Style And Technique

Abstract

When Lewes was encouraging Eliot to start writing novels he told her: ‘You have wit, description and philosophy’ -he only feared she lacked ‘the highest quality of fiction - dramatic presentation’. He could not have been more wrong - it was discovered that Eliot had a remarkable gift of catching nuance of character in tone of voice. She had always admired writers who dared to be ‘thoroughly familiar … like Shakespeare, Fielding, Scott and indeed every other writer of fiction of the first class … Shakespeare is intensely colloquial. One hears the very accent of living men’.