SOURCE: Leavis, L. R. “George Eliot's Creative Mind, Felix Holt as the Turning Point of Her Art.” English Studies 67, no. 4 (August 1986): 311-26.

In the following essay, Leavis discusses how the failure of Felix Holt led to the success of Middlemarch.

In our time when literary criticism has been generally discarded for the fashionable mechanics of structuralism and post-structuralism, George Eliot's novels can still raise extreme responses. The Jewish sections of Daniel Deronda or the ‘failed St. Theresa’ emphasis on Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch still find their admirers,¹ while those hating her writing can reject even her best novels, labelling her as an infuriatingly emotional Victorian encumbered with a heavy pedantic style and often breaking into the sustained didacticism of the self-educated. Robert Liddell's The Novels of George Eliot (London, 1977) would appear to exemplify much of the previous account of an extreme hostility to her art, and while the...