George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism

In George Eliot's last two novels, Middlemarch (1871-72) and Daniel Deronda (1876), she abandons the realism she had explored and articulated so carefully, most famously in Adam Bede, 'a faithful account of men and things', for an unprecedented return to 'cloud-borne angels, [...] prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors'. This study addresses Eliot's exploitation of Victorian medievalism by considering the way in which she utilizes the discourses of medievalism, both for their potential for sub…