George Eliot's Intellectual Life

This portrait of a major Victorian intellectual was an important addition to scholarship on nineteenth-century British culture.

Avrom Fleishman (Author)

9780521117364, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 February 2010

310 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.64 kg

"One strength of the book is that it returns to some of Eliot's essays, attending not only to the points that have been central to recent critical discussion, but also drawing out elements that have been overlooked." --Victorian Studies

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 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.

Introduction
1. The 'evangelical': starting out in a Christian culture
2. The apostate: moving beyond the Christian mythos
3. The journalist: editing, reviewing, shaping a worldview
4. The Germanist: balancing the counterweight of German thinkers
5. The novelist: mixing realism, naturalism and myth-making
6. The historian: tracking the idealistic - utopian and national - in Romola and The Spanish Gypsy
7. The 'radical': taking an anti-political stance in Felix Holt
8. The encyclopaedist: transcending the past in Middlemarch
9. The visionary: transmitting ideals in Daniel Deronda
10. The intellectual: cultural critique in Impressions of Theophrastus Such
Works cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]