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OVER THE course of George Eliot’s career, her realism developed from attentive observation and sympathetic historicism in her early novels to analysis of the web-like intricacies between individuals and their social and cultural environment in her late novels. However, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), Eliot’s last published work, has remained enigmatic for scholars of realism due to its deviation from Eliot’s primary literary form, the novel. Impressions is not a novel. In fact, George Henry Lewes, Eliot’s philosopher-psychologist partner, claims in a note to John Blackwood accompanying the manuscript of Impressions that it “is not a story” (qtd. in Haight 515, emphasis in original). Indeed, it does not read like a story. Impressions presents as a series of loosely connected character sketches narrated by a middle-aged bachelor named Theophrastus, and it deviates from two mainstays of Eliot’s realism. In contrast to her novels, which make use of third-person omniscient narrators and fully realized and psychologically complex characters, her last work embraces a limited first-person perspective and presents typified, one-dimensional characters through the character sketch genre. Because of the first-person narrative and generic experimentation in Impressions, scholarship has failed to provide a coherent account of it in relation to her body of work and realist aesthetic.
Though Nancy Henry’s introduction to the 1994 edition renewed interest in the text, Impressions has received remarkably little attention from Eliot scholars. Most often, individual chapters are treated in isolation or Impressions is read alongside Daniel Deronda (1876).1 Hazel Mackenzie’s essay, which aligns the formal complexity of Impressions with Eliot’s perfectionism, and S. Pearl Brilmyer’s essay, which analyzes Eliot’s late-career non-human interest through Impressions’s conflation of humans with other life forms, are notable exceptions. Most recently, Rosemarie Bodenheimer gives an account of the text in relation to Eliot’s biography and traces common themes from Eliot’s novels, such as human illusion and egoism, as they appear in Impressions. Moreover, despite its heavy engagement with psychological discourse, Impressions has been overlooked in monographs on Eliot and science and nineteenth-century psychology.2 Sally Shuttleworth examines Eliot’s engagement with organic theory in her novels but treats Impressions for only two pages in her conclusion, arguing that the book offers “no hint” of “radical social or psychological vision” (202). Michael...