ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that of Middlemarch (18712) George Eliot as narrator begins by drawing a famous contrast between her own closely focused practice and Fielding's copious digressions over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe' and she ends by ranging as far as Paris to tell the story of Lydgate's infatuation with an actress in his days as a medical student. Will Ladislaw's interesting but not fully accommodated presence in Middlemarch shows Eliot's imagination straining against the limited frame of a realist novel about English provincial middle-class life. It is in Daniel Deronda that she makes her most important attempt to break free from those restrictions and comes closest to writing a Bildungsroman on Goethean lines, for the story of Deronda himself presents a fuller treatment of the problem of dilettantism in a way that is clearly indebted to Goethe.
