Henry James, George Eliot, and the "Old-fashioned English Novel"

Abstract

Abstract:Critics have tended to be reproving of Henry James's so-called "parasitic" relationship with George Eliot. Eschewing such characterizations, this article focuses instead upon the glimpse that James's early reviews of Eliot offer into his developing aspirations for the modern novel. In particular it traces how James's dissatisfaction with texts where Eliot had seemed to place insufficient demands upon her readers' faculties helped give rise to the innovative type of psychological realism underwriting his own work, which by soliciting the imagination of possibility would succeed in pushing the representational capacity of prose fiction deeper still into the life of the mind.