In the Library
Felix Holt, the Radical
George Eliot, 1866
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 13 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 53
- Length
- Length 181k words
£1.99
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there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life
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About the book
Ride the old coach road into Treby Magna and Eliot shows you, hedge by hedge, how an English country town really gets its politics: who owes whom, which chapel despises which parson, whose vote was bought long before anyone stood for it. Then the Reform Bill passes, the first election under it is called, and the whole quiet apparatus tears itself open in a drunken riot with a dead constable on the pavement. At the centre is a watchmaker's son who could rise and refuses, who says a vote is worth nothing to a man who can be bought for five shillings. But the room you will not be able to leave is upstairs at Transome Court, where a proud, ageing woman sits before her mirror holding a secret that has cost her everything and bought her nothing. God was cruel when He made women, she says, and Eliot lets the sentence stand.