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Scenes of Clerical Life has been reprinted in book form several times since 1858, including five editions within Eliot's lifetime. [2] The three stories were released separately by Hesperus Press over the years 2003 to 2007. A silent film based on " Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" was released in 1920, starring R. Henderson Bland as Maynard Gilfil and Mary Odette as Caterina. [40]Lawson, Kate; Shakinovsky, Lynn (2002). The Marked Body: Domestic Violence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Literature. New York: SUNY Press. p.167. ISBN 9780791453759. Scenes from Clerical Life, by George Eliot". The Atlantic Monthly. May 1858 . Retrieved 11 November 2008. There was some silly stuff in the intro about Eliot being conflicted over her loss of faith and the clerical life she depicts - I don't see the problem. These are affectionate portraits of ordinary people and their faults and foibles, and there's nothing unkind or strident in any of it. Eliot wrote as Austen and Trollope did, with a gentle wit and clever satire, relying on the perspicacity of her readers to discern the issues that mattered. So she knows how the wife of Amos Bates is worn out by child-bearing; how the social strata of English country life could trifle with a foundling's heart and break it; and how the religious controversies of the day were all so much of a storm in a tea cup. Despite Eliot's title for this story, Gilfil is not our primary interest. Apart from his grief at the death of his wife, Caterina, only six months after their marriage – the fact is revealed in the opening chapter – Gilfil is not a complex character demanding our attention. He loves Caterina, which is in contrast to Wybrow’s ill-usage of her. It is Caterina’s “marble tablet, with a Latin inscription in memory of her”, and represented by the vague memories of the oldest town residents, which is the ‘wood-ash’ we are to sift......

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… Hardy, Barbara. The Novels of George Eliot. London: Athlone Press, 1963. Hardy’s splendid critical work remains the best introduction to Eliot’s fiction. Maynard Gilfil – formerly the ward of Sir Christopher Cheverel, and subsequently curate of Shepperton, he is at the time the story takes place chaplain at Cheverel Manor. He is a tall, strong young man, devoted to Tina. "His healthy open face and robust limbs were after an excellent pattern for everyday wear". (By the time he appears at the beginning of "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton" he has become "an excellent old gentleman, who smoked very long pipes and preached very short sermons".) [30] Eliot uses her characteristic empathy to look behind the “scenes of clerical life” portrayed in this volume. She tells three stories, connected in that they take place in and around the fictional English town of Milby and each concerns a certain Anglican clergyman whose religious views are under criticism. The culmination is reached in “Janet’s Repentance.” By this time your heart has been pummeled by the first two “scenes,” and you are ready for a happy ending. But Eliot, true to form, has created a real life heroine and hero. They struggle with their own “sins” and their purgatory is harrowing, but this final installment ends with a beautiful triumph of the soul.In this book, the letters written by Lady Hester Margaretta Mundy Newdigate to her husband Sir Roger Newdigate are compiled and commented that had inspired Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life.