George Eliot, music and Victorian culture

This book brings together rich and sometimes surprising contexts for Eliot’s writing about music including the legacy of Romanticism, the importance of music in scientific theory, and the ambivalent status of women’s involvement with music. It shows how Eliot’s use of musical allusion is intensely informed by her engagement with the culture of her time. A focus on music also offers a fresh view of the experimental writing through which Eliot took the realist novel into unfamiliar regions where scientific materialism and the Romantic uncanny meet