Taken together, the four books under review here make me feel, not too comfortably, like a character in Middlemarch: in the aggregate, recent work on George Eliot is so slight that it evokes books unwritten, mighty tasks not only unfinished, but unbegun. The comparative modesty of even excellent work like Rosemarie Bodenheimer's, the sense that criticism is returning, in a smaller compass with more scrupulous vision, to ground already broken, is symptomatic of a void in our generation's imagination. An adequate appraisal of George Eliot needs an ambition as encompassing as George Eliot's own, but we seem to have directed our intensity to smaller, slyer writers.