This book is about George Eliot’s appropriation and transformation of psychological ideas. It identifies which scientific and philosophical thinkers had an impact on Eliot’s writing, while acknowledging her contribution to the history of psychiatry. Davis offers a broad and detailed account of the links between nineteenth-century psychology and the writings of George Eliot, looking into some of the period’s most tense and prolific debates as well as how Eliot’s complex realism drew on and influenced those issues. More specifically, Davis discusses the relationship between the mind and the body, the formation of selfhood and identity, and the vexed question of how much control human subjects have over their thoughts and actions. The book ends with a particularly useful chapter on how these issues relate to Eliot’s spiritual, ethical, and religious doubts.

Davis’s book enters into a very active field of research. As he acknowledges in his introduction, he is not the first to write on the links between Eliot and psychology. He is, however, the first to offer a full-length study of the subject. Previous works by Sally Shuttleworth and Jane Wood, for instance, consider Eliot’s links with Victorian psychiatry but these discussions are given in books that study other authors or other branches of science as well. In dedicating a full monograph to the subject, Davis is able to explore, in new and convincing detail, issues like the relationship between psychology and language and the possibility that theories of the mind were filling a gap left by religion following the Victorian crisis of faith.

This is a well-structured book. Its thematic layout is valuable in pinpointing which issues Eliot felt most compelled to return to throughout her career. It will be very useful to scholars interested in the links between medicine and literature, the history of psychology, and the work of George Eliot. Davis is so thorough in exploring the links between Eliot and psychology that I was often left wondering how these ideas related to other literary and cultural trends. Notwithstanding, his methodology is something that other academics can draw on in order to understand the work of any given author. The book is densely written; I had to read many of its sentences several times before getting a sense of Davis’s meaning, which I would consider a weakness if one was expecting the book to be useful to a wide and varied range of academics.

Andrew Mangham (University of Reading)

For more details, see the Ashgate Press website