Vocation and Desire

Generations of critics have seen George Eliot as a conservative Victorian high moralist and sibyl. "Vocation and Desire" questions that image, finding in her work unexpected elements of anger, feminism, subversiveness, revenge, iconoclasm, wit and eroticism. Analyzing the making and remaking of George Eliot, Dorothea Barrett traces the development of Eliot's sybilline image, which gradually eclipsed the subversive George Eliot - an eclipse which Eliot herself initiated. Barrett's study of the heroines of Eliot's six major novels focuses on issues of language and desire, providing a re-reading of the contradictions and strengths of Eliot's work. She also considers the reception of George Eliot by 20th-century feminist critics, and discusses the broader implications of her work for contemporary feminism.