Notes to pages 88–92 173
critical responses; see J. McDonagh, ‘Th e Early Novels’, in G. Levine (ed.), Th e Cam-
bridge Companion to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp.
38–56. Critical assessments of pastoralism, rurality and the past include U. C. Knoep-
fl macher, George Eliot’s Early Novels: the Limits of Realism (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
CA: University of California Press, 1968); I. Adam, ‘Th e Structure of Realism in Adam
Bede’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 30:2 (1975), pp. 127–49; and H. Li, Memory and His-
tory in George Eliot: Transfi guring the Past (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).- On female sexuality and mobility in these novels, see W. Parkins, Mobility and Modernity
in Women’s Novels, 1850s–1930s: Women Moving Dangerously (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009) and G. Beer, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986). - Hetty has inspired sharp critical responses that vary widely in their view of Eliot’s
approach to the naïve and vain girl: U. C. Knoepfl macher, for example, reads her as a
‘repulsive’ fi gure whose ‘charm is the perverse result of George Eliot’s excessive eff orts to
denigrate her character’; see Knoepfl macher, George Eliot’s Early Novels, p. 120. Feminist
critics have been more responsive to the complexities of Hetty’s character, recognizing
that her lack of perspective or wider vision prevent her from being situated as a hero-
ine, but that Eliot nonetheless evokes a complex form of understated sympathy for her
plight: see B. Hardy, Th e Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London: Athlone
Press, 1959) and Beer, George Eliot. - See, for example, L. McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist
Geographies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). - R. Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Verso, 2002), p. 43; Parkins,
Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, p. 13. - A. Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture: Th e Origins and Uses of Peripatetic
in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). - McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place, p. 154.
- Sayer, Women of the Fields, p. 92.
- Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture, p. 30.
- Quoted in Solnit, Wanderlust, p. 97.
- Ibid., p. 101.
- C. Brontë, Shirley (1849), ed. J. Cox (London: Penguin, 2008).
- Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture, pp. 201, 204.
- G. Eliot, Th e Mill on the Floss (1860), ed. A. S. Byatt (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 15.
- Ibid., p. 108.
- Ibid., p. 310.
- On women, rurality and nature, see J. Little, Gender and Rural Geography: Identity, Sex-
uality and Power in the Countryside (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2002), and G. Rose,
Feminism and Geography: Th e Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1993). Nina Auerbach discusses this scene in the wood for its Gothic associations
and allusions to witchcraft ; see N. Auerbach, ‘Th e Power of Hunger: Demonism and
Maggie Tulliver’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 30:2 (1975), pp. 150–71. - Th e situation of Maggie as middle-class is not altogether straightforward: for a full dis-
cussion of class in both novels, see M. Homans, ‘Dinah’s Blush, Maggie’s Arm: Class,
Gender, and Sexuality in George Eliot’s Early Novels’, Victorian Studies, 36:2 (1993),
pp. 155–78. - G. Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), ed. M. Reynolds (London: Penguin, 2008), pp. 94–5.
- Ibid., p. 148.
- Ibid., p. 142.