Conclusion

Abstract

Reading Daniel Deronda via musical allusion illuminates the extraordinary scope of Eliot’s writing in her final work. Music permeates her investigations of cultural and personal vocation, including the most extensive exploration of female creativity in her fiction. It links these with her invocations of uncanny sympathetic communication and with her unprecedented expansion of the boundaries of realism. We already see this in The Mill on the Floss, where musical allusion dramatises the entangled workings of inner and outer life. Musical allusion resounds throughout the elaborate textures of Eliot’s writing, in these two intensely musical novels and elsewhere in her work. It enlarges her relationship with her Romantic inheritance and with contemporary science and it accommodates her own literary innovations. To a remarkable extent, music supplies Eliot with a language with which to dramatise the interactions and inner lives of her characters and yields a fruitful source of analogy with writing — especially with the experience of the woman writer. Music has a privileged relation to the literary here because it offers a focus both for the writer’s experiments and for the reader’s interpretation.KeywordsLiterary InnovationWoman WriterFruitful SourceRelated EngagementRemarkable ExtentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.