Literary Significance & Criticism
After the lack of success with Romola, George Eliot returned to the more familiar English provincial setting for Felix Holt, the Radical, and resumed her publishing relationship with Blackwood's Magazine. Both George Henry Lewes and John Blackwood were reportedly excited at the prospect of a novel pertinent to current affairs. However, upon the story's release, some criticism was drawn to its less-than-substantial focus on politics, although this itself can be argued as representing an underlying theme in the book. Overall, Felix Holt, the Radical was an average success, but it remains one of George Eliot's least read novels.
Read more about this topic: Felix Holt, The Radical
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or criticism:
“Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
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