Eyes meeting eyes
Dorothea stuns a silly, wilful and selfish young woman with her powerful, radiant kindness and, having meant to disdain her,...
Pah to the Iliad
Tom dismisses one of the world's greatest epics, a 3,000 year old classic of war, on the grounds that its...
Like a surgeon’s knife
Adam Bede is so far from being like a timid woman that this is striking, and Eliot uses the idea...
Life simile
What a surprising simile for life - at least in its easeful moments - likening it to a familiar tool...
Finely-touched spirit
A lovely summary of the ineffable subtleties of human beings. Of whom would you say, in your acquaintance, that they...
Carpet-covered dias
Part of the infrastructure of a village fête celebrating the coming of age of the young squire, from where patronising...
As hard as…
Mrs Poyser has strong and generally accurate opinions about the people around her, and she nails Hetty's character in a...
Like a kitten
This novel is to a great extent about the relationship between brother and sister Maggie and Tom Tulliver. She loves...
Gently-swelling meadow
George Eliot lived during the height of the Industrial Revolution, with several of her books being set earlier in its...
As open as …
A limpid simile for being open and transparent. If only more people were like Maggie Tulliver, although it can be...
As relaxing as …
Casaubon is a serious-minded studious individual pursuing research so recondite that only he really understands why he's doing it. When...
Quill-driving alien
A foreign writer? A spy reporting on his hosts? A literary martian? I liked this unusual triologism of George Eliot's. ...
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