'Influencing the moral taste': Literary work, aesthetics, and social change in 'Felix Holt, the Radical'

George Eliot's ambivalence about the business of writing shapes critical an d autobiographical accounts of her work. Embracing the idealism of literary vocation while rejecting its mundane professional and entrepreneurial qual ities, Eliot thereby evades the fact of her own participation in the litera ry marketplace. As a complement to this familiar representation of Eliot's authorship, in this essay I turn to Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), a novel that focuses on the operations of moral influence at the height of George Eliot's commercial success. Felix's efforts to evade mere profession in ord er to present himself as 'a demagogue of a new sort' often stand in for Eli ot's concerns. Yet, as many critics attempting to recuperate the significan ce of Esther Lyon, Felix's 'worldly' convert, suggest, Esther ultimately su rfaces as the novel's more effective moral guide. As Felix and Esther debat e the appropriate placement of aesthetics, ideals, and commerce, they embod y and engender cultural hierarchies that were of direct concern for this co mmercially successful woman writer. Dramatizing, through Esther's fashion-c onscious mobilization of public sympathies, what it means to have a vocatio n or to be a professional, Eliot's social-problem novel shifts the alignmen t of disinterestedness, intellect, and masculinity to a form of female auth ority in the marketplace. This attempt to integrate the aesthetic, commerci al, and ethical aspects of literary work in Felix Holt helps complicate con ventional portrayals of George Eliot's rejection of Victorian commodity cul ture at the same time that it vivifies the negotiations that enabled Eliot to shape the 'moral taste' of her readers.