SOURCE: Starr, Elizabeth. “‘Influencing the Moral Taste’: Literary Work, Aesthetics, and Social Change in Felix Holt, the Radical.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 56, no. 1 (June 2001): 52-75.

In the following essay, Starr discusses Eliot's beliefs on the relationship between authorship and commerce in Felix Holt.

For George Eliot, as for many successful Victorian novelists, moral inquiry into the nature of “the author's vocation” inevitably turned to the relationship between fiction and commerce.¹ In the section headed “Authorship” in her “Leaves from a Note-Book,” Eliot deplores the circumstances that lead writers to behave like industrialists, “producing calicoes [or fictions] as long and as fast as he can find a market for them” (Essays, p. 439). Yet rather than suggesting that authors should (or even could) separate themselves from this marketplace, Eliot explores how the market could disseminate authorial influence:

But man or woman who publishes writings inevitably assumes the office of teacher or influencer...