Vocation and Desire

First published in 1989. Generations of critics have seen George Eliot as a conservative Victorian high moralist and sybil. Vocation and Desire questions that image, and finds in her work elements of anger, feminism, subversiveness, revenge, iconoclasm, wit, and eroticism – elements that we have been taught not to expect. After looking at the development of the sybilline image and the gradual eclipse of the subversive George Eliot – which Eliot herself initiated – Dorothea Barrett goes on to inv