George Eliot: Provided a lesson in the use of epigraphs

“A good epigraph should be more than mere adornment.” says Toby Lichtig in a commentary for the Guardian. “Better to think of it as a lens — or a sucker punch. Indeed, the very presence of an epigraph can make us question what lies before us. Playful or authoritative, omnipotent or throwaway, it acts as a kind of shadowy third figure, somewhere between the author and the audience.”

Of course, the epigraph is “subject to abuse,” he says: “Authors may add random passages from the Bible in the quest for portent; Shakespearean couplets to add a little erudition; sections from Lewis Carroll to conjure that missing air of mystery.”

Still, he says, a good one “can work wonders,” and he cites some favorites, such as one from F. Scott Fitzgerald ….

This Side of Paradise also supplies us with another genre of epigraph: the fictional quotation. A character in the novel, Thomas Parke D’Invilliers, is “cited” as the author of a poem at the start of The Great Gatsby: “Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; / If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, / Till she cry ‘Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, / I must have you!'” There is something devastatingly mischievous about the subverted authority of the fictional epigraph, just as there is something wonderfully mischievous about Fitzgerald’s quatrain itself.

He also likes the way George Eliot used epigraphs in her massive Middlemarch, which he calls “an epigraphic master-class, each of the 86 chapters coloured by an introductory source. Whether being allusive, ironic, aphoristic or downright playful, Eliot shows the full power of her intellectual arsenal. Layering on the sources thick, she seems to create a sort of epigraphic narrative of its own.”