George Eliot: Critical Issues

In this monograph Pauline Nestor disagrees with John Bayley’s contention that George Eliot “lives in a distant and now unrecoverable country of her own.” Nestor asserts “such a position is wrong – … the landscape of Eliot’s fiction is neither so distant, nor so unrecoverable” (p. 7). Her fiction “forms an extended, particularised and dramatic investigation of fundamental ethical problems” (p. 8). The remainder of Nestor’s book is preoccupied with the explication of these problems in George Eliot’s fiction. Following a lengthy introduction, Nestor begins with Scenes of A Clerical Life, then moves through the others in chronological order,...