Abstract

Despite criticism's collusion with Eliot, there are a number of incongruities between Wordsworth's ideas and Eliot's texts that do not seem to be simply differences, scenes and passages that Eliot invites her readers to find Wordsworthian while she indicates a significant pattern of divergence from Wordsworthian prototypes. The brotherly instructions that Eliot is most generally concerned at once to follow and to deny are contained in Wordsworth's wish, in the verse "Prospectus" to The Recluse, to see "Paradise, and groves/Elysian" be "A simple produce of the common day" . But when she follows this wish literally, her "common day," the intensely social world of her novels, tests far more strenuously the adaptability of the paradisal vision than does anything Wordsworth wrote. The generic incompatibility between a poet's vision and the form of the novel may account for some of the obvious differences, yet, as I will try to suggest later, it may be that Eliot's choice of the realistic novel as the form for her vision is in part an effect, not a cause of her ambivalent divergences from Wordsworth .Margaret Homans, an assistant professor of English at Yale University, is the author of Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson. She is currently at work on a book of feminist criticism of Romanticism and Victorian fiction