Stories we Like to Tell: Gossip in George Eliot's Fiction

Gossip, this essay argues, highlights an essential crux in George Eliots work by dramatizing the imaginative, antisocial and often anticommunitarian processes that flourish in her fiction, complicating her ethical ideal for literature. Addressing the analogues that Eliot draws between gossip and fiction-making, the essay seeks to account for moments where both become occasions for indulging schadenfreude and social sadism. It traces Eliots representations of gossip throughout her career, including her fictions metaphors of diffusion and supplementarity, and argues that her representations of gossip threaten to render her aims for sociability and realism ineffective, even self-defeating.