In George Eliot's last two novels, Middlemarch (1871-72) and Daniel
Deronda (1876), she abandons the realism she had explored and
articulated so carefully, most famously in Adam Bede, 'a faithful
account of men and things', for an unprecedented return to 'cloud-borne
angels, [...] prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors'. This study
addresses Eliot's exploitation of Victorian medievalism by considering
the way in which she utilizes the discourses of medievalism, both for
their potential for subversiveness and their potential for mediation, to
affirm that change is possible socially, culturally, and politically, in
her modern contemporary world. The various medieval discourses are
revealed as interstices within what initially appears to be a
continuation of the realism of her earlier novels. They permit political
and cultural readings of a different, and often unexpected, kind to the
realist bourgeois values of novels like Adam Bede, and to a lesser
extent, Felix Holt. These political and cultural readings reveal a
more determined, more obvious feminist and socialist polemic in her two
last and possibly greatest novels.