George Eliot's Intellectual Life

by Fleishman, Avrom

• ISBN13: 9781107402669
• ISBN10: 1107402662
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-08-23
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

It is well known that George Eliot's intelligence and her wide knowledge of literature, history, philosophy and religion shaped her fiction, but until now no study has followed the development of her thinking through her whole career. This 2010 intellectual biography traces the course of that development from her initial Christian culture, through her loss of faith and working out of a humanistic and cautiously progressive world view, to the thought-provoking achievements of her novels. It focuses on her responses to her reading in her essays, reviews and letters as well as in the historical pictures of Romola, the political implications of Felix Holt, the comprehensive view of English society in Middlemarch, and the visionary account of personal inspiration in Daniel Deronda. This portrait of a major Victorian intellectual is an important addition to our understanding of Eliot's mind and works, as well as of her place in nineteenth-century British culture.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The 'evangelical': starting out in a Christian culture

The apostate: moving beyond the Christian mythos

The journalist: editing, reviewing, shaping a worldview

The Germanist: balancing the counterweight of German thinkers

The novelist: mixing realism, naturalism and myth-making

The historian: tracking the idealistic - utopian and national - in Romola and The Spanish Gypsy

The 'radical': taking an anti-political stance in Felix Holt

The encyclopaedist: transcending the past in Middlemarch

The visionary: transmitting ideals in Daniel Deronda

The intellectual: cultural critique in Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Works cited

Index

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