Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot

Carroll, Alicia. Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. xvii + 179 pp. $39.95

In her introduction, Carroll explains George Eliot's complicated relationship with and attitude towards the exotic Other: "Negotiating the conservative mainstream in her fiction, as she had in life, George Eliot became deeply engaged in representations of desire which often question and subvert the status quo of white innocence and dark desire." Subsequent chapters show how Eliot constantly renders the erotic through the racial or ethnic Other,...