Marilyn Orr. George Eliot’s religious imagination: A theopoetical evolution

Abstract

The monograph by the Canadian scholar Marilyn Orr examines George Eliot’s oeuvre from the viewpoint of theopoetics. The author analyses the writer’s novels in chronological order, paying special attention to the problem of religious influence. The search of the form in the novel Adam Bede is interpreted as a search for ways to implement the writer’s own ideas, while Felix Holt, the Radicalis shown as an attempt to create a non-religious saint; in Middlemarch, the scholar continues, Eliot concentrated on depiction of a priest’s social role in a novel; finally, in Daniel Deronda we see an emphasized prevalence of the characters’ spiritual life over accuracy and truthfulness of narration, breaking the mold of realism. Orr’s methodology opens up new ways to look at the familiar classical texts, but it is not free of certain limitations (detailed examples provided in the review).