George Eliot: Poetry,fiction and European spas

Abstract

While the gambling scene that opens George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda has led scholars to believe that she and George Henry Lewes abominated European spas, records of the couple’s travels in Europe reveal that they returned time after time to spas in France, Belgium, Switzerland and especially Germany, and further reveal that these destinations provided considerable stimulation for George Eliot’s creative imagination beyond contributing to the single scene of Gwendolen’s reckless roulette. Although the Leweses did dislike the gambling at such places as Baden Baden and Bad Homburg, they otherwise enjoyed the spa culture generated by (supposedly) healing waters, concerts, society and long walks in the gardens and hills, and there George Eliot found creative inspiration for her literature, as well as acquaintances who enriched her life and her literature. Spas turn up as settings occasionally in her poetry and fiction before becoming a major setting in Daniel Deronda : centrally in ‘Agatha’, where she adapts settings and characters from a short visit to Sankt Märgen in Germany; and tangentially in Middlemarch in the conclusion to Lydgate’s plot. Fellow spa visitors make plausible models for characters, in particular a mother-and-daughter pair who share many similarities to Gwendolen and her mother Mrs Davilow, while nineteenth-century spa guide books contain narrative material similar to plot elements in Daniel Deronda. George Eliot’s last two novels, as well as her less well-remembered but historically important poetry, acquired details of character, plot, setting and metaphor from nearly half a lifetime of her regularly availing herself of the culture and facilities of European spas.