Felix Holt: The Radical by George Eliot

Felix Holt: The Radical Reviews

• 
  Fionnuala

  Towards the end of this long but intensely interesting narrative, the reader is told exactly how much time has passed since the first of the many events of the story. The narrator sounded surprised at how brief a period it had been, and I was surprised too because I'd been reading this book for quite a while and I'd come to associate it with the passing of a considerable period of time. That was partly due to the many events that occurred in my own life while I'd been reading about Felix Holt's life, but also to the fact that I'd read two books by Ali Smith in the meantime.
  Felix Holt had had to wait calmly in the background while I helterskeltered through Smith's
  Autumn and
  Winter.
  
  The contrast between Smith's twenty-first century urban Britain and the rural world of George Eliot's 19th century Loamshire couldn't be more stark at first glance but it has occurred to me on finishing
  Felix Holt that it and Ali Smith's Seasonal series are not so very different after all. One of the key events in Eliot's novel concerns the election of a candidate to parliament. This was a time before universal suffrage so only the small number of men who owned land or property had votes. However election agents often roused great mobs of landless people to demonstrate in favour of a particular candidate. In this way, people with no vote managed to have an influence on the outcome of elections. The mobs might have had only the barest notions about the candidate's policies, but, inflamed by free drink and scurrilous handbills circulated by the election agents, they could make such a clamor in support of the agent's favourite, and against the opposition, that they could sway the course of the voting.
  
  Ali Smith's Seasonal series touches on a voting issue too, the referendum that resulted in Britain leaving the European Union. Though every adult citizen in Britain now has a vote, it could be argued that many of the voters had only a partial understanding of what they were voting for and were manipulated by the twenty-first century equivalent of the 'election agent' and their clever use of media. We have come a long way from handbills and free drinks but people are still as open to influence from misleading headlines as ever they were. Election results are still controlled by small groups of powerful people.
  
  The other overlap between this Eliot novel and the Smith books concerns the role of women in the narrative. Readers who are familiar with Ali Smith know that her main characters are invariably woman - but making the main character a woman is not a given in the case of George Eliot. She has several books in which the main focus is on a male character:
  Silas Marner, for example, and
  Adam Bede and
  Daniel Deronda. But while this book is named after a male character, Eliot's story is predominantly about a female character, Esther Lyon. Felix Holt is essential to the plot but it is Esther who makes the key choices and decisions that influence all the outcomes.
  
  There are two other important characters in this novel, the parliamentary candidate, Harold Transome, and his mother, the doyenne of Transome Court. Harold strides through the book as if he owns it but it is his mother who holds the controls of his life. His decisions become meaningless in the face of hers.
  
  We know that in the mid-nineteenth century, women, even if they owned land or property, didn't have the right to vote, and that they had little power over their own lives. Husbands were chosen for them by their fathers and everything thereafter was chosen by their husbands, or eventually by their sons. George Eliot presents us here with two rare cases of women who refuse to let fathers, husbands or sons decide for them - for better or for worse...
• 
  Paul

  4.5 stars
  One of the least read of Eliot’s novels; sitting in the middle of her output. I found it had a surprising resonance for today. It was published in 1866 but was set in the time of the Great Reform Act in 1832, when the vote was extended (not by much, the electorate increasing from about 500,000 to just over 800,000). As Eliot was writing the Second Reform Act was being promulgated. The landed classes and aristocracy were bringing on board some of the wealthier middle classes.
  The plot centres around an election in a Midlands town in 1832; probably modelled on Eliot’s home town Nuneaton; the riot in the book is very like the one in Nuneaton in 1832. The voices of the Tory side are as you would predict. On the other side is Harold Transome, a wealthy landowner just returned from abroad a widower with a son. He returns to find his estate is causing some concern and shocks his mother and friends by announcing he is standing as a Radical. Felix Holt is an educated, but poor Radical who has also returned from journeying (in Scotland) to stay with his mother and work as a watch repairer. Meanwhile the Rev. Rufus Lyon (a dissenting minister) and his step-daughter Esther make up the other main protagonists. There develops a sort of legal and electoral thriller with some twists relating to birth and inheritance and a significant riot on Election Day. Inevitably there is a love triangle involving Esther, Felix and Transome and Eliot works it all out in an interesting way. All the lawyers are corrupt and self-serving and true to type. The working class characters are a little less convincing.
  There are some interesting lines of thought. Eliot looks at the situation of older women in the form of Mrs Transome and Mrs Holt, the mothers of the male protagonists. Both feel helpless in the face of their strong-minded sons who barely tolerate them: Contrast the very sympathetic relationship between Esther and her father, Rev. Lyon.
  Another major theme is of course political change and the book (often in the form of Holt) asks difficult questions. Does the electorate always get things right? That brings us straight to the US and UK today! The political landscape in the novel is out of joint and all are aware of it and there is a good deal of anger at the grassroots level, often without direction. Holt himself is not arguing for extending the franchise; he believes in gaining power for the working class by building a movement from the bottom based on education. Partial change at the top was no change. Holt, of course was right, as there was now a larger electorate to bribe, so you had to be even richer to enter politics.
  Of course there is a love story going on, but I was much more interested in the parallels with Trump and Brexit.
• 
  Kathleen

  “Such was the old-fashioned, grazing, brewing, wool-packing, cheese-loading life of Treby Magna, until there befell new conditions, complicating its relation with the rest of the world, and gradually awakening in it that higher consciousness which is known to bring higher pains.”
  
  Treby is a fictional town set in the English Midlands, and the “new conditions” are the Reform Act of 1832, which changed the way people voted, to include smaller landowners and shopkeepers. The working class were still largely excluded, as were women, though the fight for women’s suffrage had begun in 1817.
  
  The Debarry and the Transome families are Treby’s old money Tories, except for the prodigal son Harold Transome, who has returned from many years in the East and announced he will run in the upcoming election for Parliament as a Radical, against a Tory Debarry, causing quite a ruckus, and a particular strain on his long-suffering mother.
  
  There is another long-suffering mother across town, the mother of Felix Holt. Felix has returned from studying medicine in Glasgow, only to announce he prefers a working-class life as a watchmaker.
  
  But this is the story of two contests: an election, yes, but also the contest for a woman’s heart. Esther is the daughter of the town’s “dissenting” minister and as her story develops, her complicated origins are revealed and her inner-struggles unfold. (The title is misleading, by the way. This is Esther’s story.)
  
  So what we have here is quintessential George Eliot! Intricate characters navigating politics, religion, and personal growth. The only downside was Eliot’s typical very, very slow buildup.
  
  I had the feeling this novel was practice for Middlemarch. You could say that about much of Eliot’s work, I guess, but this was the major novel in her oeuvre that preceded that masterpiece. Felix Holt had many of the same features, but in Middlemarch I think, she figured out how to avoid the slow first-half, by having multiple main characters, and alternating the buildup of one’s story with the action of another’s.
  
  Here is how I’d rank the George Eliot books I have read so far.
  
  Middlemarch
  
  Felix Holt: The Radical
  
  Scenes of Clerical Life
  
  The Mill on the Floss
  
  Adam Bede
  
  Felix Holt is not a book for everyone, but it should be read more, particularly by Eliot fans.
  
  “It is not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose what is difficult.”
• 
  Jonathan

  There are, I think, two problems with this generally excellent novel. The first relates to how it is approached, and tends to lead to some of the issues readers have with it, and the second arises from the choices made by its main character at its end.
  
  The first issue comes from the book's title. The book is, as is the case with a number of other books by Eliot, not really about its title character. The core of this novel is Esther. Holt is one of the forces operating on her, as are Harold, the political and religious conflicts surrounding her, law, society, class, gender and money. Holt is irritating in his priggishness, in his self-righteousness, regardless of the fact that he is correct at core in his political beliefs - simple expansions of the franchise without education and other social change will not result in betterment of life for all. Giving the working class the vote, while keeping them in ignorance and plied with bribes of booze and bread and circuses will not end up in things improving for them. But as a character he is not nuanced and interesting enough to be the "hero", he is more a device, a force that pushes Esther from her complacency.
  
  But this is where the second issue comes in. While Esther's choice at the end of the novel was largely inevitable, I found it extremely frustrating. Think of all the good she could have done with that wealth! If she did not want to live as a "rich" person with Holt, why not sell the estate and use it to set up a school for working class kids or something? Instead she leaves the money in the hands of the landed gentry where it will do no good for anyone. Frankly it made me want to yell at her.
  
  Regardless of all this, there is much to recommend in the book, and I see no reason for it to languish in the second tier of her novels. In particular the political aspects of the book (which take up so much less of the text than you may have been led to believe) remain often remarkably (and sadly) relevant. And, of course, the writing on every page is as wonderful as one would expect from one of the greatest writers of the 19thc.
  
  If you have read others of hers, but left this one behind because of some sense it is a lesser work, I would urge you to pick it up and give it a go. This is my 4th novel of hers this year, and all have been masterpieces of the highest order. She is up there with Zola as my joint favourite 19thc author.
• 
  Janelle

  Well that was unexpected… I loved this book!
  I found this novel when looking for books from 1866 for one of the classics buffet challenges. I’m pretty sure I was unaware of it before.
  Felix Holt arrives in the village of Little Treby to return to his mother’s home after giving up his study of medicine. He’s a radical and has many strong beliefs, he certainly doesn’t think much of the rich. Harold Transome also returns to his family home, and is also a radical but he is rich and stuns many of the other upper class families when he doesn’t stand as a Tory in the upcoming election. The year is 1832 and the reform act has opened up voting to more men (men with property of course!). Much of the early parts of the novel concern the election but the main character is Esther Lyon, daughter of a dissenting minister and I thought she was a wonderful character, an interesting young woman and her relationship with both Felix and Harold, simply put, is what the novel is about. But there’s much more, a bit of politics, some lawyer shenanigans, inheritances, affairs, and it’s written so well! Brilliantly constructed, I couldn’t put the novel down for the last quarter or so.
• 
  Tristram Shandy

  “[…] ‘[B]ear in mind there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is to tell them what they don’t understand; and the other is, to tell them what they’re used to.’ […]”
  
  This clever advice, cynical as it may seem, is nevertheless true and it may also account for why George Eliot’s novel Felix Holt, which was completed in 1866, is nowadays still amongst her most-neglected works, together with Romola, its predecessor. In other words, it is not the quality of the book, but it might be our expectations which have made this novel drift into oblivion.
  
  Felix Holt is often referred to as Eliot’s political novel, and there is certainly a lot of politics going on in it: One of the events the plot focuses on is an election in a little town called Treby Magna, and we get a good impression of how voters in the early 1830s were intimidated, browbeaten and catcalled by riotous mobs, and this had two reasons: First of all, you did not cast your ballot in a secret vote in those days, but you were obliged to go onto a stage, some kind of hustings, and openly declare the name of the candidate you wanted your vote to go to. This happened in front of everyone that was interested looking on, from the simplest coal miner, who had no right to vote, to your own landlord, who not rarely expected you to vote for the candidate he himself was backing (unless he were not one of the candidates himself). The second reason was that most candidates, be they Tories, Liberals or Radicals, mobilized large parts of the population who had no votes because of their insufficient income, often with the help of free drinks and made them come to the elections where they actively bullied the voters in order to make them throw in their votes with the candidate who had treated them. One may well imagine that going to give one’s vote required a lot of courage and cold-bloodedness from any man in those days.
  
  Nevertheless, Felix Holt is not only, not mainly, a political novel but what you may call a bildungsroman because it tells us the story of the moral development of Esther Lyon, a young woman, who, unbeknownst to herself, is entitled to a great inheritance, and who stands between two men: One of them is Harold Transome, a young, self-confident landowner, who decides to run for the Radical Party and whose campaign staff also employ the means sketched above. Transome is a man who is mainly concerned with his own career (and not so much with the welfare of the workers whose interests he has on his lips) and who does not really care a lot either for his own mother or for Esther, whom he regards as an enchanting woman and a means to further his personal ends. The other man is the eponymous Felix Holt, a young idealist, who says things like this,
  
  

  ”[…] I would never choose to withdraw myself from the labour and common burden of the world; but I do choose to withdraw myself from the push and the scramble for money and position. Any man is at liberty to call me a fool, and say that mankind are benefited by the push and the scramble in the long-run. But I care for the people who live now and will not be living when the long-run comes. As it is, I prefer going shares with the unlucky.”

  
  
  And who acts accordingly and does not spare Esther for her own genteel pretensions and her obsession with form and propriety. What a reader of Felix Holt may therefore look forward to is a mixture of a love triangle, the story of the intellectual and moral maturation of an intelligent young woman, a tale of intrigue around an estate – Eliot’s lawyer Jermyn is a villain of Dickensian proportions – and an account of political upheaval, a rather unusual, an in its construction not always quite successful mixture because the author has to rely heavily on coincidences to keep her team of thematic horses in rein. For example, Esther’s presence in the little market town where an entire estate happens to actually belong to her is quite a stretch of the laws of likelihood, and there are other such instances.
  
  What always impresses me about George Eliot, especially in regard to her later works, is the psychological insight she offers into her characters, very often through the comments and observations of her narrator’s voice, which admittedly might seem old-fashioned and down-talking to a modern reader, but not less frequently through the characters’ words and actions. Very early, we are made aware of Harold Transome’s lack of regard for other people as individuals in their own right by his treatment of his mother or his calling the family retainer Hickes ”a neat little machine of a butler”. His tendency to objectify other people also becomes clear when he admires Esther’s beauty and tells her she would make a wonderful painting in her dress, while around them the family portraits of the Transomes spread an air of gloomy barrenness. While Ester and especially Mrs. Transome are equally psychologically believable characters, the latter being one of the most impressive characters in 19th century literature I ever came across, strangely, Felix Holt comes over as a programmatical monolith of an idea the author wants to illustrate and to advocate. There is as much subtlety in him as in Ayn Rand’s literary creations. Similarly, Esther’s father, the Dissenting preacher Rufus Lyon is little more than a garrulous bore, ready to argue ad nauseam how many angels could dance on a pinhead (and yet we are supposed to like him, which I did not!), but many of the other side characters are very well-drawn, and the complexity of country life that the author conjures up in this novel already hints at Felix Holt’s famous successor Middlemarch.
  
  Another pièce de résistance in this novel is the introduction, which features a journey on a stage coach through the England of the early 1830s and which cleverly advocates Eliot’s rather conservative attitude of building a future carefully on the treasures of the past instead of wilfully cutting all traditions and regarding human beings as a malleable and arbitrary mass that can be formed at will by social engineers. This ruthless will to reform without any regard of inner continuities and traditions is what makes Harold Transome prone to fail in all his enterprises because there is no respect in him for his environment and the people inhabiting it, and which is counterbalanced by Holt’s readiness to care for people as they exist and establish modest improvement with an eye to the world as it is. It is obvious where Eliot’s sympathies lie.
  
  This spirit of a partly romanticizing, partly enlightened conservatism may seem strange and quaint to modern readers, lacking any flavour of great sociological or philosophical theorizing, and it may therefore be something they are neither used to nor ready to expect. This is maybe one reason why Felix Holt has dropped out of favour with modern readers, which is a pity because the novel is a great example of Eliot’s skills in world-building as well as in stylistic clarity.
• 
  booklady

  Very enjoyable story was further enhanced by Nadia May’s superb rendition of it for Blackstone Audio/AudioBookStand. This was my husband’s introduction to George Eliot and I’m glad it was a mostly cheerful—even humorous—novel as her works can be dark. Mrs. Holt, Felix’s mother, is a hoot and May has captured her perfectly. Highly recommended especially in the audio format.
• 
  Kara Babcock

  I make no secret of the fact that I think George Eliot is a literary badass, and Felix Holt: The Radical is just the latest example of these well-deserved credentials. This is essentially a political and legal thriller set in 1832 England on the cusp of the passage of the First Reform Act. (Among other things, the Reform Acts of the 1800s redefined the electoral districts for the English Parliament and expanded the franchise ever so slightly.) The sleepy English town of Treby finds itself the centre of political action during the latest election campaign. Harold Transome returns home after fifteen years abroad and decides to run as the Radical candidate, much to the surprise of his Tory family. Meanwhile, in typical Eliot fashion, the Felix Holt doesn’t show up for the first fifty pages of his own book! Despite Transome and Holt’s self-declared Radicalism, the two butt heads, and soon it’s obvious neither really embodies the label they’ve chosen. Meanwhile, a dastardly lawyer plots possible revenge against Transome, and it all hinges on the question of paternity and inheritance of a preacher’s daughter.
  
  You hooked yet? Because I know that the language in novels like this can be an obstacle to enjoying them. Eliot is a fan of lengthy sentences and even longer paragraphs. Her description belabours points until they become entire discourses; her dialogue is more of a series of speeches fired back and forth like broadside salvos. With this style, however, comes a consummate ability to draw out the most intricate descriptions of human foibles and fragility. We see this quite early in Eliot’s portrayal of the ageing Mrs Transome, and later when we delve into Esther’s motivations for obsessing over the strange and somewhat offensive Mr Holt. Unlike modern thrillers, which tend to sacrifice depth of character for depth of field in the action, Felix Holt is a character-driven thriller in which Eliot asks how our upbringing, gender, and political convictions influence the choices we make and how far we will go to get what we want.
  
  First, we have Harold Transome. He comes back home after living in “the East” (mostly Smyrna), where he had a wife (who since died) and a kid (whom he mostly ignores, in that great fashion of the English gentility). Like many a man convinced of his competence, he essentially swoops down on Transome Court like the North Wind: we’re doing things the Harold Transome way, and if you don’t like it, then tough. He engages the Transomes’ lawyer, Jermyn, as his election agent even while plotting to remove Jermyn at the most convenient opportunity. He ignores his mother and the tough time she’s been having of keeping up the estate—but that’s mostly because Transome ignores women in general, finding the weaker sex useless for everything except stroking his ego and likely stroking … well … you know what I mean.
  
  Transome runs as the Radical candidate for this district. I never completely understood why he was going for Parliament, except perhaps because he felt it was the prestigious thing to do. He certainly never evokes a sense of statesmanship. Although he good-naturedly (and naively) attempts to put a stop to the rabble-rousing activities Jermyn’s minion engages in on Transome’s behalf, Transome does not in and of himself spend much time espousing Radical views. His political allegiance seems more a reaction against the stagnant Toryism of the countryside than any conviction that England needs to change.
  
  I guess the most redeeming thing we can say about Transome is that he’s not a total dick. When he learns that Esther has legal claim to Transome Court, his first reaction is not to conceal the news but actually tell her and then kind-of-sort-of attempt to court her in the hopes he can keep the estate this way. (Now, the cynical would point out he’s just pre-empting the uncomfortable disclosure from Jermyn, and he obviously talks himself into loving Esther instead of harbouring true feelings for her. And there is something to that. But Transome is not a villain so much as an opportunistic upper–middle-class businessman; granted, the distinction between these two labels is not always clear.)
  
  Whereas Transome considers himself a “man of the world” in a quite literal sense and almost condescends to bring himself down to the worker’s level, Felix Holt is quite proud of his poverty. He looks down on the rich, in a moral sense. Like Transome, he identifies as a Radical but doesn’t necessarily embody that philosophy: he in fact discourages workers from getting it into their heads that they need to vote to effect political change. Holt wants everyone to behave nicely in the hopes that this will persuade the people in charge to be nicer in return. In her “Address to the Working Man” included as an appendix to this edition, Eliot writes in Holt’s voice and explains that expanding the franchise to uneducated workers would be a bad idea right now, because it would encourage a kind of ignorant populism that would pull the country down.
  
  And so Felix Holt is fascinating, because it is not actually a very radical novel. At the time Eliot was writing it, of course, those in favour of Reform were seen as quite radical people (and then you had the unions, and later, the people advocating for secret ballots). But if anything, this novel shows that Eliot is herself calling only for gradual change. She doesn’t want workers to have the right to vote until they also have the education she feels is necessary for them to vote “properly.” I find this paradox fascinating, because in some ways she has hit on the crucial point: franchise is no good if the people enfranchised have little knowledge on which to base a decision. Simply guaranteeing everyone over 18 the right to vote is not enough, then; we are obligated to provide civic education—and in this respect, I don’t think our present government does nearly enough….
  
  So Holt, then, is the “common man” who nevertheless acts as a voice of caution. He is continually trying to apply the brakes, as seen in his foolish and ill-fated attempt to curb the rioting on election day. It sometimes seems like Eliot focuses less on him than on any other main character. Nevertheless, his role as titular character is deserved more because he ties all the other characters together. He interacts with everyone else, subtly shaping the nature of the conversation. It is the not-quite-love-triangle among Holt, Esther, and Transome that precipitates the novel’s conclusion.
  
  In Esther we see Eliot wrestle with ideas of femininity, education of women, and the duties that children have for their parents. I’ve always lauded the way Eliot’s writing has a feminist tone for the Victorian period in which she lived; and, by all accounts, Mary Ann Evans was a pretty spectacular woman. Nevertheless, Esther demonstrates some of the limits of Eliot’s endorsement of “women’s liberation.” On one hand, Eliot mocks those women around Treby who look down on Esther for being “over-educated” for a preacher’s daughter and for putting on airs. On the other, she uses Felix as a foil for Esther’s ego and high opinion of herself: after a single meeting, Esther becomes desperate to prove to Felix at every turn that she can be humble and be open to being lead by a man (i.e., him) in matters of substance. Eliot places Esther in a role complementary to the men in her life: she must support and aid her ageing father; be led by the man she chooses as a husband; and nurture the children in her charge, whether it’s as a mother or a teacher. In this respect, while Eliot is quick to call out the double standards that adversely affect women’s quality of life, she is not quite ready to tear down conventional gender roles.
  
  Felix Holt culminates in an election, a riot, a trial, and shenanigans over estate ownership. It all ends in tears, and then a wedding, and finally a happily-ever-after, for most involved. The winds of change are evident throughout the novel, but the ending seems to assure us that all will go on as it largely was before: the rich will be rich, the poor will be poor, and there will be Tories and Whigs and the occasional Radical doing whatever it is men of means do in Parliament while your average worker drinks and works the mines. This is not, therefore, that radical of a book. But Eliot manages to deliver an amazing story full of intrigue, backstabbing, characters who are all out for themselves.
  
  I picked an excellent time to read this as well. And I don’t just mean because Thanksgiving Saturday was unseasonably pleasant and I could read this outside while listening to the new Florence + the Machine album. No, I mean that in Canada we’re a week away from a federal election. The campaigning in this book reminded me of the lengthy campaigning happening here. Eliot’s coverage of the Reform Act is a potent reminder that we are lucky we have the right to vote—and by we, I don’t just mean land-owning white men. While I completely understand why some people are discouraged by our political system and don’t believe their vote will “count,” I’m still disappointed when someone I know shrugs off the idea that they should vote. It is a duty, and it is not one we should take for granted considering that some of us have had it for less than a century. And it’s certainly in the interests of the people in power to keep you from voting, particularly if you are young, or poor, or from a minority group and interested in expressing your opinions.
  
  This might sound trite, but one of the most radical things you can do as a Canadian on October 19 is vote. Go do it.
  
  And then go read Felix Holt. It’s far from my favourite Eliot novel, but it shows the beginnings of all the skill and ability with character and setting that makes her one of my favourite authors. Eliot manages to convey a sense of entirety, that microcosm of the human experience: she is not overly cynical or overly optimistic; she simply shows what is—and what might be.
  
  
  
• 
  Nick Imrie

  I once read an essay about the objections to women's suffrage. One argument that anti-suffrage activists made was that voting was a proxy for fighting: men will wage war over political power, but they can save blood and energy by taking a vote, allowing the larger army to win without the smaller one having to die. Very civilised, no?
  Women should not be allowed the vote because women don't fight - imagine if there was a vote in which women all voted one way and men all voted the other. What, exactly, would prevent the men from doing what they wanted anyway, safe in the knowledge that women couldn't stop them?
  
  Now I suspect that you (and I) can poke some holes in that argument, but Felix Holt: The Radical does have some scenes that wonderfully illustrate the pugillistic nature of early voting. Voters had to get up on platform to declare their vote publicly, surrounded by the drunken mob, with their employer and landlord looking on sternly. Some men crept in to vote early, before the crowd had had time to grow big and rowdy. One character wrapped all his limbs in flannel, put on three coats, and went to vote like the michellin man. Another fell into the hands of the crowd, and was so befuddled by everyone screaming the names of their preferred candidates in his ear that he accidentally blurted out the wrong name on the stage. In the end, the crowd got completely over-excited and went off on a riot, with disastrous consequences for all the characters in the book.
  
  But that's by-the-by. The election is the event that the plot hangs on - but it's not really the point. The meat of the story is Esther Lyon's romantic choice between fake, snobby, radical Harold Transome, and literally perfect human-being, radical Felix Holt. Incidentally, for reasons only tangentially related to the text I imagine Felix Holt to look alot like Jamie Fraser:
  
  
  
  So, on one level Esther's dilemma is the standard dilemma of every trashy YA romantic subplot: 'Oh no! Which of these two men will I choose? It's so tough being loved by two men. Poor me!' And Esther's dilemma is not the only part of the book that seems weirdly trashy to me. There's also the mysterious matter of Esther's parentage (apparently 'love of velvet cushions' is a gene). And the mysterious matter of that other question of parentage, which resolves itself with a very satisfying level of melodrama. What I'm saying is: this is my first ever George Eliot novel and I was not expecting this level of Wilkie Collins. I like it! I was just surprised.
  Anyway, Esther's dilemma: it's not a spoiler to say that she picks the right guy (which is to say the good guy), because the interesting part is Eliot's exquisite, fine-lined depiction of each character, their thoughts, failings, virtues, and reasoning. Each of them is completely plausible, even as they walk this somewhat clichéd path (and don't we all? As if our own loves and marriages were somehow wildly original!).
  
  I was especially touched by Harold Transome's vague realisation that he might've been a better man - that Esther might've made him a better man. I felt an awful pang for him when he learnt The Terrible Secret - because it's the sort of secret that's shocking for a Victorian and irrelevant for us, so his struggle to behave honourably upon learning the truth is doubly poignant. I felt terribly sorry for Mrs Transome, for her rather tragic life, and for the painful way that her tragedy was born entirely of her own actions, her own character, and her own beliefs. And Esther who struggles with herself to discern substance from appearance - this was an especially good depiction of youth and the mingled pride, folly, idealism, naïvety, wilfullness, good-intentions, bad-temptations, and basically everything that goes into being young and trying to make good decisions while simulataneously learning how to make good decisions.
  
  And finally, Felix, who is perfect, but still a pretty well-drawn perfection.
• 
  Elizabeth (Alaska)

  Ugh. Double Ugh. I struggled with this almost from the beginning and, frankly, wish I'd abandoned it before I got far enough that I felt I had too much invested in it to do so. Eliot kept going off on tangents. Sometimes my mind would wander and I'd read passages again, just to make sure I hadn't missed anything. And I hadn't. Not all of the tangents were of the religious nor even the political sort. The below was more understandable than many, but gives you a glimpse. Keep in mind that not one character ever plays chess, there is never any suggestion of a match.

  Fancy what a game at chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning: if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, in disgust at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deductive reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beat, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt.

  I found the characterizations to be mostly one-dimensional and the plot to be fairly predictable. (Remember, I'm the one who doesn't know what will happen next!) Read others by George Eliot. Read this only if you insist on reading her entire oeurvre.
• 
  Britta Böhler

  3.5*
• 
  Issicratea

  Felix Holt (1866) is not the best-loved of George Eliot’s novels, and in some ways it’s easy to see why. The male protagonist, the earnest idealist Felix Holt, is too idealized himself to be a truly compelling character, and the tale of his moral “conversion” of the beautiful and worldly Esther Lyon may be a little too pious and pedagogical for most modern readers. The plot has its creaks as well, rather, sometimes lurching perilously close to the model of the Victorian sensation novel à la Wilkie Collins in respect both of melodramatic subject matter and of narrative devices. There are coincidences here at which even Collins would raise an eyebrow.
  
  Despite these criticisms, there is plenty to enjoy in Felix Holt. The narrative is set at the time of the English parliamentary reform bill of 1832, and the plot centers around local electoral politics in the invented Midlands town of Treby Magna. Eliot shows her usual, sure hand in evoking an entire society in all its sedimented complexity, caught here at a moment of transition. A stunning, filmic opening scene, representing the approach to Treby Magna from the back of a stagecoach, shows a land half in the industrial nineteenth century, and half still in the ancient, unchanging agricultural world (In these midland districts the traveller passed rapidly from one phase of English life to another: after looking down on a village grimy with coal-dust, noisy with the shaking of looms, he might skirt a parish all of fields, high hedges, and deep-rutted lanes; after the coach had rattled over the pavement of a manufacturing town, the scene of riots and trades-union meetings, it would take him in another ten minutes into a rural region, where the neighbourhood of the town was only felt in the advantages of a near market for corn, cheese, and hay.) The episode serves as a perfect frame for the political landscape of Treby, rooted in an ancient, feudal logic whereby land ownership signifies political preeminence, but shaken by the promptings of a newer, nineteenth-century world, of politically organized labor and “radical,” post-Enlightenment thought.
  
  All of this works very well, as do the socially-defined spaces of the novel, from the leafy glades of Treby Manor, home to the brooding Lady Transome; to the cramped lodgings of Esther’s father, the nonconformist preacher Rufus Lyon; to the “publics”—or alehouses—of the hardscrabble colliers of surrounding mining towns. There are also some fine minor characters: Lady Transome herself; her radical son, Harold, returning from a louche period in the moral wasteland of “abroad;” their slick, shady, secret-harboring lawyer Matthew Jermyn; and the equally suave and secretive Maurice Christian, secretary of the Tory candidate Phillip Dubarry. These shadowy souls are a splendid crew, with enough moral murkiness between them to compensate for the whiter-than-whiteness of the novel’s protagonists. I was disappointed when they faded out at the end.
  
  Reading the novel soon after Thomas Hardy’s early novel
  Desperate Remedies (1871), I was struck by how much Hardy was influenced by Felix Holt. Eliot’s Lady Transome must surely be the prototype for Hardy’s striking Miss Aldclyffe, her more sexualized, less melancholy twin. I wondered also whether Eliot’s smug squire Harold Transome, with his “padded yoke ready for the neck of every man, woman, and child that depended on him,” lurked somewhere in the literary ancestry of the title character of George Meredith’s 1879
  The Egoist, another of my recent Victorian reads.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Lee Foust

  OK, so this is my first ever Eliot so bare with me. It's New Year's Day and I find myself in an Air BnB (Of course I'm ashamed of myself, but willing to admit my faults--or the faults of poverty) in Budapest and my wife wants to go to lunch so I'll quickly sketch out a few thoughts. I went back 'n' forth a bit pleasure-wise with this novel. I love Victorian novels, intricate plotting, and the dialogic clashing of characters, so those aspects pleased me very much. Eliot is obviously a star in the form and all of these aspects are classic features of novels of the period and are handled exquisitely. I'm also an author completely opposed to the modern pressures of bourgeois writing so I loved the fact that there were no likable characters at all in this novel. This is as it should be. Did I feel for and suffer with the characters by the end--of course! This is how empathy is constructed and maintained in a world of self-interested, frightened, and desperate human beings all very wary of one another. The love story palled, however, on this older and perhaps too jaded twice-divorced romantic failure. (My third wife is standing by the door tapping her foot so, you see, failure.) On the bright side, I loved the politics and the close description of the machinations that went into a British election of the period. Very engrossing! The big revelation toward the end was pretty evident from the earliest scenes dealing with those characters so that's either good or bad, I suppose, depending upon the author's intention (something we will never know!) and/or a reader's annoyance/delight in having things hidden and revealed dramatically in a narrative's denouement. Speaking for myself, I'm usually a very naive reader hoodwinked normally by such devices--although they neither please nor annoy me--so the fact that I figured this one out almost from the get-go probably means it was over-telegraphed, again depending upon some subjective measure of such things. Anyway, I will leave off comparing the novel's politics to today's swamp rats and all of their anti-rhetorical rhetoric, but you will certainly find something upon which to meditate here in whatever political situation you find yourself, for the business of and the reasons for obtaining political office in the Western democracies remain pretty much unchanged these last two hundred plus years. Also I will say that I liked Felix Holt, The Radical well enough to continue on reading Eliot. Perhaps Romola next? I do live in Florence and I have a lovely old hardback edition with photos of my adopted city from the last century. Cheers, and Happy New Year everybody!
• 
  Lady Clementina ffinch-ffarowmore

  A novel of society, politics and elections; of people and relationships; of principles and the lack of them; of secrets; and of women’s role and place in society and family, among others, Felix Holt: The Radical (1866) was George Eliot’s fifth published novel. Set in a small (fictional) industrial town in the midlands, Treby Magna, the events of the book unfold in the context of the Reform Act of 1832 and the changes it bought in terms of people who had the right to vote, how elections were conducted at the time, and relatedly the politics (Tories vs Radicals mostly).
  
  The younger son of the Transome family (one of the wealthy families in the neighbourhood) is returning to town after 15 years in the East, having made a substantial sum of money. His mother, Mrs Transome is anticipating his return eagerly for he is her pride and joy; her husband is described as an ‘imbecile’ while the older son (now dead) was dissipated and much like his father. But Harold has done well, and is expected to return and take over the Transome estate (which is in trouble), perhaps even contest elections. And while he does do that, the Transomes and other noble families in town are in for a shock, for Harold intends to contest as a radical. Harold means well, but his own interests and way are the priority for him—for instance, his mother’s well-being and wants are looked after but he has no care or value for her opinions (though it is she who has been managing things so far); the property agent/lawyer Jermyn is appointed as his election agent since he needs him, but Harold dislikes Jermyn and means to make him pay for his mismanagement of the Transome estates.
  
  Meanwhile in Treby Magna, we also meet Felix Holt, a radical in his own right, and one far more principled than Harold. Felix has trained as a doctor but scorns genteel life and occupations, choosing to earn his living as a watchmaker. He wishes to work among the workmen—educating them, making them aware of their responsibilities. But he too, like Harold disappoints his mother, for he also disdains the small pill business on which his family depends and makes Mrs Holt (who like Mrs Transome has been managing her family) give it up, dubbing it as no more than quackery.
  
  We also have the Lyons, Mr Lyon the dissenting minister who is also somewhat of a scholar and preaches among a small congregation, and his lovely daughter Esther, fond of the finer things in life to which she applies her earnings as a teacher. Felix soon befriends the Lyons, and while Felix and Esther’s relationship starts out with a little friction (he disapproves of her reading tastes [Byron] or love of finery), soon Esther finds herself admiring his idealism and ideas, wanting to earn his approval in what she does, while his feeling too deepens, though he sees no place for love in his life.
  
  As campaigning for the elections begins, practices like treating the miners and workmen to free liquor (thereby gathering unruly support) too, start to take place, something Felix takes strong objection to trying to drum some sense into the workmen; Harold mayn’t want these in theory, but is ok with closing his eyes to what his agents might get up to. Alongside, there are secrets in both Harold and Esther’s lives—ones they themselves aren’t aware of, and as these are revealed, relationships and dynamics alter, and matters of property, manipulation and blackmail start to emerge.
  
  In Felix Holt, Eliot gives us an engaging read, blending personal and romantic stories with broader social issues and commentary such that both aspects move together without either taking the novel over and giving the reader enjoyment while also delivering its messages.
  
  Elections and politics, and especially things as they unfolded post the Reform Act of 1832 are both the context and subject of the book. And at a time when suffrage wasn’t available to all men, let alone universal suffrage, one issue that plagued the election process was the use of treating (free alcohol) workmen so as to get them to support one or the other candidate. While these men didn’t have the vote, their numbers and the violence (rioting and disorder) they could be worked up to were used freely by unscrupulous agents and candidates to either simply disturb the process or in their favour. (Election day as portrayed in the book was quite the eye-opener.) Amidst this Felix is Eliot’s voice of reason trying to get the workmen to see that the vote is important but of itself of no value if it isn’t exercised responsibly—and knowledge, ability and honesty all play a part in this. This line of thought is as relevant in the present for (and I couldn’t help but think back to Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg here), mechanical or passive participation in the process can as well mean that these elements (even if we have them) are not necessarily employed.
  
  Another broader issue that Eliot highlights is of women and their role in society. Though unlike in Middlemarch, where Dorothea Brooke wished to do something worthwhile rather than live the typical wealthy woman’s life but lacked the education or guidance to do so, here we simply see women affected by social mores and expectations. Mrs Transome and Mrs Holt have both held the reigns of their families in their own ways, yet as their sons grow up and ‘take over’ so to speak, their opinions are sidelined and they are simply expected to fall in with the young men’s wishes and thoughts.
  
  Our heroine, Esther is fond of feminine things and finery (which she works to provide for herself), dreams of a life of luxury, but under Felix’s influence begins to grow and change, at a point finding herself in a dilemma between her dreams and the alternative path that seems possible with Felix’s love. (Love itself though, is seen differently by different characters—Felix for instance, vis-à-vis his ideals; or Mrs Transome in terms of power).
  
  Felix Holt himself is an interesting character. He is young and idealistic, and not so only in theory but also in practice, trying to do as he preaches, while also trying to help the workmen through encouraging their children to get an education, spreading awareness, trying to intervene where he witnesses election malpractices and such. And yet, his idealism also leads to a fair bit of trouble for himself which causes much discomfort even though he continues to live by his principles all through. Admirable though he may be, his approach does throw up the question of perhaps a need to balance ideals and practical considerations, even if not for one’s own comfort but at least of those for whom one is responsible.
  
  But with these more serious themes there are also more entertaining ones; with more than one character with secrets and others out to use these to their own advantage, we get a fair bit of excitement in the book too. One is able to guess part of these right at the start (though nothing is ever expressly stated), but it is still interesting watching how these will play out and how these impact our characters’ lives. There is also one rather humourous episode involving a theological debate which Mr Lyon proposes, which I thought made for a really enjoyable and light segment in the book.
  
  Felix Holt is a book which is equal parts thought provoking and entertaining, with ideas which resonate even today and characters that are flawed and sympathetic. I read this over February and March in instalments with a Goodreads group.
  
• 
  adam

  Felix Holt: The Radical is one of Eliot's finer works and a great 19c. novel. In many ways, it's a shorter and much more readable version of Middlemarch , and, being the book which directly precedes it, can be read as its predecessor. In F.H., Eliot explores her constant concern: the tensions between the intricate and overpowering contingencies of historical circumstance which influence and determine human action and the innate spirit of sympathy and virtue that struggles to transcend those contingencies. This all takes place in a plot that is coherent, thoroughly compelling, and even suprising. Moreover, all of the characters in the novel are complexing drawn and thoroughly sympathetic. In short, Felix Holt has everything you could want: entail, intrigue, illegitimacy, electioneering, riots; in it, Eliot is reaching her peak of realist representation that is perfected in Middlemarch .
  
  The two most difficult aspects of the novel are the complicated legal plot, and its deep enmeshment in history. Like Middlemarch , the novel is set in the years around the Reform Act of 1832, but, unlike the later novel, F.H. provides a denser and more precise historical account, making it a perfect read for anyone interested in that extremely important period of British history. If fractions were allowed, I would give this 4.5 stars.
• 
  Brian Fagan

  Mary Ann Evans (1819 - 1880) wrote under the pen name of George Eliot, and her novel Middlemarch is considered by many to be among the finest written in the English language. Felix Holt: The Radical (1866) concerns life in small-town England in 1832. The principal characters are Felix, a young man driven by his ideals to live a life of relative depravation in order to make himself useful in human rights endeavors, which includes supporting the Radical candidate in the upcoming election, Harold Transome, a young widower recently returned from years in the East to his family estate, who is that local Radical candidate, Mr Lyons, a local pastor sympathetic to the Radical cause, his grown daughter Esther, who finds herself drawn romantically to both young men, and the lawyer Jermyn, who Transome has put in charge of his candidacy, but to whom he ascribes serious mismanagement of the family affairs during his time out of the country.
  
  I have to say that, for whatever reason, Eliot, for a writer reported to have been sympathetic to the advancement of women's rights, doesn't particularly portray her women, aside from Esther, in a beneficial light. They tend to be meek and focused on trivial things. I have to imagine that she felt that demonstrating the pervasive result of society's choking restrictions on women would be more enlightening than populating her novel with strong women characters.
  
  The book contains several memorable and well done dramatic scenes. When Mr. Lyon makes a long-delayed and shocking revelation to his daughter Esther, her compassionate reaction to him is wonderful - the stuff of a movie highlight. I enjoyed Eliot's observation on Esther's dilemma of two agreeable men in pursuit of her: "There is no point on which young women are more piqued than their sufficiency to judge the man who is making love to her." The detailed comparison Esther reflects upon in terms of the personal characters of, and her possible futures with, Felix Holt and Harold Transome is fascinating and beautifully written.
  
  There is an uncomfortable scene between Felix's aged but sharp mother and the Harold's father, who suffers from dementia, and has earlier been referred to literally as an imbecile. Although characters with mental illnesses are often depicted in Victorian literature, I'm not sure that I remember previously reading scenes in which those with dementia are not just mentioned, but featured in a touching and pitiful scene.
  
  After plenty of deftly handled twists and turns, Eliot brings about the conclusion of her novel at quite a rapid pace. I've read three of her other novels, and I rank this one slightly below them in my overall enjoyment.
  
  One observation that I've had in fairly extensive reading of Victorian novels over 30+ years was brought to mind again as I read Felix Holt, although I don't think Eliot was more guilty of this than other writers of that era - my favorite era in fact. There is a tone that is pervasive and probably the only disagreeable thing about Victorian literature to me. It is the venom that authors and their narrators used in describing people in every imaginable occupation and walk of life. While it was a time of outstanding writing, it was unfortunately also a time of widespread social intolerance. In 20th century novels, the antagonist generally bears the major brunt of the writer's stink-eye. Victorian writers acted as if pointing out the failings of so many of their characters revealed their own moral superiority. Of course books are full of imperfect people, because the world is. But the MANNER and TONE in which Victorian writers degrade fictional characters is transparently ill-tempered.
• 
  Pam Baddeley

  The background to this novel is the 1832 Reform Act and the turmoil in local elections, as the novel was a historical one - published in 1866 it looks back to an earlier period when the vote was held only by landowners etc and was denied to all women and to working men. Of course, the reform that eventually did take place only extended the vote to categories of working men, women being denied it until well into the 20th century.
  
  Despite the title, the novel does not focus totally on Felix Holt, a thirty-something man who gives up training to be a doctor, and also spurns an easier life of selling quack medicines originally pedalled by his deceased father, to instead become a watchmaker and live a fairly poor life. It is mainly the story of Esther, a young woman who is faced with the choice of Felix as husband or a more prosperous life, possibly as the wife of a local rich man who tries to enter politics as a candidate in the election. For Esther's true antecdents are gradually revealed in the novel and could lead her to becoming an heiress.
  
  Meanwhile, Esther is torn between the two men. Felix's moral standards drive her to emulate him and abandon her superficial concerns with having a fine appearance etc. In the process, she becomes more caring to her father, the Dissenting minister.
  
  I found this a slog in places partly because the style of writing is occasionally very convoluted and hard to follow. I also wasn't convinced by Felix's moral superiority. The refrain of women's inferiority (in a book written by a woman) did grate rather especially as Esther internalises it. Overall I would rate the book at 3 stars.
• 
  Helen

  Typical of George Eliot, her focus is much more on ideas than on the story. Much of Felix Holt the Radical is about the political machinations of an election. The politics are dirty, no different in most respects than they are today. Reading the classics is always a reminder of how little humans change fundamentally.
  
  As in Adam Bede, the title character is not really the main character, nor the most interesting. I, in accord with others who have written reviews of this book, think that Mrs. Transome is one of Eliot’s best characters, neither idealized nor demonized.
  
  “This girl has a fine spirit—plenty of fire and pride and wit. Men like such captives, as they like horses that champ the bit and paw the ground: they feel more triumph in their mastery. What is the use of a woman's will?— if she tries, she doesn't get it, and she ceases to be loved. God was cruel when He made women."
  
  Though it is somewhat slow going at first, Felix Holt has enough political chicanery, plot twists, surprises, and Eliot wit and wisdom to highly recommend it.
• 
  Shawn Mooney (Shawn The Book Maniac)

  40% of the way in, I give up. The plot lines involving female characters were quite engrossing; however, the female plot lines form too slim a part of the story. The rest of it was mind-numbingly boring political dudes scheming and what-not – just shoot me now. I had a peek ahead and the next several chapters from where I got to also were all about the men and their political shenanigans, with nary a female character in sight - I’m done.
• 
  Stephen Brody

  Now this was a pleasant surprise: a novel I’d somehow overlooked reading before even though it’s been on the shelf for decades and in which every word is a perfect delight and I could almost say an education. With George Elliot’s characteristic perspicacity, common good sense and scrupulous fair-mindedness it’s also what I’ve just seen someone (not without approval) describe as “bitchy”. That’s not quite the right word, unless one means wryly incisive and to-the-point and therefore often terribly funny in a ‘high’ way without resorting to satire. That’s partly why, I think, Iris Murdoch was inclined to withhold complete favour from the predecessor with whom she stands head-to-shoulder in the forefront of English writers (there’s another reason I’ll come back to). Murdoch, who of course was far from not having opinions of her own, manages never to transmit them in her characterizations, thereby leaving many would-be readers bewildered by what seems like a distant other-worldly aloofness and eccentricity; whereas Elliot is what would now be called ‘judgmental’ - she doesn’t hesitate, albeit sideways, to say what she means, though those who might be indignant over that sometimes slightly mischievous streak tend to fail to take into account that the judgements she (usually) puts in the mouths of her finely-observed characters are most carefully thought out and perhaps based on a rather wider experience of the world: Mary Ann Evans was no bluestocking any more than she was a beauty and raised a few eyebrows herself in her private life, while Murdoch raised none except for the extraordinary disorder of her domestic arrangements. The setting is somewhere in the English countryside just after the passing of the 1832 Reform Bill which by extending the vote to all those possessed of a certain amount of property opened the way to the dubious practice of electioneering, whereby governance in a rapidly-changing social context became less a matter of invested authority than a career dependent on the glibbest tongue so that honesty and integrity tended to fly hastily out of the window to make way for hypocrisy . How well we all know what that’s become. The author’s part-mocking opinion of burgeoning ‘democracy’ and its upholders and denigrators is nicely conveyed through a variety of characters over a wide spectrum by so many succinct passages and sentences that they could be quoted for pages, but here’s a few random examples.
  
  The Reverend John Lindon prefers to ait on the fence until he can work out on which side his bread is best buttered: “In the course of half an hour he had brought himself to see that anything really worthy to be called British Toryism had been entirely extinct since the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel had passed the Catholic Emancipation Bill; that Whiggery, with its rights of man stopping short of ten-pound householders, and its policy of pacifying a wild beast with a bite, was a ridiculous monstrosity; since therefore an honest man could not call himself a Tory…. still less become that execrable monstrosity a Whig, there remained but one course open to him. ‘Why lad, if the world was to be turned into a swamp, I suppose we should leave off shoes and stockings and walk about like cranes’ – whence it followed plainly enough that, in these hopeless times, nothing was left to men of good sense and good family but to retard the national ruin by declaring themselves Radicals and take the inevitable process of changing everything out of the hands of beggarly demagogues and purse-proud tradesmen”
  
  Mr Chubb, a flourishing publican eyeing the opportunities for greater flourish, is one of the purse-proud. “Mr Chubb’s notion of a Radical was that he was a new and agreeable kind of lick-spittle who fawned on the poor instead of on the rich, and so was likely to send customers to a ‘public’ so that he argued well enough from the premises at his command”
  
  Elliot uses a quotation herself, source not given, as a preface to Chapter XII, which deals with the obsequiously well-nourished goings-on in the servants’ hall of the local manor, lackeys according to the Radical of the title who complacently and automatically side with the Tory master who so graciously keeps them supplied with handed-down luxury and therefore regard their critic with as much mutual contempt as does the self-made publican. Behind the fawning they’re a rather coarse lot. “Oh Sir, ‘twas that mixture of spite and over-fed merriment which passes for humour with the vulgar. In their fun they have much resemblance to a turkey-cock. It has a cruel beak and a silly iteration of ugly sounds; it spreads its tail in self-glorification, but shows you the wrong side of that ornament – liking admiration but not knowing what is admirable”.
  
  Mr Nuttward on the other hand is a gloomy grocer much taken up with righteousness and self-effacement. He’s upset by a member of his congregation singing louder than the others. “It makes him desire to be heard of men, but the weaker song of the humble may have more power in the ear of God”. The Radical has as little patience with Puritan humility as with borrowed grandeur. “Do you think it any better vanity to flatter yourself that God likes to hear you, though men don’t?” Mr Nuttward naturally takes offence and Felix Holt has one more enemy.
  
  Another enemy is the flashy lawyer Matthew Jermyn with a few past memories he’d prefer to keep to himself and who feels personally aggrieved when young Holt seems threatening to thwart one of his shady schemes in the service of the new candidate; here Elliot allows herself a rare comment in her own right: “ I have known persons who have been suspected of undervaluing gratitude, and excluding it from the list of virtues; but on closer observation it has been seen that, if they have never felt grateful, it has been for want of an opportunity; and that, far from despising gratitude, they regard it as the virtue most of all incumbent – on others towards them”.
  
  More down-to-earth folk regard the whole business of ‘voting’ for anyone at all as preposterous if not ungodly. “Irreproachable Dissenting matrons, like Mrs Muscat, whose youth had been passed in a short-waisted bodice and tight skirt, had never been animated by the struggle for liberty, and had a timid suspicion that religion was desecrated by being applied to things of this world”.
  
  Witticism is not an icing applied only to the political cake. “One way of getting an idea of our fellow countrymen’s miseries is to go and look at their pleasures. The Cross Keyes had a fungus-featured landlord and a yellow sickly landlady, with a napkin bound around her head like a resuscitated Lazarus; it had doctored ale, an odour of bad tobacco, and remarkably strong cheese. It was not what Astrea, when come back, might be expected to approve as the scene of ecstatic enjoyment for the beings whose special prerogative it is to lift their sublime faces towards heaven. Still, there was ample room on the hearth … for a man to stretch his legs; his brain was not pressed upon by a white wall within a yard of him; and the light did not stare in mercilessly on bare ugliness. Compared with some beer-houses of this more advanced period, the Cross Keyes at that day presented a high standard of pleasure”.
  
  Or regarding the activities of the villain of the piece, Lawyer Jermyn, a social up-start. Elliot fairly evidently has no great admiration for the legal profession, but she allows Sir Maximus Dubarry, with aristocratically-scant ceremony, to put that into words; “a cursed, sleek, handsome, long-winded, overbearing sycophant”. Her approach is the more dangerous for being the less broad-side on: “You will hear very strong denials that an attorney’s being handsome could enter into the dislike he excited; but conversation consists a good deal in the denial of what is true. From the British point of view masculine beauty is regarded very much as it is in the drapery business – as good only for the fancy department – for young noblemen, artists, poets and the clergy”. Mr Jermyn, an aspiring poet in his younger days, is undone by an underling he’s spoken down to once too often: “To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double , was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy”
  
  And so on, so far so good, an involuntary guffaw on every second page, “bitchiness” or very astute astringent observation as one wishes, drawing-room comedy at a very sophisticated level….until we come to the chief protagonist, Felix Holt the Radical, and there’s nothing very amusing about him because this, underneath all, is a seriously-intentioned book when ‘radical’ signified something like post-War ‘communism’. Felix – and surely the name is not fortuitous – is a character very difficult, impossible perhaps, to bring off, as his less successful literary step-brother Adam Bede exemplifies: a genuinely good man who isn’t at the same time a bit of a prig, a misanthrope with a delicately-concealed sympathy, interestingly-complicated yet with the plainest convictions. In fact, the ‘radicalism’ is quite apolitical and is a label used ironically in his case to show up the actual Radical candidate, Harold Transome, second son of an impoverished old Tory family who’s been “out east” and whose affection for the lower classes is a good deal more restrained than his interest in them as vehicles of a theoretical social progress to benefit himself . Felix, who deliberately on principle doesn’t wear a cravat and has a shock of unruly hair, is scornful equally of the arrogant collective right, the surly collective left (as the division would now be, though wasn’t yet then) and all shades in between because his government is himself, he doesn’t “fit in”, and if he’s somewhat quick-tempered it’s at attempts by others to suppress that independence. To the chagrin of a tiresome complaining mother, he’s used the education he’s acquired to “make a common man of himself” instead of finding a woman “with money to furnish” Less, I think it’s hinted, out of any particular zeal for the matter (“there are some men meant to live alone”) than to satisfy the conventions of a ‘romance’ (the more accurate former word for a ‘novel’) and effect a moral sea-change in the otherwise self-regarding airs and graces of the scintillating Esther Lyon (who conveniently turns out to be an unsuspected heiress anyway so that thanks to the influence of her mentor she can renounce it), he’s obliged to ‘fall in love’ with the latter. Something of his character is conveyed with economical artfulness by a dialogue in a minor episode at the beginning of this amatory process. Miss Lyon, at once unwillingly under Mr Holt’s uncalculated spell and determined to make him bend to hers, finds an excuse to visit him at home where she finds the usually querulous old mother quietened by an orphaned village infant her son has in a manner adopted. “Looking at Mrs Holt, she saw that her eyes had lost their bleak north-easterly expression and were shining with some mildness on little Job who had turned around towards her, propping his head against Felix.
  
  “ ‘Well, why shouldn’t I be motherly to the child Miss Lyon?’ said Mrs Holt, whose strong powers of argument required the file of an imagined contradiction, if there were no real one at hand, ‘I never was hard-hearted, and I never will be. It was Felix picked the child up and took to him, you may be sure, for there’s nobody else master where he is ……..’
  
  ‘Stop stop mother’ Felix burst in; ‘pray don’t use that limping argument again – that a man should marry because he’s fond of children. That’s a reason for not marrying. A bachelor’s children are always young; they’re immortal children – always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good’.
  
  ‘The Lord above knows what you mean! And haven’t other folk’s children a chance of turning out good?’
  
  ‘Oh, they grow out of it very fast. Here’s Job Tudge now’ said Felix, turning the little one around on his knee and and holding his head by the back – ‘Job’s limbs will get lanky; this little fist, that looks like a puff-ball and can hold nothing bigger than a gooseberry, will get large and bony, and perhaps want to clutch more than its share; those wide blue eyes that tell me more truth than Job knows, will narrow and narrow and try to hide truth that Job would be better off without knowing; this little negative nose will become long and self-asserting; and this little tongue …hardly bigger than a rose leaf, will get large and thick, wag out of season, do mischief, brag and cant for gain or vanity, and cut as sharply, for all its clumsiness , as if it were a sharp-edge blade’ ”
  
  Subsequent speeches become, of course, a little more conciliatory if no less stalwart as Miss Lyon’s proud gaze and some of her determinations start to waver before such an unusual conquering hero of the untailored type. At that stage a more worrisome objection might be said to arise, to return to Murdoch’s reluctance to ‘moralise’. It was an over-riding preoccupation peculiar to the nineteenth century English (or perhaps Protestant is the more accurate word) that literature should have not so much a poetic as an exemplary function, that it should ‘raise’ or ‘improve’ the reader by depicting for his consideration either the salvation or damnation of the characters according to their lights; what is ‘right’ must be seen, finally to conquer – a ‘happy ending’ after a sequence of testing trials and tribulations in other words - in something of the manner of a less simple medieval morality play, so that to a later more utilitarian or disillusioned audience it can seem, at best, like seeing from afar a grand but irrelevant pageant or mighty mustering of useless archaic forces. Felix is less irritatingly saintly than Adam, and much more rounded and filled out, generally highly sympathetic if not necessarily quite likeable, but still his stoical patience and stony resistance to the least temptation from his admirable path is too remarkable to represent him, in the end and however much it’s concealed, as more than a symbol of an ideal of manly rectitude. And unless young women born only something over a century before I was really were like this - in which case we’ve slipped shockingly down the evolutionary ladder - Esther, his female counterpart, with all her delightful repartee and precocious cleverness and charming prettiness and poise and impeccable taste while transforming herself simultaneously into a perfect lady and another ideal of feminine devotedness, is frankly psychologically incredible; she is only twenty-two and apart from a rather mysterious brief semi-education in a sort of ‘finishing-school’ has barely set foot outside a humble habitation in an insalubrious provincial alleyway. I’m not sure that matters, since after all it’s ‘true’ when so brilliantly and perceptively related as this, and psychoanalysis is no less a fiction than is literature, so long as one accepts the conventions of the time in which it was written, and Elliot certainly uses every masterly stroke to make us believe that it doesn’t; but also it’s easy enough to see why the Bloomsbury coterie after the First War was so keen to reject the out-dated over-stuffed Victorian past in favour of an irreligious would-be stricter realism without ever achieving the easy graceful impersonality of their French contemporaries, for example.
  
  That said, when the morality tale and the sparkling wit is all blended with an excitingly-complicated and fast-moving story of the rueful consequences of past mistakes, misadventures and secret sins, nocturnal entertainment like this makes occasional insomnia something to be welcomed. Five stars are not enough. It’s remarkable, perhaps, that George Elliot, a mere scribbler of the weaker sex, could not just get away with such unfeminine forthrightness and veracity but earn enormous acclaim for it at a time (1866) when according to modern interpretations the social rules were so oppressive and constricting. Her equivalent, were there against all the odds to be one, wouldn’t go down at all well in these days of freedom and emancipation.
  
  
• 
  Matthew

  Reading Felix Holt the Radical, I am once more struck by the opprobrium with which progressive forces have tended to be regarded by society at large, a society which always tends to fall on the side of conservatism.
  
  That is understandable. Once you accept radical change in society, you cannot easily go back to the safe world of the present. Something has changed forever. That said, the world is only safe for those who have money enough to live a safe life. As the present economic crisis demonstrates, the wealthy or well-to-do will manage fine with soaring prices, but poor families are once more in trouble.
  
  At a time when bans are being merrily slapped on any remotely progressive book in parts of America, it is remarkable that George Eliot slips below the radar. She was a religious freethinker and a political radical.
  
  I can only assume it is the relative subtlety of her works that prevents many from seeing this in her novels. While she was a non-believer, Eliot was a respecter of religion, and one of her major novels is a defence of a religion. In her typical unconventional manner, that religion was Judaism, not Christianity. As for Felix Holt, the character of the Reverend Rufus Lyon in this book indicates that Eliot preferred her religion to be like her politics – dissenting.
  
  Still Eliot’s radicalism is often overlooked, perhaps because she lived in a pre-socialist age, and could not be thus labelled. I suspect if she had lived 50 years later, she would have embraced aspects of that movement. It also helps that her opinions on the Radical movement are to be found in one of her least popular novels.
  
  Looking around second-hand bookshops for Felix Holt the Radical, it took me several months to find it, even though it is a work of literature by one of the Victorian age’s most prominent authors. That indicates its comparative lack of appeal. Fewer editions have been published.
  
  Why should this be? Some are put off by the political content, something that does not help when it is the politics of a bygone age, and also a set of left-leaning views that repel both conservative and liberal readers.
  
  A large part of the book is taken up with discussions of an obscure legal arrangement which threatens to dispossess Harold Transome, the other Radical in the book. A number of critics have found fault with Felix Holt himself, finding him to be a surprisingly unconvincing character in a George Eliot novel.
  
  Now I think that Felix Holt is one of Eliot’s best works, perhaps second only to Middlemarch. I am not blind to its faults. Sometimes Eliot the pedant has done a little too much research, and weighs the book down with facts. Her measured and balanced prose occasionally tends towards the labyrinthine, and passages have to be re-read. However that is the price we pay for reading a book by someone who understands the subject matter better than many of her contemporaries, and I am happy to pay it.
  
  The legal part did lose me a little, and it hinted at melodramatic sub-plots that jar with Eliot’s usual realism. Similar faults can be found in even Middlemarch, and Eliot is freer of the fault than most Victorian writers.
  
  That leaves us with the political aspect of Felix Holt the Radical, which puts some people off. After the esoteric subject matter of Romola (and with Daniel Deronda still to come), readers might have felt glad to get back to a book about conventional British matters, but they were not quite prepared for a discussion of Radicalism.
  
  Many political books have a limited perspective when it comes to understanding working movements. Some, like Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, remain firmly conservative and against them. Some, like Mrs Gaskell’s North and South, aim for a naïve alliance between workers and their bosses. Works written by progressive writers often present a black-and-white struggle between the oppressed workers and the oppressive ruling classes.
  
  What Eliot understood better is that the bigger division in progressive movements is not between oppressed and oppressor, but between different modes of thought within the progressive movement, and a lack of enthusiasm for those causes among the poor.
  
  In this book, Eliot presents two kinds of Radical. Harold Transome is a wealthy landowner who has lived abroad for many years, and is therefore receptive to new ideas, even if they cause him to be shunned by his conservative neighbours.
  
  While Harold is not without some genuine commitment to his cause, he has adopted it from a patrician point of view, dispensing some good to others on his own terms. He has no real love for the disenfranchised, or indeed for anyone else. In order to run for election, he is quite happy to use the usual lackeys who foment trouble, rather than preserve his ideals. I would not be surprised if Harold had appeared in a sequel as a Tory candidate.
  
  On the other side is Felix Holt, a man so poor that he does not even have the vote. The Reform Act of 1932 had widened the franchise, but still left the poorer members of society without any power to influence elections. It would be nearly a century before universal suffrage was achieved.
  
  Felix is an idealist, and wants only what is best for the ordinary man and woman. He tries to persuade Harold to rein in his worst agents. When this fails, and the agents incite the drunken workers to a riot, Felix goes with the mob in order to try to divert them from doing too much harm. Alas, he accidentally kills a law officer, and is mistaken for their leader.
  
  For many critics, Felix Holt is the weak link in the book. Henry James calls him a ‘fragment’, and I think I understand that. Felix is honest to the point of bluntness, and stands for all that is noble and just. He is a little too good, compared with Eliot’s usual flawed characters.
  
  It is also a little hard to see what motivates Felix. His mother sells quack medicinal cures, and perhaps this explains his wish to seek the truth. Still there is something under-explained here. Why does he choose to live a poorer life than he needs to in order to pursue idealistic goals that have still not been fully-realised in society?
  
  I suppose we have to see Felix as more of a representation of a political viewpoint, than as a developed character. He is the emblem of all that Eliot finds best in Radicalism, the movement at its most pure, the ideal that needs to be sought without compromise or pragmatic betrayal, and therefore the opposite of Harold.
  
  Does Felix work on this level? Are his ideals too pure to ever be achieved? If so, does that make Eliot’s platform unrealistic? When we see the working men choosing to get inflamed by drink and false rhetoric rather than by the honest goals of Felix, we might feel that he is expecting more of people than they deserve.
  
  I think Eliot has this covered too. Felix is an idealist, but a realist too. He recognises that the ordinary man is not yet ready to have the vote, and likens them to Calibans running after the next Trinculo. What is needed first is the education of the ordinary man, and only then can he be trusted to vote in his own interests.
  
  Looking at what has happened since the vote was achieved, I am not sure that even this has come to pass. Still we live in a society where people choose ease over change, even when that ease is killing them. They accept the existing society as the right one, because the effort of trying to change it seems too daunting, and they have become cynical about past attempts.
  
  The dilemma of choosing the right life is encapsulated in the character of Esther Lyon. She is wooed by Harold in a courtly way, since Harold thinks that women are trivial, and he is motivated more by preservation of his estate than love. She is also followed in a different way by Felix, who challenges her complacent attitudes.
  
  Naturally Esther is more drawn to the man who challenges her, even if she is sometimes angered by him. Still a life with Harold would be easier, if less happy, and the temptation is there.
  
  Esther is one of Eliot’s finest heroines, witty and charming, but also reflective and capable of change. Does she represent a feminist heroine though? Many would say not.
  
  The choice that Esther faces is which man she should follow. Should she settle for Harold’s complacent sexism, or give up everything to worship at the altar of Felix? Indeed some of the language used in relation to the two of them is that of religious devotion.
  
  Nonetheless while Eliot is Victorian enough to favour a degree of submission to a man’s will, there is still a sense in which Esther is making an emancipated choice. It is she who can save both Harold and Felix, and she does. She gets to decide which path to lead.
  
  If she accepts Harold, she will live a lie, and become like Harold’s mother, a woman who remains in the shadow of dominant and scheming men, never knowing a day’s happiness. If she accepts Felix, he will bring out what is best in her. He believes in her potential to be something better. She can grow and develop, albeit into something that Felix wants.
  
  While Felix Holt the Radical may not be to everyone’s tastes, I heartily recommend it as a book that gives a deeper insight into what George Eliot stood for, and as a fascinating study of what it means to be a Radical.
• 
  Lene Jaqua

  Felix Holt kept my attention. It was an enjoyable book with an engaging plot, however, given that it is authored by Georg Eliot, I would say that it is not as engaging or unique as Silas Marner, nor as complex and thought out as the multiplot-lined Middlemarch.
  
  Some common themes that show up in other Eliot books as well is the dissenting Protestants, the restless female who is not content to be flirtatious and pretty, as well as the giving up of wealth and rank in order to gain a more meaningful life. These themes are prominent in this book, as well as in other Eliot books.
  
  Interestingly enough, her heroine, Esther has sort of a biblical calling and a path that is worthy of her name. Esther's father, Rufus Lion, the lion of Judah in the book, strong and determined, never greedy, always in consideration of others and faithful in his ministry and in his love of God. The main 'antagonist' --- if there can be said to be one -- Harold, has the name of old English kings, and his life is one of entitled wealth and rank, mingled with issues of legitimacy, need of money, and bungled up legal matters. He also names his young son and heir after himself, Harry. Harold is the ultimate patriarch. He listens to no one, runs roughshod over his mother and her wishes, and over anyone's wishes, really, if they run counter to his own.
  
  Felix Holt, the book's title, refers to a young radical who is rather otherworldly in his values, who is as honest as the day is long, but whose motives are constantly misread. Nobody, excepting perhaps Esther and her father, believes that Felix is as honest as he really is. Felix's disinterestedness in money and making lots of it tortures his middle aged mother, who like Harold's mother feels abused at the hands of her son--- in Felix' mother's case because her son is honest, can get by with little, and because he is not willing to live off of any line of sales that are hurtful to the general public.
  
  A good book, perhaps a bit predictable, but a solid story line.
  
  
  
• 
  Carmen

  The first book I have finished in 2011 is a classic written by the estimable George Eliot, whose novel Middlemarch I fell completely in love with. I found Felix Holt to be an inferior work, but still entertaining and quite gripping toward the end of the book. The Transome estate is in neglect when we first enter the scene, and the stately lady of the house is eagerly awaiting the arrival of her second-born son who has recently become the inheritor of everything. Lady Transome has many high hopes for this, her favourite child, and is in a state of eager anticipation when he arrives. Thus the story starts briefly with hope, but delves quickly into a twisted labyrinth of secrets and politics, immorality and goodness, love and hatred. We meet Esther and her father Mr. Lyon, a Radical minister, Mr. Jermyn who is a lawyer and has managed Transome in lieu of a mentally incapacitated Lord and his gambling eldest son, and the man the book is named after, Felix Holt who is of high moral character and, even more impressive, practices what he preaches.
  
  Felix Holt was slow to get into and slow to introduce characters, but once all that was out of the way it developed into a lovely little morality tale complete with romance and politics. I give it seven bookmarks out of ten.
  
  
  http://toomanybooknotenoughtime.blogs...
• 
  Bryn

  I first read Felix Holt about 15 years ago, and it didn't catch me as much as other, more popular novels by Eliot. Having just re-read it, I now understand why.
  
  This is a novel that depends on an understanding of the political state of the UK in I think the 1830s. On first reading, I just didn't have the insight to make any sense of some of the motives and events. Going back armed with a few ideas about the history of political reform, I experienced the book in a very different way, getting far more out of it and being far more interested in the debates and issues.
  
  I also realised just how much sarasm and irony Eliot employs. She can be really bitchy, and I'd entirely missed that too, as a younger reader. I laughed, repeatedly. I alo enjoyed the little philosophical asides, the characatures and the scathing moments.
  
  In essence it's a romance, but so decked up with moral and political issues that it barely scrapes into the genre, which is excellent. I like complex romances. There's a fair dose of wild coincidence - often a feature of witing from the period, so some tolerance is called for on that score.
  
  A crash course in period history is a necessary investment for getting the most out of this story, but if you know your Chartists and rotten boroughs, and radical politics, its a fun read.
• 
  John

  First, Eliot is simply a master. I love her way of writing. This is my fifth book by Eliot. Unfortunately, it's my least favorite. It is a story about an election, about love, about a surprise heir, about how poverty and wealth can each make us selfish. These stories were all ok but none of them was great. And the ending came so abruptly. All that being said, the writing is wonderful.