Glegg, Mrs. Jane

Mrs. Tulliver's oldest sister; a handsome, thrifty, ill-tempered woman, the embodiment of the Dodson spirit. "The Dodsons were certainly a handsome family, and Mrs. Glegg was not the least handsome of the sisters. ... no impartial observer could have denied that for a woman of fifty she had a very comely face and figure, though Tom and Maggie considered their aunt Glegg as the type of ugliness. It is true she despised the advantages of costume, for though, as she often observed, no woman had better clothes, it was not her way to wear her new things out before her old ones. Other women, if they liked, might have their best thread-lace in every wash, but when Mrs. Glegg died it would be found that she had better lace laid by in the righthand drawer of her wardrobe, in the Spotted Chamber, than ever Mrs. Wooll of St. Ogg's had bought in her life, although Mrs. Wooll wore her lace before it was paid for. So of her curled fronts: Mrs. Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness; but to look out on the week-day world from under a crisp and glossy front would be to introduce a most dreamlike and unpleasant confusion between the sacred and the secular. Occasionally, indeed, Mrs. Glegg wore one of her third-best fronts on a week-day visit, but not at a sister's house." She and her brother-in-law, Mr. TuUiver, frequently disagree, and she is disliked by the Tulliver children because of her disagreeable temper and domineering ways. Her sense of family loyalty, however, as well as her desire for gain, leads her to help Tom Tulliver when he is trying to make money in trade to pay his father's debts, and she surprises everyone by offering Maggie Tulliver a home after Maggie returns from her flight with Stephen Guest. Mrs. Everard, George Eliot's aunt (her mother's sister), one of the Pearson sisters, was the original of Aunt Glegg. Her portrait, corresponding fairly closely to the quoted description, is in the possession of the Reverend Frederic Rawlins Evans, George Eliot's nephew, and a reproduction of this is given in Olcott, George Eliot, p. 94. See also note and references under Dodsons.

<em>The Mill on the Floss</em>

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