Science, pseudo-science and transgression

pp. 108-133

in: Saleel Nurbhai, K. M. Newton, George Eliot, judaism and the novels, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002

Abstract

Certainly throughout her life with G. H. Lewes — partly as a result of it — Eliot was in active dialogue with the contemporary scientific debate. Though the theme of the ideal organic society, which runs through her work, may seem remote from science, it has its foundation in scientific theories of natural history and experimental psychology. Underlying such theories one can detect a metaphysic based in Jewish mysticism and its relation to scientific and pseudo-scientific creation and experimentation, aspects of which are discernible throughout the varied worlds created in her novels, from fifteenth-century Florence to contemporary England.