense of the Victorian era, and
demonstrate the irrelevance of who is conducting the study. Yet there
is no neutral vantage point, and the context of lives inflects the motiva-
tion of research, as I noted in reference to Moretti. It was once a struggle
to claim a place for women’s studies in academia, but too often the effort
has divided into a persistent niche in Victorian studies for adding schol-
arship on an expanded list of British women novelists and poets, on the
one hand, and, on the other hand, the thriving global, intersectional the-
ory and politics in departments and programs of studies in women, gen-
der, and sexuality. Some digital humanists are engaging in advocacy for
social justice more directly and effectively than most Victorianists, as far
as I can judge by my participation in the respective international confer-
ences of these fields.60 Freshly confronted with the fact that misogyny,
like white supremacy, easily finds new fuel, we can pursue feminist, digital
Victorian studies that open up new directions in interdisciplinary collab-
orative scholarship, recognizing the effects of typological norms and bio-
graphical expectations.
I hope we can sustain both a retrospective and emergent outlook,
reviving our sense of Middlemarch as a contribution to collective feminist
biographical history, by methods undreamed of forty years since.
Collective Biographies of Women will reveal a morphology of women’s

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biographies in a certain form of publication, 1830–1940, without claim-

ing an eternal pattern, or that young women of the future only have
the option of imitating and failing to match the great Spanish saint.
Why always the picturesque Madonna or saint? Instead of Dodo with
her hidden influence, should we not carry on from Mary Garth, who,
if you recall, “wrote a little book for her boys, called ‘Stories of Great
Men, taken from Plutarch’”? Although “every one in the town was willing
to give the credit” to her university-educated husband for this new ver-
sion of classical prosopography, Mary succeeds in raising boys who
“liked nothing so much as being with their mother” (Middlemarch,
Finale). Eliot makes clear that the elder Mrs. Vincy and Mrs. Garth
remain prejudiced about class and gender differences as if they were pre-
determined in the Bible, but Fred and Mary collaborate on new methods
of farming and balanced family life, as far as 1830s England would per-
mit. Let us be sea captains, scholars, president.61 Middlemarchers
might say, a woman of Mary’s type as well as Dorothea’s was a nasty
woman; Eliot might say, nevertheless, she persisted. I see no reason to
go quietly as we near the centenary of the female suffrage that took
well over a century to win.
NOTES
My thanks go to Talia Schaffer for insightful help in revising this essay.
1. Middlemarch, chap. 16. I cite Middlemarch, by chapter, from the

Project Gutenberg text, because the criticism and research discussed
in this essay rely on searching and analyzing digitized text.
2. See Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail for a pre-Internet reading of the
semiotic networks in the novel.
3. Plural proper names are a classical rhetorical device, and public fig-
ures are relentlessly compared to precedents: in the collective biog-
raphies of women genre, we tag the instances of analogy to famous
woman or famous man.
4. The first woman nominated by a major party to run for president of
the United States had been attacked for playing “the woman card”
(by analogy with “the race card”), as if feminist advocacy were an
unfair advantage. The conference, after Hillary Clinton’s defeat,

26 VLC • VO L . 4 7 , N O . 1
addressed the continuing vitality of feminist studies within Victorian

studies.
5. Woolf, “George Eliot.” Woolf repeats Eliot’s move of placing women
in comparative series of versions of the same potential life.
6. In my early work, I canvassed the critical assessments of Eliot’s equiv-
ocation on the woman question. Staten counters the Raymond
Williams tradition that objects to Eliot’s evasion of economics in
Middlemarch (“Is Middlemarch Ahistorical?”).
7. Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine; the question of being yourself was
a preoccupation in pre-deconstructionist movements. Broyard,
“Revising the Heroine.” Brownstein’s and Nancy K. Miller’s early
work opened my eyes to the ways that the marriage plot defeated a
female ambition plot.
8. Mead, My Life in Middlemarch; Spacks, “The Power of Middlemarch.”
9. DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending, was an influential voice respond-
ing to Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own on style and structure in women’s
writing. Many feminists touted formal disruption to achieve self-
realization, though others questioned individualist goals and
doubted that artistic experiment correlates with political change.
At the conference, I alluded to the title of a key book by Nancy
K. Miller, But Enough About Me, aware that she was present.
Institutional and disciplinary histories would not only be material
for prosopography but also for network analysis and mapping—
e.g., zones of Victorian studies in Berkeley, Bloomington,
New York, etc. See Hirsch, “Feminist Archives of Possibility.”
10. The database focuses on the 1272 English-language books (primarily
1830–1940) that include three or more short biographies of women,
amounting to some 14,733 individual chapter biographies; the data-
base includes 8700 persons who wrote or were presented in these
biographies. http://womensbios.lib.virginia.edu and http://cbw.
iath.virginia.edu. CBW is supported by the Institute for Advanced
Technology in the Humanities, the Scholars’ Lab, and the English
Department at the University of Virginia, and by grants from ACLS
and NEH. Thanks to the collaboration of Bethany Nowviskie, Joe
Gilbert, Worthy Martin, Daniel Pitti, Rennie Mapp, Jeremy Boggs,
Sarah Wells, Suzanne Keen, and a lengthening list of research
assistants.
11. The annual celebration of the Inimitable made its only concession to
headline a novel by a woman writer in thirty-seven years, for
Middlemarch (novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and

PARTICULAR W EBS 27
Elizabeth Gaskell had been paired with Charles Dickens in three of

the summer sessions). George Levine, in his lecture linking the
Universe’s 2017 and 2018 novels, Middlemarch and Little Dorrit,
noted a precedent for the comparison circa 1986: my article
“Interpreting the Heroines of History.” Another reason to reread
Middlemarch in 2017 was that I gave a short talk at a Charlottesville
Opera event before the East Coast premiere of the opera
Middlemarch in Spring. Adaptations of works by women authors persis-
tently play the woman card.
12. Among much coverage, see Ruairi Arrieta-Kenna’s updated article in
Stanford Politics.
13. One point of broad consensus among digital humanists and femi-
nists is that a datum or given is already a value inflected by the ide-
ology and perception of the tabulator. Drucker, “Humanities
Approaches to Graphical Display.”
14. Bode, “‘Close’ and ‘Distant’ Reading”; Rhody, “Beyond Darwinian
Distance”; Klein, “Distant Reading After Moretti.”
15. The Lost Cause assembled its prosopography in the form of statues
of Confederate generals, on Monument Avenue in Richmond or in
many town centers across the South. The proposed National
Women’s History Museum and the recently opened African
American museum share in this memorial rhetoric, with selected
sets of representatives invoking the missing. The forms and rhetoric
are similar, while the moral orientation seems antithetical.
16. Jaffe, Affective Life, 24–25.
17. For example, a first pass at terms that connote frequency and distinct-
ness in the stories of lives, from typology to tragedy: in Middlemarch,
the term “tragedy” co-occurs in 216 paragraphs with “many.” In the
whole text of the novel, there are 94 instances of “common,” includ-
ing uncommon, commonness, etc.; “common” and “many” occur
together in 27 paragraphs. Such data can be visualized using the
tools of Voyant.org.
18. Daniel Shore, in Cyberformalism, delineates “linguistic forms” as alter-
natives to word tokens or keywords in literary history at mid-range.
19. Jonathan Reeve et al., “Computational Analyses of the Critical History
of George Eliot’s Middlemarch.” Jonathan Reeve, Milan Terlunen,
and Sierra Eckert, “Frequently Cited Passages Across Time.”
20. Allison, “Discerning Syntax,” 1275–77; Middlemarch, chap. 1; Purdy,
“One Poor Word.”

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21. See Fessenbecker for a related argument from repeated linguistic

forms: “In Defense of Paraphrase” argues that Middlemarch repeat-
edly illustrates the problem of moral remainder from the conse-
quences of one’s deeds.
22. For a recognition of the language of characterization that is not par-
ticularly enumerative but links the novel to science, see Brilmyer,
“Matter of Character in Middlemarch.”
23. The audiobook reading with Juliet Stevenson alerts me to the novel’s
scene painting and chorus of voices, as in drama and opera, or as in
Dickens; the scenes are designed to be heard (perhaps most
Victorians got their novels that way).
24. Arnold, “Quitting Middlemarch.”
25. Many studies of Middlemarch note the patterns of analogy, the specific
trait, and the gesture toward general principle. Gallagher, “George
Eliot, Immanent Victorian,” influentially reads typology in
Middlemarch: “no sooner is the type—‘Theresas’—named than it
begins to dissolve” (67). Recent studies have turned to cognitive the-
ory. See Judge, “Gendering of Habit.”
26. Feminist criticism exposed the use of first-person plural in scholar-
ship. Here, the pronoun antecedent is the audience of Middlemarch.
27. Eliot’s narrator schools the reader against “too hasty judgment” of
Casaubon based on the Brooke, Chettam, and Cadwallader consen-
sus (chap. 10); they may think that Casaubon’s blood is made of
“semicolons and parentheses,” and he “dreams footnotes”
(chap. 8), but “the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary super-
lative existed,” would find unflattering reflections in “small mirrors”
(chap. 10).
28. A full account of CBW exceeds the aims of this essay. Biographical
Elements and Structure Schema (BESS) is a stand-aside XML
schema: editors use a controlled vocabulary to tag the values of spe-
cific elements found in each paragraph (or paragraphs), creating a
separate, annotated outline or abstract.
29. We could use the BESS schema on a novel. A difference would be the
brevity of these biographies that narrate birth and death. No charac-
ter in Middlemarch receives an entire life story, narrating childbirth,
childhood, and deathbed; the focus is youth and middle age (with
a few key deaths) of an intersecting set.
30. Foster, ed., Heroines of Modern Religion. Here I cite chapter six, para-
graph 1. CBW texts may be found by author, title, or ID number at
http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu. For citations where digitized text may

PARTICULAR W EBS 29
be directly accessed in CBW, I will cite author, title and ID, with chap-
ter and paragraph number rather than publication data and page.
For books that include a biography of Sister Dora or of Lola
Montez, the database displays text and BESS analysis, as here:
http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu/exist/cbw/dual/a302A/bio06.
31. Here and in some following notes, I will provide URL addresses for
underlined proper names, leading to the person record in CBW.
http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu/women_display.php?id=9444.
32. Pierre Marie Grégoire, Maidens of Hallowed Names, a344 bio13. Text
available at HathiTrust; citing p. 312.
33. http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu/women_display.php?id=9246.
34. Parton, Daughters of Genius, a624 bio07; follow link to HathiTrust;
pp. 94–96. Hughes, Victorians Undone, dramatizes a century-long
quarrel over the irrepressible anecdote that Mary Ann Evans worked
in the dairy at Griff: a laboring hand is not a Victorian lady’s hand.
35. Eliot corresponded with Francis Emilia Pattison from 1869, a few years
after Mark’s sister, Dora, came to Walsall. In May 1870, after ten
months of work on “the Vincy-Featherstone parts” of Middlemarch,
“Mrs. Lewes” visited Mrs. Pattison at Lincoln College, Oxford. Soon
after, she began to write “Miss Brooke,” the story that she decided to
combine with the previous Middlemarch material. Manton, Sister Dora,
353, 362; Haight, George Eliot, 420–28; Beaty, From Notebook to Novel, 3.
36. Manton, “Dorothy Pattison and George Eliot,” appendix to Sister Dora
(see also 272, 354–55). Birch: “He was too clever, too productive, and
not by any means sexless” (“The Scholar Husband,” 210). See
Oldfield, “George Eliot’s Dorothea?” for another source among
Eliot’s circle.
38. Simcox, “Ideals of Feminine Usefulness,” 657. Eliot died rather sud-
denly, after this was published, on December 22, 1880. Manton notes
that Simcox’s review of Lonsdale’s biography could have been based
on information from Mrs. Pattison when both were intimate guests at
George Eliot’s house (356–57).
39. They share “dominating will and cheerful obstinacy” but Sister Dora
was more fortunate in her freedom from the rigid Catholic rules,
according to Green-Armytage, Maids of Honour, a034 bio04 par.9.
40. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 221–22. James uses the bio-
graphical trope of plural proper names: “The great saints, the spiri-
tual heroes whom every one acknowledges, the Francises,
Bernards, Luthers, Loyolas, . . . the Agnes Joneses, Margaret

30 VLC • VO L . 4 7 , N O . 1
Hallahans, and Dora Pattisons, are successes from the outset.”

Pattison ends the list as one of three British women who ministered
to the poor in Staffordshire or Liverpool before early deaths in 1868
(Jones and Hallahan) or 1878 (Pattison). Jones was Evangelical;
Hallahan, Catholic; Pattison, High Church Anglican.
41. Fraser, “St. Theresa, St. Dorothea,” 404.
42. Lonsdale was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lichfield who vol-
unteered as a lady-pupil in Sister Dora’s hospital, and Ridsdale was
the daughter of Walsall’s Methodist minister.
43. Both Lonsdale and Ridsdale reported Pattison’s obvious preference
for men: “she disliked the sole company of women” (Ridsdale,
quoted in Manton 158). Sister Dora primarily nursed male victims
of industrial accidents (Lonsdale 85). Manton documents Dorothy
Pattison’s two broken engagements and two other episodes when
she was secretly meeting and corresponding with a beloved man.
44. Mark Pattison wrote, “She spent a faculty of invention which would
have placed her in the front rank as a novelist in embellishing the
everyday occurrences of her own life. A very faint reflection of
Dorothy’s powers of self-glorification is preserved in Miss
Lonsdale’s romance Sister Dora” (Manton 20).
45. George Barnett Smith, Noble Womanhood, a730 bio05 pars. 6–7, rely-
ing heavily on Margaret Lonsdale’s “Sister Dora,” a book-length biog-
raphy first serialized in The Churchman; this quoted passage, from
chapter 1, appears in volume 41 (May 15, 1880), 548–49. The text
of Smith’s chapter on Sister Dora, with BESS markup, may be seen
both at http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu/exist/cbw/dual/a730/bio05
and at the BESS Viewer by selecting this chapter, http://cbw.iath.vir-
ginia.edu/bess.php. The BESS markup of these paragraphs includes:
Stage Of Life: middle; Topos: beauty as effect on others; charity;
Persona Description: beautiful; sympathetic; humor, good sense of;
generous; intelligent; Discourse: quotation, unidentified; allusion
to previous biographer.
46. Joseph Johnson, Noble Women of Our Time, a468 bio09, par. 5.
47. Mumford in Foster, Heroines of Modern Religions a302A bio06 par.7.
The BESS markup includes: Topos: beauty as effect on others;
Persona Description: good sense of humor; Discourse: prospective
or foreshadowing.

PARTICULAR W EBS 31
50. http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu/women_display.php?id=20424. Seacole

was the mixed-race Jamaican entrepreneur, military supplier, and
author who was forbidden to join Nightingale’s nurses in the
Crimea (and made it into only one pre-2000 collective biography,
according to CBW’s records, and appeared on the home page of
the Woman Card conference).
52. Elliott, The Angel Out of the House, 189–91.
54. Mary Craven, Famous Beauties a206: http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu/
books_display.php?id=1532.
55. Sometimes the community forestalls rearing flocks of swans rather
than ducks (Eliot’s metaphor again) by marking the saint as out-
sider—“sane people did what their neighbors did so that if any luna-
tics were at large, one might know and avoid them” (Middlemarch,
chap. 7). No one can see that Rosamond, picture of finishing-school
perfection, is a water nixie, a torpedo.
56. From St. Theresa of Avila, click “Find persons within 1 degree of
separation” to see the list of her 143 siblings, from some very obscure
religious women to Mary, Queen of Scots, and Emily Brontë.
57. CBW offers ways to visualize associations of persons as siblings or
cousins: Sister Dora and George Eliot are “cousins” (two degrees of
separation); they have forty-five names that appear as siblings (in
the same table of contents) at least once in a book that includes either
Sister Dora or George Eliot. http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu/cbw_db/
parallel_ coordinates.php?id_a=9246&id_b=9349.
58. Booth, “Feminism.” In 1897, Oliphant et al., Women Novelists of Queen
Victoria’s Reign, offered early literary criticism of women writers, asso-
ciating the queen and the rising status of women in the era. In CBW:
a607 http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu/books_display.php?id=1532.
59. Showalter, A Literature of Their Own; Gilbert and Gubar, The
Madwoman in the Attic.
60. I don’t undertake here to support such a generalization with data
from conference programs, which could be easily done. See, for
example, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/07/new-
study-suggests-continued-bias-academic-conference-panel-selections.
See the quick response in June 2018 to the forced separation of fam-
ilies at the Mexican border: Torn Apart / Separados http://xpme-
thod.plaintext.in/torn-apart/index.html. For a recent example of
feminist DH, see Losh and Wernimont, ed., Bodies of Information.

32 VLC • VO L . 4 7 , N O . 1
61. Marshall, “On Margaret Fuller,” in November 2016 after Hillary

Clinton’s loss, cites Fuller’s 1845 proposal that women should fill
any occupation, “Let them be sea-captains, if you will.”
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Particular Webs: Middlemarch, Typologies, and

Digital Studies of Women’s Lives

T would be hard to discover a theoretical or aesthetic approach to

Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 5–34.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

classifications and flesh-and-blood individuality, both digital research and

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

1. BUT WHY ALWAYS MIDDLEMARCH? OR, ENOUGH ABOUT ME

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

cannot be separated from a sliding series of represented lives.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

elements distributed across the paragraphs of these narratives. The aim is

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Collective Biographies of Women are characteristic of modern recogni-

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

ready. Although here I am concentrating on the typological characteriza-

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Allison highlights in Middlemarch. This dialectic, inherent in biography,

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

in tables of contents in the bibliography. CBW studies a genre of multi-

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Parton, like so many biographers of Eliot, attests that Eliot’s companions

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

ardor.43 Mark Pattison apparently distrusted his sister’s passion for

7. “It will be said that a perfect character . . . is here described; but . . .

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

a pupil of the superstar Florence Nightingale (in sixty-one versions).49

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Lamia-like, or like a plant growing upon a dead man’s brains. Laure’s

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

4. FEMINIST VICTORIANIST DIGITAL HUMANITIES

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

poets.59 The limited canon pre-dated the impact of deconstruction and

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

biographies in a certain form of publication, 1830–1940, without claim-

My thanks go to Talia Schaffer for insightful help in revising this essay.

1. Middlemarch, chap. 16. I cite Middlemarch, by chapter, from the

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

addressed the continuing vitality of feminist studies within Victorian

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Elizabeth Gaskell had been paired with Charles Dickens in three of

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

21. See Fessenbecker for a related argument from repeated linguistic

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Hallahans, and Dora Pattisons, are successes from the outset.”

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

50. http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu/women_display.php?id=20424. Seacole

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

61. Marshall, “On Margaret Fuller,” in November 2016 after Hillary

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001286 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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BOOTH, Alison - Particular Webs. Middlemarch, Typologies, and Digital Studies of Women's Lives

BOOTH, Alison - Particular Webs. Middlemarch, Typologies, and Digital Studies of Women's Lives