‘I found her in that magnificent pose’: Ekphrastic Detail and Gendered Perspectives in Middlemarch

Abstract

In his review of George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871), Henry James praised the novel for its particularly intricate and rich attention to the knottiest of social and emotional detail. He accused Eliot's attention to these minutiae, however, as having failed to produce a convincing whole: "Middlemarch is a treasure-house of details, but it is an 'indifferent whole'." However...