...Rosetta Young “‘How nicely you talk; I love to hear you’: Speech as Cultural Capital in Emma , Middlemarch , and The Portrait of a Lady ” (pp. 286–315) In this essay, I examine how, in Emma , Middlemarch , and The Portrait of a Lady , Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James craft heroines who...

...Margaret A. Miller Margaret A. Miller, “George Eliot’s Wetland Form” (pp. 291–320) This essay relies on the 1747 Lincolnshire bog-woman and her porosity of bodily boundaries as a useful heuristic to historicize the ontological unity between gender unconformity and the environment. George Eliot’s...

...Jayne Hildebrand Jayne Hildebrand, “Environmental Desire in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss ” (pp. 192–222) This essay argues that George Eliot’s expansive use of landscape description in The Mill on the Floss (1860) represents an engagement with the emerging concept of a biological “medium...

...Rebecca Ehrhardt Rebecca Ehrhardt, “‘One of Those’ Characters in Middlemarch ” (pp. 318–345) This essay takes a robust critical conversation about character in realist fiction in a new direction through a reading of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72). While critics have traditionally theorized...

...Ilana M. Blumberg Ilana M. Blumberg, “Sympathy or Religion? George Eliot and Christian Conversion” (pp. 360–387) This essay argues that a postsecular moment requires our return to George Eliot to consider anew the relations between religion and secularity. Looking at her early works, in particular...

...Elsie B. Michie Elsie B. Michie, “Envious Reading: Margaret Oliphant on George Eliot” (pp. 87–111) This essay maps out a model of influence that is not deterministic but instead addresses historical “conditions,” the proximity of authors’ lives to their work, the relationship among texts, and how...

...Rachel Kravetz Rachel Kravetz, “The Radiant Tableaux of Daniel Deronda ” (pp. 68–93) This essay argues that the ekphrastic images in Daniel Deronda (1876) mark a shift in George Eliot’s thought away from a historical to a prophetic national mode. Taking as a point of departure the critical...

...Deborah Shapple Spillman Deborah Shapple Spillman, “All That Is Solid Turns into Steam: Sublimation and Sympathy in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss ” (pp. 338–373) This essay argues that steam and its gaseous properties in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1861) represent capital’s...

...Meegan Kennedy Meegan Kennedy, “‘A True Prophet’? Speculation in Victorian Sensory Physiology and George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’” (pp. 369–403) George Eliot’s novella “The Lifted Veil” (1859) is often considered an outlier in Eliot’s realist corpus, perhaps due to its focus on controversial...

...Tatiana Kuzmic This essay contributes to George Eliot scholarship by examining the author’s interest in Eastern Europe, which spanned the length of her literary career, and its portrayal in her fiction. It situates Eliot’s Eastern European characters—from the minor ones, such as Countess...

...Jennifer Raterman This article traces George Eliot’s use of translation and foreign words to make “impressions” on her readers. This keyword, which recurs in her narratives and in the title of her final work, is used to refer to the repeated reinterpretations of translated quotes that undergird...

...Ilana M. Blumberg Silas Marner (1861) depicts a stolen hoard of glittering gold at a historical moment that saw an increasing displacement of coinage by paper money in one of the major developments of industrial capitalist modernity. Reading the novel as George Eliot’s aesthetic and ethical...

...Michael Tondre This article advances a fresh understanding of the ethics and aesthetics that defined George Eliot's fictional maturity, particularly in light of Eliot's fascination with energy science. Victorian scientists discovered that the energy of the world was ineluctably lost or “diffused...

...Cara Weber Victorian writers often focus questions of ethics through scenes of sympathetic encounters that have been conceptualized, both by Victorian thinkers and by their recent critics, as a theater of identification in which an onlooking spectator identifies with a sufferer. George Eliot's...

...Rebecca N. Mitchell In both Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) an earnest and ambitious man falls in love with a superficial and beautiful woman named Rosamond. This essay explores the “Rosamond plots” to argue that Middlemarch stages a radical revision...

...Emily Coit Emily Coit, "'This Immense Expense of Art': George Eliot and John Ruskin on Consumption and the Limits of Sympathy" (pp. 214–245) This essay attempts to better our understanding of George Eliot's conservatism by examining a body of ideas about consumption and moral obligation that she...

...Katherine Dunagan Osborne Katherine Dunagan Osborne, "Inherited Emotions: George Eliot and the Politics of Heirlooms" (pp. 465–493) This essay removes George Eliot's heroines from heterosexual dyads to focus on the roles that things play in women's autonomous moral and sexual development. Because...