George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance

The book examines Eliot's use in her novels of the theme of inheritance as an almost Burkean metaphor for her politics - one linking generations in the kindred family and providing bonds of sympathy for the wider family of the nation. Eliot's stress on the political traditions and culture of the national inheritance countered the doctrinaire authoritarianism and cosmopolitanism of her Positivist friends, though risking a descent into the Völkish ideology of W.H. Riehl, whom she admired.