George Eliot, judaism and the novels

Saleel NurbhaiK. M. Newton

Palgrave Macmillan - Basingstoke

2002

This is the first study to argue that Jewish Mysticism influenced all Eliot's novels and not just her Jewish novel, Daniel Deronda , and leaves the reader with a very different George Eliot from that assumed by most previous criticism. Though previous studies have attempted to qualify the still-dominant view that George Eliot is firmly as part of the realistic tradition, this study goes further by demonstrating that a cohesive mythic structure with its basis in Jewish mysticism is identifiable in her fiction.