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30:3, Reviews sion that he prepares us "for new modes of understatement, indirection and silence" suggests otherwise (214). Generally, Hardy supplies Ulustrative critical reading of scenes and passages; these close readings prove to be her strength and in the end distinguish her work from many of the eccentric, jargon-riddled studies being published today. Hardy's analyses of forms of feeling in George Eliot's fiction are convincing because they evolve out of her painstaking attention to detail. In Middlemarch , for example, Hardy discovers "a recurring personification of feeling," and shows how Bulstrode allegorizes his passions, "reminding us of the Puritan inheritance which he has corrupted" (132). Hardy convincingly argues that Eliot is not merely depicting religious hypocrisy, but rather "a break and deception within [Bulstrode's] consciousness" (132). According to Hardy, Eliot uses consciousness as a way to develop the forms of feeling that eventually plunge Bulstrode into darkness and despair. Hardy's comments on Middlemarch are important because she telescopes throughout her analysis Eliot's concerns over EvangeUcaUsm. Hardy's understanding of the evangeUcal strain in Victorian writing emerges most powerfully in her analysis of Eliot, particularly Middlemarch. In this chapter, Hardy clearly establishes a connection between the fiction, the feeling, and the insight. The book may be considered a collection of critical essays; and like any collection of essays, some produce a powerful impression (the Brontes and Eliot) and some do not (Hardy and James). Jay B. Losey Baylor University SCIENCE, LITERATURE, WOMEN J.A.V. Chappie. Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1986. Cloth $29.95 Paper $9.95 Pat Jalland and John Hooper, eds. Women from Birth to Death: The Female Life Cycle in Britain 1830-1914. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1986. $35.00 Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century is a hybrid: part scientific summary, part Uterary analysis. It deals with the interweavings of two branches of culture, and the ways in which each affected the other. Perhaps the theme is too broad. Perhaps the format of the series in which this volume appears—on "Context and Commentary"—is overly restrictive. Whatever the explanation , readers of ELT are likely to find individual nuggets to savor, but little in the way of a satisfying synthesis. At the outset of the nineteenth century, as J.A.V. Chappie makes clear, science and literature formed part of a common intellectual discourse. To be an educated person in Victorian Britain was to possess familiarity with the most recent scientific discoveries. Quarterlies and monthlies like the Edinburgh 375 30:3, Reviews Review, the Cornhill Magazine, and the Contemporary Review pubUshed articles summarizing scientific advances or, better yet, essays written by scientists describing their own findings. The prose was accessible. Science had not yet developed a specialized jargon, and its conclusions were not clothed in formulas incomprehensible to laymen. Dickens, Eliot, Hardy and other writers of fiction (not to speak of critics like Leslie Stephen and Walter Bagehot) read the digested scientific treatises and books, and incorporated them into thenpublished writings. The idea of "twin cultures" was many decades away. Chappie is stimulating on the reasons for the rapport between science and literature. To borrow a phrase from Walter Houghton's The Victorian Frame of Mind (1957), scientific assumptions and methods permeated Victorian thought, "from the physical world to the whole life of man." Science was regarded as a unifying force: it could provide an explanation for diverse activities and establish a rationale for shared endeavor. It was not a crass expression of power over the natural world, as was assumed by a number of previous writers who emphasized the contradictions between Victorian science and literature. On the contrary, it was in the forefront of the nineteenth-century idea of progress , as defined in intellectual and cultural terms. Chappie makes clear in a succession of chapters that science was not yet specialized by discipline. In addition to biology, chemistry, astronomy and physics, and popular sciences like geology and botany (which Chappie largely ignores), there were "gray" areas: psychology, anthropology, eugenics, ethnology , and favorites such as "spirit-rapping," hypnotism and phrenology. "Moral philosophy" continued to bridge the gap between literature and science...

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