Book Description

Felix Holt, the True Story is a critical examination of Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) by George Eliot. Since the novel's publication, it has automatically been assumed that the fictional East Midlands market town of Treby Magna (where the novel is set) "must" be based upon the Nuneaton of George Eliot's childhood. However, this assumption has made the novel largely "unreadable." Whilst Eliot's childhood and her earlier novels are informative towards the construction of Felix Holt, the Radical, this study proposes that the Treby community is based upon the East Midlands market town of Leicester - by far the oldest East Midlands community. It is also proposed that Eliot wanted to write a novel with a similar impact to Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell (1851 - 1853) in which the community finally pulls together. Hence, it is determined that Eliot wrote Felix Holt, the Radical, as a means of unifying the varying rifts of "Christian eclecticism" into her mode of Humanism.