GEORGE ELIOT S SERIAL FICTION

Serialization was a form of publication used extensively by many Victorian writers, although it was primarily associated with more dramatic and sensationalist novelists than George Eliot. Reviewers of Eliot's Middlemarch note that many serial installments would "leave their heroine in a position of perplexity of peril. Either she has run away from home, or is left on London Bridge with only fourpence-halfpenny and an opera cloak; or her soul has been softened by the charm of a dragoon, wh…