The Way George Eliot Read Paradise Lost: Raphael and the Temptation of Speculative Thought

Through repeated quotations and allusions over the course of her novel Middlemarch, George Eliot suggests a relationship between that work and John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost. While this connection has received some critical attention during the past two decades, I contend that it runs deeper, and carries greater significance, than has yet been recognized. Through an analysis of the major epistemic course of each plot, I argue that Middlemarch is an attempt to carry Milton’s account of faith and reason into the nineteenth century.