Afterword

Abstract

We can probably never know whether the more radical views in George Eliot’s later fiction were those she held when she began writing fiction or those she later developed. Probably she never fundamentally altered the radical notions she formulated after 1842 and before 1856. Ideas developed only in her late works are often adumbrated earlier, though she was constantly experimenting, building on past finds in succeeding works. Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda rework the conflict with a patriarchal husband in “Janet’s Repentance”; Felix Holt reworks the conflict with a patriarchal society in Adam Bede; and Silas Marner, The Spanish Gypsy and Daniel Deronda rework the conflict with a patriarchal father in Mill on the Floss. Recapitulating in her fiction the shift she underwent from a conservatism tied to Christianity to the rationalism she adopted after her apostasy, she perhaps, in “Janet’s Repentance,” adopted her earlier conservative position simply as a starting point for exploration that she hoped would end in adoption of a more radical position. She suggests as much while working on Mill, when she writes that her mind works best in her “remotest past,” and that she must work through “many strata” before she can use material gathered in the present (L, III: 128–29). Beginning with Silas Marner, the first work in which she looks favorably on rebellion, she is perhaps writing from her viewpoint at the time.