The Honeymoon

Smith's heavy-handed novel imagines the life of the writer George Eliot at age 60, reflecting back to her disastrous Venetian honeymoon with an abusive younger husband. Eliot was born Marian Evans to a rural farm family that encouraged her education after it was decided that her plain looks wouldn't secure her a husband. She becomes interested early on in writing and religion. She falls in with a bohemian, polyamorous crowd and gets her heart broken a few times before meeting George Lewes, the married man who would become the great love of her life. Eliot helms a magazine before running away to Germany with Lewes and returning to America to write the succession of novels that earned her fame and fortune. Lewes begins an avuncular relationship with the very handsome Johnnie Cross, who is 20 years the couple's junior. Following Lewes's death, Cross inexplicably proposes to Eliot, citing his promise to Lewes to care for her. While Cross is for the most part doting and kind, the honeymoon finds him behaving strangely and viciously. Smith's writing is chock-full of exposition and often clunky: "%E2%80%89%E2%80%98I love him%E2%80%94and his sons.' She smiled, saying the names aloud, %E2%80%98Charley, Thornie, Bertie.'%E2%80%89" Smith (The Illusionist) establishes that Eliot is insecure and painfully aware of how social class and looks can pigeonhole her, but it seems unbelievable that her reaction to Cross's mistreatment would be to worry that her looks and age drove him to it. The book is unsatisfying in that it tells rather than shows, and generalizes instead of teasing out the little details that would have made this book more than an overwrought CliffsNotes version of Eliot's life. (May)