Eliot is one of my favorite authors and I have enjoyed other of her works. However, this was her first attempt at writing and the minutiae of the religious life was about more than I could bear! This book contained three stories of life in the parish. The clergy was not always the star of the show, but the stories did revolve around the church. I almost gave up completing the book when in the third story the debates amongst the Anglicans, the Dissenters, the Calvinists, the Reformists, and the Presbyterians went on and on and on and on! None of these stories had a happy ending nor anything close to it. If Eliot would be a new to you author, don't start with this one! 410 pages ( )

George Eliot’s first novel, Scenes of Clerical Life, is a set of three tales, loosely connected by locale and a few minor, overlapping characters. They focus on three clergymen and are refreshing in that they are portrayed as human beings rather than objects of scorn or ridicule.
Apparently, this surprised some of Eliot’s friends, who knew her as the translator of David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach. Perhaps the best way to think of this book is as an example of post-anti-evangelicalism. Eliot had a conversion experience late in adolescence, followed by an intellectual awakening a few years later. When she wrote these tales, her concern was no longer with doctrine. As she writes of one woman, Mrs. Raynor: “I fear most of Mr. Tryon’s hearers would have considered her destitute of saving knowledge, and I am quite sure she had no well-defined views of justification. . . . Let us hope that there is saving ignorance, and that Mrs. Raynor was justified without knowing exactly how.”
In the place of orthodox theology, Eliot stresses the importance of how we treat one another. Mrs. Raynor’s daughter, the long-suffering Janet Dempster, exemplifies this at her dying husband’s bedside: “Here is a duty about which all creeds and philosophies are at one.”
In addition to putting a human face on the controversies that roiled the Church of England in the 1830s and 1840s, Eliot also confronts alcoholism and spousal abuse. This comes in the third tale, “Janet’s Repentance,” which struck me as the strongest of the three.
Although less well-known than other of George Eliot’s novels, and not a masterpiece on the level of Middlemarch, I felt this was well worth reading. ( )

While the first story in this collection would only garner a 3.5 rating from me, the other two more than make up for it and thus find me giving the book a firm 5-stars.

This is not technically a novel, but a collection of three stories that are all centered around the clergy in the same area of Milby and Shepperton, England. We meet, and are told the stories of, three separate clergyman who serve the district at separate times.

The first story is titled, The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, and his fortunes are indeed sad. I liked the story and caught glimpses of George Eliot’s masterful style, but I never felt overly attached to any of the characters and did not relate on an emotional level. Here is the shadow of greater things to come, I thought.

The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way imagined to ourselves.

Little did I know that the greater things were to be found in the second story of the series, Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story. Here is a man who did touch and pull at my heartstrings. Here is a story with depth and meaning, that keeps you captivated beginning to end. I could feel George Eliot blossoming as she wrote. Maynard Gilfil is one of the finest and sweetest characters in Eliot’s fine fiction.

But it is with men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk. 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, finally, the crowning glory is Janet’s Repentance, a story of reclamation and salvation and hope. This one brought me to tears, for I could not fail to feel Janet’s desperation and Mr. Tryan’s martyrdom at the hands of a society that purposely failed to appreciate or understand him. There is a sweetness and a sense of feeling that permeates this story that reminded me of why I loved The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch so much. There is moral instruction, without preaching, and there is example that is uplifting and yet ever human.

It is apt to be so in this life, I think. While we are coldly discussing a man’s career, sneering at his mistakes, blaming his rashness, and labeling his opinions--’he is Evangelical and narrow’, or ‘Latitudinarian and Pantheistic’ or ‘Anglican and supercilious’--that man, in his solitude, is perhaps shedding hot tears because his sacrifice is a hard one, because strength and patience are failing him to speak the difficult word, and do the difficult deed.

Could we not all take a lesson from that passage. Do unto others.

...everywhere there come sweet flowers without our foresight or labour. We reap what we sow, but Nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit that spring from no planting of ours.

And finally:

They might give piety to much that was only puritanic egoism; they might call many things sin that were not sin; but they had at least the feeling that sin was to be avoided and resisted, and colour-blindness, which many mistake drab for scarlet, is better than total blindness, which sees no distinction of colour at all.

I am happiest when I close a book and feel that I have something worthwhile and meaningful to take away, that the impact is not temporary and will last, perhaps forever, in the part of the soul that craves instruction. Today I am happy.

( )

The sad fortunes of the reverend Amos Barton - 3.5 stars
Mr Gilfil's love story - 3.75 stars
Janet's repentance - 4 stars
These were very nice stories. They all began very slowly and took a few chapters for me to get invested/ hooked, but once I did they were interesting and gripping (if sad). ( )

(29 July 2017, Oxfam)

Like other early books (that Jane Austen book from the other month springs to mind, and early Hardy in a way), this felt hard to get into, especially the first story, nad a bit over melodramatic, although the writer of the introduction of my copy seems to claim she’s realistic, not melodramatic. Because of the short story format, the characters are by definition not as well-established as in her novels, and although the web of society is there, it’s not fleshed out so much.

“The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton” took a lot of getting past some old people visiting each other before we got to the story. There’s some good observation of our central vicar character, including sharp comments about how a tallow dip candle that belongs in the kitchen candlestick doesn’t match as well the silver candlesticks kept for best, and I liked Eliot’s boldness in concentrating on a fairly ordinary man and situation; her careful exactness on the effect of the gentry turning the head of a local vicar and the scene where the maid rebukes the fine lady are nicely done. There’s a weird bit of random criticism of the reverend’s hair, odd in a book that was apparently written from the life. We hover over house calls and clerical meetings in a style that will be familiar to those used to Eliot, and we also have a fair bit of her authorial voice and metafiction.

“Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story” gives us the back-story of someone mentioned in the first story, and as it’s told in flashback, we know it’s going to be a tragedy. It’s a bit odd and melodramatic, with Eliot really too far outside her main characters to make them attractive to the reader: she’s best on the controlling instincts of the old man of the family and there are some great scenes between the abandoned and new loves. Mr G is a truly, rather Iris Murdochian, good character and it’s interesting to see how Eliot develops him.

“Janet’s Repentance” is the longest of the stories and covers domestic violence (it’s very good on why Janet remains trapped in her awful situation) and alcoholism. I loved the narrator, an invisible but present figure who is there in church and chapel with Janet but then torments his younger sister with impressions of some of the characters. He reminded me of Murdoch’s narrator in “The Philosopher’s Pupil” – how can he see inside all the houses? Anyway, unfortunately there are too many women characters of a certain age to not confuse me, and the plot relies on having a fairly detailed knowledge/understanding of religious sects and divisions which is perhaps retreating further and further from the modern reader: Eliot does fill in the background but I was a bit confused there, too. Mrs Crewe and Mr Jerome are, again, selfless and good characters who work for the benefit of others, and this redeems the story.

So, sorry, George Eliot, this didn’t hit the spot for me. I’m sure many other people have read this and can change my mind … maybe. ( )