ABSTRACT
Byronism was a subject which continued to be discussed or alluded to-even in moralistic Victorian women’s fiction—and not always pejoratively. For example, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters depicts Lord Byron’s verse being misjudged by philistines and prudes. However, George Eliot’s Felix Holt has the radical hero Felix assuming that the reading of Byron indicates Hitherto Esther’s bourgeois desire to ape aristocratic gentility, and the narrator implies he might be right. The urgency of the critique of Romanticism in Eliot’s fiction is, of course, testament to the overwhelming influence on her of its literature, especially the poetry of Wordsworth, and the novels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and Madame de Stael. Byron’s pilgrim was wasted by sexual satiety, but Dorothea, whose name recalls the saint martyred in the city for preserving her virginity, experiences sexual frustration in Rome.
