terward conformed and managed to come
out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family
estate," had a hand in Dorothea's "plain" wardrobe. "She could not
reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal
consequences with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of
drapery," but Celia "had that common-sense which is able to accept
momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation." Both were examples
of "reversion." Then, as an instance of heredity working itself out in
character "in Mr. Brooke, the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was
clearly in abeyance, but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through
faults and virtues."

Could anything be more natural than for a woman with this passion for,
and skill in, "unravelling certain human lots," to lay herself out upon
the human lot of woman, with all her "passionate patience of genius?"
One would say this was inevitable. And, for a delineation of what that
lot of woman really is, as made for her, there is nothing in all
literature equal to what we find in "Middlemarch," "Romola," "Daniel
Deronda," and "Janet's Repentance." "She was a woman, and could not make
her own lot." Never before, indeed, was so much got out of the word
"lot." Never was that little word so hard worked, or well worked. "We
women," says Gwendolen Harleth, "must stay where we grow, or where the
gardeners like to transplant us. We are brought up like the flowers, to
look as pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining. That is my
notion about the plants, and that is the reason why some of them have got
poisonous." To appreciate the work that George Eliot has done you must
read her with the determination of finding out the reason why Gwendolen
Harleth "became poisonous," and Dorothea, with all her brains and
"plans," a failure; why "the many Theresas find for themselves no epic
life, only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual
grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity." You must search
these marvellous studies in motives for the key to the blunders of "the
blundering lives" of woman which "some have felt are due to the
inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme power has fashioned
the natures of women." But as there is not "one level of feminine
incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the
social lot of woman cannot be treated with scientific certitude." It is
treated with