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George Eliot's realism and Adam Smith.(Critical Essay)

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From: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
Date: 20020922
Author:Coovadia, Imraan

"Young ladies don't understand political economy," Mr. Brooke explains in Middlemarch, "I remember when we were all reading Adam Smith. There is a book, now." (1) Although references to economics are invariably satirical in George Eliot's fiction, her later novels borrow extensively from Smith. The images that George Eliot selects in Felix Holt as emblems of her own realism--a milkmaid, an election day mob, and a chessboard--are indebted to Smith, particularly to his focus on the ways in which each person's career interferes with that of every other, whether for good or for ill. ...

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