George Eliot pushed the boundaries of fiction and of Victorian society. She was an extraordinary woman whose unconventional life meant that she was judged harshly by family, friends, and strangers. Eliot wanted to draw attention to the feelings and motivations of ordinary people, so that we might feel more generous towards each other. But human beings are complex, and to capture that complexity Eliot drew on an astonishing range of philosophical, psychological, and scientific ideas. She hoped her work might do good, yet she was clear-eyed about the limits of both human sympathy and the novel.

In this Very Short Introduction, Juliette Atkinson explores the ideas feeding Eliot's fiction and looks at the literary techniques—such as narrative voice, genre, imagery, structure, and syntax—that she used to embody them. These shape her recurrent themes: the stifling nature of gossip, the hardships experienced by commonplace individuals, the duty of practicing fellow-feeling and the difficulty of doing so. Atkinson argues that George Eliot was a social outcast who became a sage, through the creation of some of the most influential novels ever written in English.