Adam Bede published in 1859 is George Eliot’s first full-length novel but not her first fiction. At the time of its apparition, she had already published a collection of three novellas and established herself as an editor, reviewer, and essayist....

Adam Bede published in 1859 is George Eliot’s first full-length novel but not her first fiction. At the time of its apparition, she had already published a collection of three novellas and established herself as an editor, reviewer, and essayist....

The greatest recent event -- that "God is dead," that the belief in the Christian God has ceased to be believable -- is... cast[ing] its shadows over Europe. For the few, at lease, whose eyes....are strong and sensitive enough for this...

In George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, a theme of subjugation through observation becomes a unifying tie between Jews and women, two primary categories of characters in the novel. Eliot's female characters provide a complex commentary on the...

The first few books of Daniel Deronda focused on Gwendolen Harleth, who shines as a self-centered, domineering young woman. In becoming trapped by marriage to Grandcourt, she develops growing fascination with Daniel, an attraction that began...

According to The Journal of Literary Technique, the narrative voice in Middlemarch uses “an authoritative system of interpretation adequate to explain the particular experience of each individual character”(Clark-Beattie 199). In chapter 37, Eliot...

When comparing Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre to fellow Victorian novelist, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, one might feel inclined to draw similarities between the title character of the former, to Dorothea Brooke. However, the Middlemarch character...

A major theme in George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch, is the role of women in the community. The female characters in the novel are, to some extent, oppressed by the social expectations that prevail in Middlemarch. Regardless of social standing,...

It is only as an historian that he [the author] has the smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events, he is nowhere. --Henry James

Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready to be institutionalized. --May West

One of George...

In George Eliot's novel Middlemarch, each character struggles to reconcile his desires with the realities of his life. This struggle often leads to an imaginative construction of reality in the "fellowship of illusion." In this novel, the...

In Chapter Twenty of Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke realizes that she has made a grave mistake in marriage: ÃÂÂ...for that new real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from the endless minutaiae by which her view of Mr....

George Eliot's unwillingness to write a Positivist novel has been clearly documented in her letters. Her responses to Frederic Harrison's suggestion that "the grand features of Comte's world might be sketched in fiction in their normal...

George Eliot writes that a marriage is either a "gradual conquest or irremediable loss of union" (Eliot 832). In other words, marriage is a joint venture that has the goal of eventually culminating into the union of two separate persons. In...

Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor...

In law a husband and wife are one person, and the husband is that person...

A woman...has got to put up with the life her husband makes for her...

In Middlemarch, George Eliot offers a portrayal of a closely-knit, semi-rural community, but in fact...

In George Eliot's novel Middlemarch, a successful and happy marriage between two characters involves the willingness to work together on their relationship. Each character must present a broad perspective, which includes the ability to know and...

George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch provides the reader with a valuable insight into the lives of different women in the first half of nineteenth century provincial England. The novel gives its readers a good idea of how people interact with and are...

In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the reader is confronted with a cast of enigmatic characters, though the “character” the reader receives the most exposure to is perhaps the least easily understood, and for the simple fact that it should not be a...

Charles Darwin is known for his profound influence of the study of evolution. However, his contributions to 19th century society go beyond his scientific theories; it is undeniable that Darwin affected what writers wrote about life and what...

Throughout most of human history, it has been difficult or even impossible to change social classes. Those born into poverty tended to remain there as slaves or peasants, and wealth tended to remain concentrated in the hands of the hereditary...

As art mirrors life, so too does George Eliot’s Middlemarch attempt to replicate a realistic world, particularly in the interactions and relationships between all the characters in the novel. Whether the relationship between the characters and the...

Objects might be more human than we think; well, in some sense. Although a plate lacks the capability to display sorrow, psychology studies have suggested evidence that it might contain the ability to embody sentiments after all. In the late...

This essay would consider the modes of sentimental realism as presented in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Charles Dickens Oliver Twist. In Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the narrator’s use of sentimentalism enables the readers to sympathise with the...

Silas Marner (1861) is George Eliot’s third and arguably most perfectly constructed novel. The book skillfully combines the conflicting aspects of Realism on the one hand, and fairy tale writing on the other by dwelling on the life of the...