SOURCE: Bamber, Linda. “Self-Defeating Politics in George Eliot's Felix Holt.” Victorian Studies 18, no. 4 (June 1975): 419-35.

In the following essay, Bamber discusses Eliot's efforts to deal with the political situation in Felix Holt dialectically and her failure to offer precise political options through her representatives of the new order.

George Eliot's intention as a political novelist is to make dramatic situations out of the great conflicts within political philosophy: to dramatize the antitheses between private and public morality, between custom and justice, between immediate fellow-feeling and social theory. She is interested in these situations chiefly for their moral complexity and is endlessly preoccupied with the fact that neither side of a political conflict can ever claim exclusive justification. It is her intention as a moralist and as an artist to handle her political characters and situations in such a way that our sympathy and censure are equally divided between...