George Eliot and the Cosmopolitan Cynic

“George Eliot and the Cosmopolitan Cynic” explores the contribution made to Eliot’s thinking about cosmopolitanism by her long-standing philosophical and stylistic attraction to cynicism. Middlemarch (1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876) have to date dominated critical debate about Eliot’s engagement with the idea of a cosmopolitan ethical detachment. This essay focuses instead on two more experimental pieces of writing that came before and after the major novels: The Lifted Veil (1859) and Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879). It argues that in these works—both “uncharacteristic,” but markedly distinct in style and ethical motivation—Eliot tested the power of cynicism to expose difficulties in the way of an ethical cosmopolitanism and operate as a reality check on all prescriptive idealisms.