The idea for this study of George Eliot's fiction came initially from the scene at the end of Romola in which the heroine seeks to interpret Savonarola's confession. With great care she examines the unreliable documents, listens to the reactions of the Florentines, and re-lives her own experience of the priest as she carries out her agonised exegesis. It is a many-layered episode in which Romola not only identifies herself with Savonarola but also comes to represent the author, the narrator, and the reader. Everyone is engaged in the difficult act of interpretation. The scene seemed to epitomise vividly a crucial and characteristic aspect of the novels and, at the same time, to place George Eliot firmly within the context of mid-nineteenth-century hermeneutics, where a crisis of interpretation was being acted out in a variety of intellectual disciplines.

This was not, of course, a new discovery. In recent years, several critics have studied the influence of many of these branches of knowledge on the form and language of George Eliot's fiction. I am thinking of such revealing studies as E. S. Shaffer's examination of the effects of biblical criticism on secular literature which culminates in a detailed analysis of Daniel Deronda; or Gillian Beer's tracing of the interactions between Darwin's evolutionary theories and narrative process in the last two novels. Others have examined, for example, the influence of psychology, mythology, and sociology on the fiction. All of these works demonstrate the novelist's intimate and formidable engagement with those disciplines which were at the forefront of Victorian radical thought.