George Eliot and the Classics

This chapter examines the work which laid the foundation for Eliot’s recognition as a classicist, her responses to Greek and Latin literature in her journalism and early fiction and her depiction of classical education. It surveys the ways in which Eliot gained access to classical learning, responses to her novels by classical scholars, and her representations of classical education in her fiction, particularly in The Mill on the Floss. It explores how Eliot drew on Greek comedy and tragedy in realist fiction. Her allusions to Aeschylus and Sophocles in Scenes from Clerical Life, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss prepared readers to understand Eliot’s claim that the lives of obscure people in the nineteenth century were significant and worthy of literary representation.