There’s a telling moment in Zadie Smith’s new historical novel, The Fraud, in which the real-life Victorian novelist William Ainsworth gives his opinion on Middlemarch by the new literary upstart George Eliot. Virginia Woolf famously called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” and it’s fair to say it has aged better than any of Ainsworth’s 41 terrible books, wildly successful in their day.
The eminent man of letters cannot see the appeal, though. “No adventure, no drama, no murder, nothing to excite the blood or chill it!” he complains. “Is this all that these modern ladies’ novels are to be about? People?”
“I like it,” his housekeeper, Eliza Touchet, counters, concealing a smile – and you can imagine Zadie
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