Book contents
- On Style in Victorian Fiction
- On Style in Victorian Fiction
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 On Style: An Introduction
- Part I Aspects of Style
- Part II Authors
- Chapter 7 Thackeray: Styles of Fallibility
- Chapter 8 Jane Eyre’s Style
- Chapter 9 Windburn on Planet Brontë
- Chapter 10 The Man in White: Wilkie Collins’s Styles
- Chapter 11 Fiction and the Law: Stylistic Uncertainties in Trollope’s Orley Farm
- Chapter 12 George Eliot’s Rhythms
- Chapter 13 The Late Great Dickens: Style Distilled
- Chapter 14 Meredith’s Style
- Chapter 15 Hardy and Style
- Chapter 16 Kipling; and
- Chapter 17 ‘All the unspoken’: James’s Style
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 12 - George Eliot’s Rhythms
from Part II - Authors
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2021
- On Style in Victorian Fiction
- On Style in Victorian Fiction
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 On Style: An Introduction
- Part I Aspects of Style
- Part II Authors
- Chapter 7 Thackeray: Styles of Fallibility
- Chapter 8 Jane Eyre’s Style
- Chapter 9 Windburn on Planet Brontë
- Chapter 10 The Man in White: Wilkie Collins’s Styles
- Chapter 11 Fiction and the Law: Stylistic Uncertainties in Trollope’s Orley Farm
- Chapter 12 George Eliot’s Rhythms
- Chapter 13 The Late Great Dickens: Style Distilled
- Chapter 14 Meredith’s Style
- Chapter 15 Hardy and Style
- Chapter 16 Kipling; and
- Chapter 17 ‘All the unspoken’: James’s Style
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter considers the rhythms of George Eliot’s prose; it shows that George Eliot had a fine ear for the cadences of her writing and that she controlled the fluency and blockage in the progress of her sentences to variously suggestive effects. Her rhythmical prose responds to the balance her realism strikes between immediate description and reflective narration, between dreamy ideals and difficult realities. The tension that her characters experience between a willingness to struggle on and a desire to relent is also registered in the fluency and friction of her sentences.
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- On Style in Victorian Fiction , pp. 209 - 226Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022