Ranging over all George Eliot's fiction and drawing as well on her
letters, essays, and translations, in this book the distinguished critic
Neil Hertz documents Eliot's lifelong questioning of the nature of
authorship and of what it might mean, in the language of one of her
early letters, for her "not simply to be, but to utter."
Pursuing oddities of diction and figuration, of plotting and
characterization, Hertz finds everywhere in Eliot's works passages of
high mimetic realism that ask to be read as allegories of writing or as
characters whose actions and destinies can only be understood if they
are seen as disguised surrogates of their author. Each essay begins with
an intriguing or problematic bit of language, then moves about within a
particular work of fiction or criss-cross to other writings of Eliot's
as well as to works by philosophers, psychoanalysts, and literary
theorists.