This book is based on a conference held in Warwick in July 1995. It is a collection of essays which explore various aspects of George Eliot's relation to the literature and culture of Continental Europe. The essays range widely over the novelist's life and work, examining her Journals and Impressions of Theophratus Such as well as her novels, and focusing on different countries and cultures, including not only France, Germany and Italy, but also Holland and Spain. Some essays examine the complex general issues of language and culture raised in her work, while others concentrate on her response to specific European writers and texts. There are investigations of intertextualities and possibilities of influence, as well as contextual discussions and comparative readings of her novels alongside works by European writers. The overall effect is to illuminate her writing by setting it in the wider European context which, with her knowledge of languages, her travels and her extraordinary wide reading, she knew so well.
