Volume 31, Number 16 · October 25, 1984
Is Science Beautiful?
By David Joravsky
Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction
by Gillian Beer
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 303 pp., $35.00
Darwin told us a story about ourselves. Novelists tell us stories of ourselves. Is there then some essential similarity between Darwin's Descent of Man and, say, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda? Gillian Beer thinks there is, and I believe she has some important points that illuminate both Darwin and Eliot, both biological science and the knowledge discovered by fiction. Unfortunately she has concealed her illuminating points within a cloudy book that will put off all but a handful of fellow specialists in a small branch of literary studies. Let me try, however presumptuously, to recast her argument, with critical additions that may open the issues to a wider audience.
Review, 3216 words
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