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Middlemarch

JUNE SKYE SZIROTNY (ESSAY DATE SPRING 1998)

SOURCE: Szirotny, June Skye. "'No Sorrow I Have Thought More About': The Tragic Failure of George Eliot's St. Theresa." Victorian Newsletter, 93 (spring 1998): 17-27.

In the following essay, Szirotny opposes the critical tendency to deny Eliot the status of a proto-feminist, arguing that Middlemarch is a feminist novel and a damnation of a society that is oppressive to women.

Whether George Eliot was in some sense a feminist has remained a moot question from her day to this. Though she knew "the supremacy of the intellectual life" (M lxxiii, IV:188)¹ and obtained for herself a "masculine" vocation that was life itself to her,² though she argued that women have a right to education and that those deprived of love have a special need for...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Primary Sources
   1. (Review Date 14 April 1860)
4. General Commentary
   1. Virginia Woolf (Essay Date 1925)
   2. Sherri Catherine Smith (Essay Date June 1996)
5. Title Commentary
   1. Felix Holt, the Radical
   2. Middlemarch
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright

1. Feminism
2. George Eliot