George Eliot’s method was very different from that of Thackeray or Dickens.  She did not crowd her canvas with the swarming life of cities.  Her figures are comparatively few, and they are selected from the middle-class families of rural parishes or small towns, amid that atmosphere of “fine old leisure;” whose disappearance she lamented.  Her drama is a still-life drama, intensely and profoundly inward.  Character is the stuff that she works in, and she deals with it more subtly than Thackeray.  With him the tragedy is produced by the pressure of society and its false standards upon the individual; with her, by the malign influence of individuals upon one another.  She watches “the stealthy convergence of human fates,” the intersection at various angles of the planes of character, the power that the lower nature has to thwart, stupefy, or corrupt the higher, which has become entangled with it in the mesh of destiny.  At the bottom of every one of her stories there is a problem of the conscience or the intellect.  In this respect she resembles Hawthorne, though she is not, like him, a romancer, but a realist.

There is a melancholy philosophy in her books, most of which are tales of failure or frustration.  The Mill on the Floss contains a large element of autobiography, and its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, is, perhaps, her idealized self.  Her aspirations after a fuller and nobler existence are condemned to struggle against the resistance of a narrow, provincial environment, and the pressure of untoward fates.  She is tempted to seek an escape even through a desperate throwing off of moral obligations, and is driven back to her duty only to die by a sudden stroke of destiny.  “Life is a bad business,” wrote George Eliot, in a letter to a friend, “and we must make the most of it.” Adam Bede is, in construction, the most perfect of her novels, and Silas Marner of her shorter stories.  Her analytic habit gained more and more upon her as she wrote. Middlemarch, in some respects her greatest book, lacks the unity of her earlier novels, and the story tends to become subordinate to the working out of character studies and social problems.  The philosophic speculations which she shared with her husband were seemingly unfavorable to her artistic growth, a circumstance which becomes apparent in her last novel, Daniel Deronda, 1877.  Finally in the Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 1879, she abandoned narrative altogether, and recurred to that type of “character” books which we have met as a flourishing department of literature in the 17th century, represented by such works as Earle’s Microcosmographie and Fuller’s Holy and Profane State.  The moral of George Eliot’s writings is not obtruded.  She never made the artistic mistake of writing a novel of purpose, or what the Germans call a tendenz-roman; as Dickens did, for example, when he attacked imprisonment for debt, in Pickwick; the poor laws, in Oliver Twist; the Court of Chancery, in Bleak House; and the Circumlocution office, in Little Dorrit.