SOURCE: Thompson, Andrew. “George Eliot, Dante, and Moral Choice in Felix Holt, The Radical.” Modern Language Review 86, no. 3 (July 1991): 553-66.

In the following essay, Thompson evaluates Eliot's many references and allusions to Dante in Felix Holt.

In his introduction to George Eliot—A Writer's Notebook 1854-1879, Joseph Wiesenfarth draws attention to the ‘substantial body of allusion’ to the Divina Commedia of Dante in Felix Holt, the Radical. In particular Wiesenfarth notes the use of Inferno Canto xiii (the Wood of the Suicides), which Eliot uses to make Transome Court ‘akin to a circle of Dante's Hell’ and to create ‘an atmosphere of hopeless suffering caused by Mrs Transome's sins’, in which she is tortured by her ex-lover, Jermyn, and her son, Harold.¹ Wiesenfarth also notes how in the novel ‘growth through suffering … seems peculiarly susceptible to presentation in terms of Dantean imagery’ (Notebook, p. xxxviii). In this article...