Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance
George Eliot is one of the top five people in history I’d most like to meet, so naturally I was drawn to Duncker’s fictional reimagining of Eliot’s life and milieu. The Sibyl of Duncker’s title is Eliot herself. Sophie is the young Countess von Hahn, love interest of Max Duncker, brother of Eliot’s publisher. The plot is told mainly through Max’s point of view, but with many narrative digressions. Even though Max and Sophie are ostensibly the protagonists, and their courtship is central to the plot, neither is sufficiently strong to carry the novel. Fortunately, it becomes clear early on that the Sibyl and the narrator (a deliberate feminist foil to John Fowles’s narrator in The French Lieutenant’s Woman) are the real heavyweights in the narrative, and through them Max and Sophie are illuminated and transformed.
Duncker blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality, not only the historical reality in which the real Eliot lived, but also the fictional reality of Duncker’s characters, some of whom exist as the inspiration for Eliot’s novels. Essentially, Duncker creates a self-conscious, fictional hall of mirrors that is much more confusing to explain than it is to read! Fowles’s memorable line from The French Lieutenant’s Woman, “Fiction is woven into all,” could be Duncker’s manifesto also.
As in Eliot’s novels, science, philosophy, and religion are central. The paradox of Eliot’s unconventional life – she lived with the married George Henry Lewes for more than twenty years – is compared to the conventional women in her novels.
Readers who prefer to keep their disbelief firmly suspended may dislike the intrusive narrator, but those who enjoy the playfulness of postmodern conventions will love the literary humor. A must-read for fans of George Eliot and lovers of literary fiction.
