George Eliot

George Eliot was passionate about music and her writing is steeped in musical allusion. This book explores musical reference in her work and investigates contexts such as Eliots friendship with Wagner, the legacy of Romanticism, musics role in scientific theory, and the ambivalent status of female musicality. The book establishes how intensely Eliots musical allusions are informed by her contemporary culture and offers a fresh view of the experimental writing through which she took literary realism into previously uncharted regions.