In both Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot interrupts her narrative to deliver a lengthy apologia for the kind of novel she is writing. It is prompted in each case by what appears to be an anomaly. In Adam Bede, the vicar of Hayslope fails as Christian mentor and appears to a putative reader as ‘little better than a pagan’. Chapter seventeen which follows is the famous aesthetic justification based on a contrast between the ‘secret of proportion’ of classical art and ‘the secret of deep human sympathy’ of Dutch realism. Only sympathy can understand and interpret the human anomalies who fail to measure up to the conventional types and contrasts of high art. The apologia in The Mill on the Floss is very different. This is again prompted by an apparent conflict between Christian and pagan values. Mr Tulliver, though a regular churchgoer, has just recorded his desire for vengeance against one of his enemies on the fly-leaf of the family Bible. The chapter which follows, ‘A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet’, defines the strategies which this novel has adopted to interpret such heretical behaviour.

Once again a contrast is established between two forms of life, symbolised on this occasion by the ruins of the Rhine and the Rhône. The former represent a time of romance when moral categories were clear and antithetical, when the great cathedrals were built and the known world was intelligible through the world-shattering opposition of Christian and pagan values: ‘did not great emperors leave their Western palaces to die before the infidel strongholds in the sacred East?’