George Eliot, Judaism And The Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism

This is the first study to argue that Jewish Mysticism influenced not only her Jewish novel, Daniel Deronda, but all of George Eliot's novels. The reader is left with a very different George Eliot from that assumed by most previous criticism. Though previous studies have attempted to qualify the still-dominant view that Eliot is firmly a part of the realistic tradition, this study goes further by demonstrating that a cohesive mythic structure with its basis in Jewish mysticism is identifiable in her fiction.