George Eliot, George Henry Lewes and the Mechanisms of Literary Influence
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In Lieu of an Introduction
Virginia Woolf has a resonant, often-quoted sentence in her famous essay on George Eliot from 20 November 1919, asserting that Middlemarch, for all of its flaws, was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”[1] In a less frequently quoted passage grappling with the previously mentioned flaws, the most important British high-modernist author writes:
It is partly that her hold upon dialogue, when it is not dialect, is slack; and partly that she seems to shrink with an elderly dread of fatigue from the effort of emotional concentration. (...)