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ALLEY, HENRY. The Quest for Anonymity: The Novels of George Eliot (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997). 182 pp. $33.50. Henry Alley's The Quest for Anonymity: The Novels of George Eliot proposes to deal with Eliot's book-length fiction by tracing the thread of anonymous heroism as it evolved through each of her novels. The theme of heroism and its various guises and disguises, Alley argues, pervasively shaped the messages of Eliot's narratives, influenced her increasingly complex characterization of men and women, and contributed to her frequent use of allusions. In Eliot's fiction, "true heroism," whether personal or public, "seeks generative life anonymously, without nominative prestige, prestige and its pursuit being. . . frequently a kind of living death" (p. 16). The unsuccessful quest for public recognition and its juxtaposition against the value of selflessness and anonymous heroism is the context in which Eliot shows us the ironies and ambiguities of everyday human experience.
Alley justifies his topic by asserting that no other single Eliot study has handled the theme of anonymity "consistently or as the key to the complex and cumulative mysteries of her art" (p. 22). He claims that this theme is additionally worthy of his attention because no other topic in Eliot "ramifies out so largely" in her work. I assume one of the goals of the book is to support this hyperbolic claim, and yet the book's length, at eight chapters and less than 200 pages in length, is unequipped to offer the reader a substantial exploration of one central theme as it appears in all of Eliot's novels. Alley's twelve pages of helpful and thorough footnotes, running approximately the same length of some of his chapters, hint at the critical background that might have given Alley's analysis more weight if he had incorporated this research into the discussion of each novel. The Quest for Anonymity provides a close reading of the development of anonymity in Eliot's novels that is consistently interesting, although it lacks the extensive textual and critical treatment the subject deserves.
Alley's reluctance to engage in a contextualized critical discussion of Eliot's work not only makes his discussions seem thin at times. but it clearly biases his conclusions. In his introduction, the author gives a nod to the major...