REALISM IN GEORGE ELIOT'S NOVELS

Abstract

It is a given fact that realism is considered one of the literary movements that started• in the nineteenth century and went right into the twentieth century. Realism started in France through the works of Emile Zola and Gustave Flaube1t. French realism was based upon science and deductions from it. George Eliot used this word for the first time in 1856. George Eliot was a highly intellectual author and a realistic writer. She was contemporary to such early victorian novelists as Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Mrs Gaskell. They were all novelists in the tradition of Henry Fielding. George Eliot follows the tradition in many aspects, but she also modifies and alters that tradition as David Cecil points out:

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Accordingly, realism is the dominant feature of her fiction. The early novels of George Eliot, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner are realistic in the presentation of the life of the Midland countries of Warwickshire and Drbyshire which she had intimately known. In these early novels, as also in Middlemarch, she presents a faithful pictures of the English Midlands, and of the life and character of the people who live in the Midlands, and with whom she had lived and moved in her childhood and girlhood.