Review by Choice Review
This is a notable addition to the St. Martin's series "Literary Lives." Aiming at the general reader, as well as at undergraduate and graduate students, McSweeney traces Eliot's development as an artist, enlacing his account of each novel with the biographical events and social context which it transmutes, an account he enhances with aptly chosen quotations from other critics. Moreover he deftly introduces Eliot's own theories of fiction at appropriate points, and with unobtrusive skill reveals how her philosophical ideas, scientific lore, and historical knowledge are embodied in her poetry and fiction. He summarizes, judges, and suggests; his guide to further reading sends the student to (with hardly an exception) the best scholarship and criticism of Eliot's life and works available. Full of admiration for Eliot's best work (as in Middlemarch), he is firmly specific about what he judges to be her failures (as in parts of Daniel Derona) and the reasons therefor. He writes a lucid, readable style, mercifully free of current critical jargon, and has produced an admirable introduction to the work of this great, insurgent, Victorian novelist. Adequately indexed.-J. W. Bicknell, emeritus, Drew University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
