![]() ![]() ![]() As she proceeded on to Oxford and then to New York and The New Yorker, marriage, and motherhood, she kept rereading it. She first read Middlemarch nearly three decades ago, when she was an “anxiously ambitious girl from a backwater town” in southwest England. The reconciliation of family and individual interests in Eliot’s fiction is the main focus of this essay, which offers fresh interpretations of 'Felix Holt', 'Middlemarch', and 'Daniel Deronda' in their theoretical and historical contexts.“There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree.” George Eliot could have written that. A legal bestseller in its time, 'Ancient Law' expounded a theory of social evolution centring on the idea that the 'movement of progressive societies has hitherto been … from Status to Contract.' Maine’s status-contract model provided a framework for his readers to view customs of inheritance and succession in light of a binary social discourse that presented family interests (expressed juridically in terms of “status”) in opposition to individual interests (expressed as “contract,” the epitome of non-familial legal relations). This article examines the intersections between jurisprudence and literature through a close reading of George Eliot’s last three novels in relation to Henry Sumner Maine’s 'Ancient Law: Its Connection With the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas' (1861).
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