ABSTRACT
Mary Ann Evans regarded as one of the great nineteenth-century realist novelists. Equally, Middlemarch', A Study of Provincial Life', is usually taken to represent the peak of her achievement, the most developed expression of her humanist worldview and realist fictional technique, a judgement recently reconfirmed by the self-consciously 'faithful' BBC television six-part dramatization of the novel. George Eliot's social formation was at best only emerging: a guarantee of connection to our own world in which each of its separate processes has gone further and deeper, but in her own world conflicting, pulling different ways, setting conscious problems in each story, almost each sentence, she must write. In The Great Tradition, F. R. Leavis argues that the work of the 'great English novelists' is 'characterised by a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity'.
