This book has its origin not in George Eliot's literary beginnings, but at a summative point in the middle of her career—specifi cally, with her 1866 novel, Felix Holt, The Radical. In a passage from the introduction of Felix Holt that stands as an obvious precursor to the famous lines from her masterpiece, Middlemarch, regarding the ‘roar which lies on the other side of silence’, the narrator observes that in spite of the universality of human suffering, the actual particulars of individual sorrows

The disparity between the intensity of the word ‘agonies’ and the subtle ‘whisper’ becomes symbolic of that level of ‘alertness to the world’ required both of the characters existing within George Eliot's stories, and of the readers experiencing the stories through them. Even more importantly, I would argue that these lines about personal deafness to the larger pain around us, coming nine years into her fi ction-writing career, stand as George Eliot's earliest explicit explanation of that most crucial theme in her work: the fundamental need for, but ultimately limited nature of, human sympathy. Imperfect consciousness is presented here as almost biologically innate, but through the worlds of her novels, we can discern that George Eliot clearly felt it was possible to make ourselves notice the ‘whisper’ with acts of increased attention.