Seminar: The Far-Stretching Life: George Eliot’s Felix Holt, The Radical, with Nicholas Birns

George Eliot wrote one of her best novels about a small Midlands community at the time of the agitation around the Reform Bill of 1832. You might be thinking this is Middlemarch, but it is Eliot's earlier book Felix Holt, The Radical. 

This novel is very different, concentrating much more on the subject matter of politics, parliamentary campaigns, and competing ideologies, and also containing perhaps Eliot’s strongest female character in Esther Lyon. From the complexities of inheritances and wills to the competing definitions of the word radical, from financial mismanagement to the toxic effects of family secrets in scandal, Felix Holt plays out the dilemmas of a certain day and age. But the novel also solicits what Eliot calls “the far-stretching life,” which continues to resonate in our own day. 

Interested, but not yet ready to register? Get a reminder closer to the first date, space permitting.