George Eliot and Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Fiction

Abstract This chapter examines eighteenth-century and Romantic fiction as a persistent inheritance in George Eliot’s fiction. The literature of this period, in its very outmodedness, encapsulates the frustrating but emotionally vital dependence on the previous generation that is central to Eliot’s novelistic creed. At the level of allusion, Eliot uses eighteenth-century fiction to define the terms of its own dismissal, allowing the literature of her childhood to shape her own narrative voice. The chapter concludes with an examination of inheritance in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. In Richardson’s novel, Eliot would have found a model for a narrative in which the ideal of ‘separateness with communication’, unable to find expression within contemporary human relationships, is postponed to an unrealised future.