1. But Why Always Middlemarch? Or, Enough about Me

The conference in May 2017, “The Woman Card,” was both timely and retrospective.Footnote ⁴ It brought to mind the value of documenting the parallels among individual lives in designated social roles, in other words, prosopography or collective biography. Speakers at the conference represented 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 (Reference Booth1992). Of course, Middlemarch has been a kind of touchstone of Anglophone feminist 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 heroine'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.”Footnote ⁵ Later feminist critics have shared Woolf's disappointment in Eliot's answers to woman's questions.Footnote ⁶ Yet many feminist readers continue to have an affective attachment to Eliot's novels. In the evergreen Becoming a Heroine (1982), Rachel M. Brownstein asks whether it is possible “‘to be who one is while living a generic woman's life?’”Footnote 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.Footnote ⁸

Not only is Middlemarch a measure of feminist self-development narratives 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” cannot be separated from a sliding series of represented lives. Brownstein's dated question touches on an enduring sore point of gender/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 interpreted 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 narrative 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 particularity in the comparison. As in Lydgate's medical research, we try to recognize [Elizabeth—a woman] among many cases of [similar symptoms; vocational choices]. But we need to go further than the ambitious scientist, recognizing our limits as researchers making daily choices interdependently with other equivalent centers of self. There can be no unselected, 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.Footnote ⁹ In the spirit of the conference, this essay includes more than usual mention of one's own work. With a persistent focus on collective biographical history, my research unites feminist, 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 bibliography 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 historic women in the typological networks constructed by these books.Footnote 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 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.Footnote ¹¹ Rereading it (or rather, listening 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 collection of polemical essays that he published in 2013. The forum was to appear in an issue dated the same month as “The Woman Card” conference, May 2017, and actually became available in October. By early November, Moretti was in the news for alleged sexual violence.Footnote ¹² At the time of revising the lecture into this essay (spring 2018), the #MeToo era continues to reach into academia, and debates about methodology 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 ostensibly 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 methods and aims. If Moretti were a Lydgate, he would not be especially interested 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 invention” like an empiricist of Lydgate's era, too often tends to cast the investigator as lone hero, to clinch argument with word-vector visualizations, and to take as given the now thoroughly questioned data of library cataloging, titles, and almost every other standard device of literary studies, including nation, period, and genre.Footnote ¹³ Most experiments with large corpora 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 overawed by what she perceives as Casaubon's immeasurable knowledge. My approach retains biographical and textual specificity, including differences of gender, in what we call “mid-range reading,” to interpret biographical 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 connection.Footnote 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 assembles parallel individual lives. It is an underlying form and rhetoric in many cultural histories, from Plutarch's Parallel Lives to medieval hagiography, 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.Footnote ¹⁵ Honor rolls or printed “galleries” of exemplary portraits reveal that any list is partial; even the most exhaustive collection seems to give prosopoetic voice to absences. Yet the printed English-language books in Collective Biographies of Women are characteristic of modern recognition, adding the names of women to historical rosters. Selective yet inclusive, 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 nineteenth 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 language 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 quantitative 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.Footnote 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 ready. Although here I am concentrating on the typological characterization that intersects with the research in Collective Biographies of Women, we could pursue more data-driven linguistic approaches.Footnote ¹⁷ With the digitized text of Middlemarch at our keyboards, studies of frequency and distribution of words or “linguistic forms” have become more inviting, not dramatically diverging from predigital concordances, but adding dimensions to the game.Footnote ¹⁸ One collaborative study mines articles about Middlemarch in JSTOR (1960–2009), analyzing the critical history 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.”Footnote ¹⁹ Also following the cue to count linguistic patterns, Sarah Allison analyzes Eliot's “maxims against maxims,” her critique of generalization—approximately 129 sentences in Middlemarch that hinge a narrative, past-tense particular with “which,” followed by a present-tense “commentative” generalization, the first example being: “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”Footnote ²⁰ Such sentences tend to indict characters’ projected desires, as in Lydgate's extrapolation of the kind of wife Rosamond will be.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ²⁴ Repeatedly, the narrator 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 perspective 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 identity. First, we get the famous invitation to reread the biography of Saint Theresa as part of scientific research: “Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how that mysterious mixture behaves under the varying 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 scientific 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 salvation, 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 interpretation than is warranted? Middlemarch famously has three heroines. Indeed, it usually has at least three of everything, ensuring that its multiplot thickness approximates a sense of the entire Middlemarch milieu: three clergymen, high, broad, and low; medical men of elevating or lowering systems, degreed or merely apprenticed; kinship networks of main characters (Brooks, Garths, Vincys) associated with the three love triangles; 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 feminist 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 typological 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 rendering 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 Allison highlights in Middlemarch. This dialectic, inherent in biography, occurs in Eliot's novel in comic scenes that never entirely give the refutation the last word. Celia deflates Dorothea's analogy to great men, a parallel 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).Footnote ²⁵ Celia sees the physicality of the particular clergyman 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.Footnote ²⁶ We would care because Locke has joined a sequence of representatives for a shared human tradition. But we would not naively mistake any single, local scholar for a forerunner of human thought, in spite of the novelist's encouragement to believe that slow progress in the provinces has improved matters for later generations.Footnote 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 outdated 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 intersubjective 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.Footnote ²⁸ Our editing schema identifies types of agents, events, and settings, and stylistic, formal, and ideological features of many nonfiction narratives interrelated in tables of contents in the bibliography. CBW studies a genre of multiple, 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 prototypes for her heroines; I suggest that the saintly Victorian nurse, Sister Dora, along with Saint Theresa and other representatives of female vocation, 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.Footnote 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 development 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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 (Reference Grégoire1881):

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 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 misinterpretation 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, husbands, 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 conditions in Middlemarch and extratextual individuals and circumstances, connections 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 compared to her heroines.Footnote 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:

Parton, like so many biographers of Eliot, attests that Eliot's companions always overcame the impression of unfeminine homeliness, particularly 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 heroines, 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 (Reference Haight1968). We know it's reductive, as we know our computer models or theoretical concepts are reductive, yet at the same time productive of interpretation. And as we study the extensive female biographical resources of Victorians, we can document 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 justification 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.Footnote 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 marrying 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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, enjoyment 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 inquiring 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 otherworldly, 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 administration, 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 romantic and life as picturesquely interesting as in the days of St. Louis or St. Theresa.”Footnote ³⁸ In a 1906 collection of short biographies of single women, A. J. Green-Armytage writes that many will have “mentally bracketed Sister Dora with Saint Theresa.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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 associated with Saint Dorothea and Saint Theresa.Footnote ⁴¹ Dorothy Pattison's life offers great material to charge the saintly-nurse icon with intense heterosexual 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.Footnote 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 ardor.Footnote ⁴³ Mark Pattison apparently distrusted his sister's passion for renunciation.Footnote 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.

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).Footnote 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 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.”Footnote 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 functions to her multiple female characters, while generally foreclosing the fulfilled career, martyrdom, or actual accomplishment that made the historic women noteworthy in biographies. Dorothy Pattison resisted marriage 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 predictability 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 prescriptive 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 experience 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 nighttime bribe. In CBW, nursing is a prominent category, including ten versions of Agnes JonesFootnote ⁴⁸ (also a saint, according to William James) who was a pupil of the superstar Florence Nightingale (in sixty-one versions).Footnote ⁴⁹ Nursing often coincides with war and military service, as in the recently revived Victorian counterpart to Nightingale, Mary Seacole.Footnote ⁵⁰ All of the women I have just named have gained statues, windows, plaques, biographies, or websites, hardly “unvisited tombs.” Dorothea's avocation, housing 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 commonplace of feminist criticism in the 1980s. Eliot might have had in mind, as Nightingale observed, the example of her friend Octavia Hill,Footnote ⁵¹ who developed housing for the urban poor.Footnote 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 existing vocabularies for historical women. In a realist novel depicting plausible 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.Footnote 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 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 biographies, while beauty is an almost occupational title in collections such as Famous Beauties of Two Reigns.Footnote 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 person 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.Footnote ⁵⁵ The tropes and epithets reveal the representational process that builds a collective narrative. 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 typological terms, CBW finds diverse cohorts or assortments of agency.Footnote ⁵⁶ These tables of contents and the narratives themselves of course skew toward literate European American women and Western, Christian heritage, but the premises that nonfiction adheres to fact, and that a collection 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 digitized 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 Nightingale and with Saint Theresa of Avila, but never does a volume in CBW's database list George Eliot and Sister Dora together.Footnote 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 hospital reformer and an agnostic novelist considered to have lived in adultery 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 rediscovers narrative assessments of newly recovered historical women, affording 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 identifications in an ideally inclusive history. All models lose specific data; a database 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 figured 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.Footnote 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 poets.Footnote ⁵⁹ The limited canon pre-dated the impact of deconstruction and of African American and postcolonial and queer theory, but feminist criticism 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 outsiders in Middlemarch making their neighbors uncomfortable with their German (French) ideas, advocacy for housing reform, and willingness 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 somewhat taken for granted as infrastructure. The advances have entailed some inevitable forgetting. Studies of disciplines, professions, epistemologies, 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 motivation 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 scholarship on an expanded list of British women novelists and poets, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the thriving global, intersectional theory and politics in departments and programs of studies in women, gender, 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 conferences of these fields.Footnote 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 collaborative scholarship, recognizing the effects of typological norms and biographical 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 biographies in a certain form of publication, 1830–1940, without claiming 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 version 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 predetermined in the Bible, but Fred and Mary collaborate on new methods of farming and balanced family life, as far as 1830s England would permit. Let us be sea captains, scholars, president.Footnote 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.