GEORGE ELIOT-3

The result was Romola (1863). It was her longest and most complex work, but lacked the charm of her earlier fiction. Felix Holt, the radical (1866) was a melodramatic story of a young political reformer. Poetry in this book prepared her readers for The Spanish Gypsy (1868), a laborious effort in verse which enjoyed popularity though it never approached true poetry.

Her last works were Middlemarch (1871-1872), in which she returned to the study of provincial manners, Daniel Deronda (1876), a fictionalized view of Zionism, and Impressions of Theophrastus such (1879), was a collection of short stories. After Lewes’ death she edited some of his unpublished work and established the George Lewes scholarship to aid students engaged in scientific work. In May 1880, she married John Walter Cross, an intimate friend of both Lewes and herself, but she died in December of the same year.