Introduction

Abstract

As we celebrate George Eliot’s bicentennial in 2019, we might be led to ask how her works can be read with profit and significance today: i.e., why proceed? Readers find rewards in Eliot’s works for her narrative representations of cultural issues or values, for her keen discernment of interpersonal relations, and for her description of private thought and motivation in lone individuals. In this introduction that surveys a history of Eliot’s reader reception, one can note that, while Victorian readers led the way in appreciating her exceptional level of human empathy in her writing, in the modern era, English and American readers later turned away from Eliot’s writing to cope with the wartime chaos that tore their societies apart. However, Thomas Pinney (Eliot’s Essays, 1963) recalls studying Middlemarch in the mid-1950s under Gordon Haight (The George Eliot Letters, 1954–1978), noting that Haight’s scholarly commitment contributed to the restoration of critical work on Eliot’s works. Publishers are now eager to publish her works and criticism about them. Pinney writes that Eliot’s works “may usefully be studied,” and that this collection of essays “illustrate[s] this proposition to good effect.” Within these pages, a reader will find that George Eliot’s works respond with resiliency to contextual and interdisciplinary criticism.