George Eliot’s PulseRanging over all George Eliot's fiction and drawing as well on her letters, essays, and translations, in this book the distinguished critic Neil Hertz documents Eliot's lifelong questioning of the nature of authorship and of what it might mean, in the language of one of her early letters, for her "not simply to be, but to utter." Pursuing oddities of diction and figuration, of plotting and characterization, Hertz finds everywhere in Eliot's works