Volume 11, Number 12 · January 2, 1969
Heroine
By Noel Annan
George Eliot
by Gordon Haight
Oxford, 640 pp., $12.50
George Eliot is the greatest of English novelists. Or, if not, Middlemarch is the greatest Victorian novel. Or, if rot, it is second only to Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, Wuthering Heights, or The Ambassadors. Or, if such conjecture is tiresome, she is at least a novelist of great achievement whom no literate person who reads novels in any language can neglect. Tolstoy, James, and Proust admired her; her contemporaries revered her. Never at any time since her death has she been neglected, and in the past thirty years she has inspired not only numerous biographies and critical studies but also a copious emission of theses, by which some still believe the fertility of our culture can be measured.
Review, 3625 words
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