1. I wish to thank Gerhard Joseph, Adrienne Munich, Munich, George Levine, Suzanne Graver, Karen Thatcher, Pa-tricia Kennedy, Valerie Traub, Jessica Wolff, and Sara Wolff for help at one stage or another in the writing of this essay.

2. For Hegel, , see for instance G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (tr. Miller, A.V., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §178, “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another” (p. 111), and §187, “its essential being is present to it in the form of an ‘other’” (p. 114);Google Scholarfor Beauvoir, de, see Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex (tr. and ed. Parshley, H.M., New York: Bantam, 1953), “no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against it” (p. xvii);Google Scholarfor Lacan, , see Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian thing, or the meaning of the return to Freud in psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits, A Selection (tr. Sheridan, Alan, New York: Norton, 1977), “the analyst intervenes … either by his silence when he is the Other with a capital O, or by annulling his own resistance when he is the other with a small o” (p. 140). I wish to thank John P. Muller, William J. Richardson, and Don Eric Levine for the opportunity to work intensively with certain Hegel and Lacan texts.Google Scholar

3. The reference is to the last stanza of “Dover Beach.”Google Scholar

4. See Lewes', Marian EvansJournal for 28 11 1860, cited in The George Eliot Letters (ed. Haight, Gordon S., 9 vols., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–1978, henceforth GEL), “I am engaged now in writing a story, … which has thrust itself between me and the other book I was meditating.”Google Scholar

5. I believe there are many ways in which the discomfiting qualities of “The Lifted Veil” remarkably anticipate Daniel Deronda. With its emphasis on the malignity of second-sight and the predictability of human fate, it is a sort of precursory inversion of Daniel Deronda's disconcerting emphasis on the positive value of prophecy and coincidence and on the uncertainty and unexpectedness of experience.Google Scholar

6. See the “Epilogue” of Felix Holt, the Radical (ed. Coveney, Peter, Penguin English Library, henceforth PEL, 1972). George Eliot makes a considerable point of being secretive about where and how Felix and Esther live.Google Scholar

7. See the chapter, “George Eliot: Daniel Deronda and the Idea of a Future Life” in Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 181–209.Google Scholar

8. See, for example, the Gascoignes in Chapters 7 and 8, the Mallingers in the middle pages of Chapter 16, and the Meyricks in Chapter 18, in which George Eliot offers us fairly particular, though not elaborate, expositions of these families at home. I am arguing that, in each case, the head of the family (Mr. Gascoigne, Sir Hugo, Mrs. Meyrick) proves exceptionally important to either Daniel or Gwendolen but does not directly impinge upon the outcome, that is, the “plot” of the book. It is in this sense that I refer to them as “neutral” as opposed, say, to Grandcourt or Mordecai.Google Scholar

9. We get our first reference to Maggie's teaching in Book vi. Chapter 2 of The Mill on the Floss (ed. Byatt, A.S., PEL, 1979, henceforth MF), when Lucy says, “You're forgetting that you've left that dreary schoolroom behind you, and have no little girls' clothes to mend,” and Maggie replies, “One gets a bad habit of being unhappy” (p. 481). At this time, Maggie is taking what was to be a short holiday from two years of governessing and teaching. We are never shown her in what is described as “a third-rate schoolroom with all its jarring sounds and petty round of tasks” (Book vi, Chapter 3, p. 494).Google Scholar

10. IISamuel, 1:23. See the title page of MF and the last words of its “Conclusion” (p. 657).Google Scholar

11. Book III of Romola (ed. Sanders, Andrew, PEL, 1980) begins with the siege of Florence and three chapters (42–44) called respectively, “Romola in Her Place,” “The Unseen Madonna,” and “The Visible Madonna,” all full of references to the Madonna dell' Impruneta, “the mysterious, hidden image … of the Pitying Mother” (p. 455), and in which Romola is constantly referred to as Madonna. See particularly p. 462, when she visits the sick: “‘Bless you, madonna, bless you!’ said the faint chorus, in much the same tone as that in which they had a few minutes before praised and thanked the unseen Madonna.” Chapter 68 ends as follows: “Many legends were afterwards told in that valley adout the blessed Lady who came over the sea, but they were legends by which all who heard might know that in times gone by a woman had done beautiful loving deeds there, rescuing those who were ready to perish” (p. 649).Google Scholar

12. See Chapter 59, “Pleading,” in which Savonarola says, “The cause of my party is the cause of God's kingdom” and Romola replies, “I do not believe it! … God's kingdom is something wider - else, let me stand outside it with the beings that I love” (p. 578).Google Scholar

13. See Lewes', Marian Evans letter to Sara Hennell: “You are right in saying that Romola is ideal -1 feel it acutely in the reproof my own soul is constantly getting from the image it has made” (GEL, iv, 103–104). She would not say that she ever felt reproved by her image of Maggie.Google Scholar

14. See her Notes on The Spanish Gypsy printed in George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (ed. Cross, J.W., 3 vols., Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1885): “A young maiden, believing herself to be on the eve of the chief event of her life - marriage- about to share in the ordinary lot of womanhood, … has suddenly announced to her that she is chosen to fulfill a great destiny. … I required the opposition of race to give the need for announcing the expectation of marriage” (III, 42–43). Reprinted in F.B. Pinion, A George Eliot Miscellany (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 126.Google Scholar

15. See, for instance, Austen, Zelda, “Why Feminist Critics Are Angry With George Eliot,” College English, 37 (1976), 549-61, and Bonnie Zimmerman, “What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Literary Criticism”; “The intense disappointment expressed by many feminists over George Eliot's disposal of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory (ed. Showalter, Elaine, New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 210–11.Google Scholar

16. Dorothea herself feared “that there was always something better which she might have done” (p. 893), and see, for instance, Edwards', Lee R. unusually empathic “Women, Energy, and Middlemarch,” Massachusetts Review, 13 (1972), 223–38, reprinted in Middlemarch (ed. Hornback, Bert G., Norton Critical Edition, 1977), pp. 683–93.Google Scholar

17. Middlemarch (ed. Harvey, W.J., PEL, 1965, henceforth Mm), p. 894.Google Scholar

18. See, for example, her letters to Davies, Emily, 16 November 1867 and 7 December 1869 (GEL, VIII, 408, 469).Google Scholar

19. Mm, Chapter 83 (p. 870) and “Finale” (p. 894)Google Scholar

20. Dorothea's plans for farmtenants' cottages are a constant leitmotif of Mm. It last appears when she discovers that she is not rich enough “to buy land … and found a village which should be a school of industry” (Chapter 76, p. 822). She only finally disposes of Casaubon's demand that she give her life to his scholarly remains when she puts away his “Synoptical Tabulation for the use of Mrs. Casaubon,” writing on the envelope, “Do you not see now that I could not submit my soul to yours, by working hopelessly at what I have no belief in” (Chapter 54, p. 583).Google Scholar

21. See MF, Book vu, Chapter 5, especially pp. 653, 655, and 656. Philip, and Stephen, “both felt that their keenest joy and keenest sorrow were for ever buried there” (p. 656). See also Mm, “Finale,” p. 896.Google Scholar

22. In a letter to John Morley of 14 May 1867 (GEL, VIII, 402).Google Scholar

23. For people unfamiliar with Marian Evans' family history, my calling Isaac Evans a “deadly brother” refers to his refusal to have anything to do with his sister between 1857 when she wrote to him that “she had changed her name” - to Mrs. Lewes, though she didn't tell him that (GEL, 11, 331) - and 1880 when he heard that she had married J.W. Cross.Google Scholar

24. See, for example, Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar's, Susan discussion of George Eliot's “angels of renunciation” who are partly “a function of selfhatred” and partly a representation of “how the injustice of masculine society bequeaths to women special strengths and virtues, specifically a capacity for feeling born of disenfranchisement from a corrupt social order,” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). P. 498Google Scholar

25. See, for example, in George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (ed. Carroll, David, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), reviews by George Saintsbury (no. 56) and A.V. Dicey (no. 59), also George Eliot's own comment to Harriet Beecher Stowe about resistance to “the Jewish element” (GEL, vi, 301) and the wonderful “Daniel Deronda, A Conversation” by Henry James (no. 62). The locus classicus is In F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: George W. Stewart, 1948): “the weakness … is represented by Deronda himself, and what may be called in general the Zionist inspiration” (p. 102) and “Henry James wouldn't have written The Portrait of a Lady if he hadn't read Gwendolen Harleth (as I shall call the good part of Daniel Deronda)" (p. 108).Google Scholar

26. Deronda, Daniel (ed. Hardy, Barbara, PEL, 1967, henceforth DD), Chapter 69, p. 875.Google Scholar

27. GEL, I 264.Google Scholar

28. DD. Chapter 51, p 694.Google Scholar

29. The notion that Daniel Deronda “is” a woman (rather than just androgynous or a representation of George Eliot) may not be original but I cannot find any reference to it in previous criticism.Google Scholar

30. DD, Chapter 53, p. 723.Google Scholar

31. In Vol. xix of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (ed. Strachey, James, London: Hogarth Press, 1961).Google Scholar

32. It is a confusing coincidence that the example Freud gives is of a patient who says “‘You ask who this person in the dream can be. It's not my mother.’ We emend this to: ‘So it is his mother.’” (“Negation,” p. 235.)Google Scholar

33. Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 902. The index of concepts from which this quotation is taken was compiled by Jacques-Alain Miller. I want to thank Jane Gallop for drawing my attention to the original text which is shortened in the English translation.Google Scholar

34. “The highest ‘calling and election’ is to do without opium and to live through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance” (GEL, iii, 366; her underlining).Google Scholar

35. The reference is to her poem (sometimes called her Positivist hymn) which begins “Oh may I join the choir invisible / Of those immortal dead who live again / In minds made better by their presence.”Google Scholar

36. Galatians 3:28.Google Scholar

37. See Lacan, “society may no longer be defined as a collection of individuals, … The terms of psychoanalytical [i.e., Lacanian] intervention … make it sufficiently clear … that its ethic is not an individualist one” from “The Freudian thing, or the meaning of the return to Freud in psychoanalysis,” Ecrits, A Selection, p. 127. This comment oddly echoes G.M. Young's use, in The Portrait of An Age: Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), of the following exchange between Coleridge and Harriet Martineau, “S.T.C. once said to Miss Martineau: ‘You seem to regard society as an aggregate of individuals.’ ‘Of course I do,’ she replied” (p. 68). Part of Lacan's claim is that most American psychoanalysis, as indeed most of American culture in general, is unsatisfyingly individualistic.Google Scholar

38. For an amusing and important rehearsal of the problems of a male writer calling for “feminization,” see Elaine Showalter, “Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year,” Raritan Review, 3 (1983), 130–49.Google Scholar