The Continuity Of The Female Characters In George Eliot's Three Novels

George Eliot is one of very important writers in the literary development and the development of women's literature. She has created different characters in her novels, especially female ones. And in her novels we could see the questions women met. Though she has created various different female characters, they were not separated, but should be taken as a whole. Only through this could we understand George Eliot and her works. We should only grasp the inner clue of different female characters so that we could fully understand her thoughts. Though George Eliot has been widely analyzed, they were usually too separated to get a full understanding of her works, so in my thesis, I take her three novels out from her many excellent ones to find this inner clue.In George Eliot's whole fiction-writing life, she has shown great talent in the characterization, especially in the female characterization. Maybe out of her background once considered as a female writer publishing her works in "TheGreat Tradition" -----a phrase coined by F. R. Leavis to describe the literarywriting dominated by the male authors in the Victorian period, the great success she has achieved, and the high appraisal she has got from her contemporaries and later ones, who played a very important role in the literary development, such as Charles Dickens, Henry James, F. R. Leavis, Barbara Bodichon, and so on, so in the atlas of the English novel, the period when George Eliot published her works was labeled as "the Eliot range", with "the Austen peaks, the Bronte cliffs and the Woolf hills" depicted as the four sides of the mountains which bounded the women's territory~1. The reason why George Eliot has been held so high in the English literary development which was dominated by the male, and when the women, deprived of the right of receiving education and speeches, were thought to stay at home to be a good daughter, wife and mother, is that we could feel her deep concern for the problems and the social issues which were confronted by the women in particular, and the great social changes which took place in the Victorian period through various colorful characters, especially female ones, such...