This creative selection of essays explores the enduring significance of George Eliot's novels The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. Widely revered in her own day as an iconic sage, a sibyl, and moral teacher, Eliot has been subject to radical revaluation and re-reading. Of the major Victorian wimen writers she has benifited most from the variety of methodological approaches that have invigorated the study of literature over the past twenty years. This is borne out in the wide range of critical responses represented in this collection. Eliot's radical cultural politics and the arrestingly original fictional strategies that characterise two of her most popular novels are explored from a variety of perspectives - feminist, historicist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic. Complete with an informed introduction exploring both Eliot's fluctuating critical fortunes and the contours of current scholarship, this collection is an important resource for students and teachers of George Eliot's fiction.