George Eliots reception as a writer has been checkered from the start. Prejudice followed the revelation of her real identity as a woman, and she suffered from critical neglect at the start of the twentieth century before a postwar renaissance of interest established her as one of the most powerful of British novelists.Focusing on three of Eliots most influential and widely read "Midlands" novels, this guide traces recent critical interpretations of her work as well as revisiting some of the perspectives offered by original reviewers and early critics. Class, gender, and ideology all come under scrutiny, as do Eliots central fictive themes of currency, circulation, sensuality, and the voice.

Lucie Armitt teaches at the University of Wales, Bangor

Introducing Eliot: Then and Now

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This chapter looks at the currency of Eliot's work, beginning with a brief synopsis of her (un)popularity across both centuries before moving on to its most contemporary application: the success of the acclaimed BBC television series, 'Middlemarch', in 1993. This is then compared with the issues and events surrounding the serialisation of Eliot's work in periodicals of the nineteenth century, along with some responses of reviewers of the time. Moving on to the relationship between realism and narrative authority we turn to a consideration of George Eliot's status as a woman writer, her own attitudes towards her peers in 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' (1856), and late-twentieth-century feminist readings of Eliot's uncomfortably consolationist narrative closures

Eliot in Relation to Literary Realism

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This chapter focuses in detail on the work of Ian Adam, Jerome Thale and Dorothy Van Ghent, and relates to Eliot's realism (and its limitations) before moving on to J. Hillis Miller's deconstructionist reading in 'Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch'. The chapter concludes by setting out, in detail, the debate between Hillis Miller and Baruch Hochman on the role of metaphor in realist narrative

Eliot's Writing and the Politics of Class

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Here we consider a range of scholarship confronting issues of ideology in relation to Eliot's writing. Particular attention is given to the work of Daniel Cottom, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Margaret Homans. Class is considered in relation to the pastoral tradition, characters' discourse and dialect, the gendered division of labour, and the family unit

Sexuality, Gender and Desire in The Mill on the Floss

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Beginning with Henry James's 1866 review complaining about the ending of the novel, we go on to examine, in detail, the work of a series of approaches adopted by critics since 1965. Detailed attention is given to criticism by David Smith, Nina Auerbach, Eva Fuchs and Elizabeth Weed. Perhaps the most innovative body of work in the volume, this chapter pulls together incest, vampirism and witchcraft before moving on to more etymologically based readings centring on the relationship between language and gender

Eliot and Representations of Science

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Beginning with Sally Shuttleworth's work on the application of scientific theories of the organism to Victorian communities, we then move on to Robert Greenberg's detailed explication of Eliot's usage of scientific allusion in Middlemarch. Gillian Beer's work on Darwinian theory is also addressed in detail, as is Tess Cosslett's

Eliot's Metaphors of Circulation

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Starting with cholera and its relationship to circulatory systems in general, this chapter moves on to the relevance of the 'social disease' of blackmail to Eliot's life and work. Drawing together economic transactions, gambling, reputation and gossip, blackmail then functions as the central metaphor for the rest of the chapter. The main works of criticism considered

Jan B. Gordon

Alexander Welsh

Gillian Beer

Jeffrey Franklin

Notes

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Works Cited

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Acknowledgements

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Index

202

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