George Eliot’s reception as a writer has been checkered from the start. Prejudice followed the revelation of her real identity as a woman, and she suffered from critical neglect at the start of the twentieth century before a postwar renaissance of interest established her as one of the most powerful of British novelists.

Focusing on three of Eliot’s most influential and widely read Midlands novels, this guide traces recent critical interpretations of her work as well as revisiting some of the perspectives offered by original reviewers and early critics. Class, gender, and ideology all come under scrutiny, as do Eliot’s central fictive themes of currency, circulation, sensuality, and the voice.