Felix Holt, the Radical

"Esther!" exclaimed Felix, amazed. They held each other by both hands, and looked into each other's faces with delight. "You are out of prison?" "Yes, I am free again, and something more."

Harold's election, the Treby riot, Felix's trial, and Esther's renunciation of Transome wealth fuse Reform politics with domestic choice, so plot scores 85.

Between her and little Harry there was an extraordinary fascination. This creature, with the soft, broad, brown cheeks, low forehead, great black eyes, tiny, well-defined nose, fierce, biting tricks toward every person and thing he disliked, and insistence on entirely occupying those he liked, was a human specimen such as Esther had never seen before.

Felix, Esther, Harold, and Mr. Lyon are typed yet warmly individuated — Esther's natural-history gaze at Harry reveals Eliot's eye for character, so cast scores 87.

Felix was going to Sproxton that Sunday afternoon. He always enjoyed his walk to that outlying hamlet; it took him through a corner of Sir Maximus Debarry's park; then across a piece of common, broken here and there into red ridges below dark masses of furze.

Thirty-seven chapters with Reform Bill exposition between riot and trial; deliberate county-election tempo rather than thriller pace, so pace scores 81.

Truth is the precious harvest of the earth. But once, when harvest waved upon a land, the noisome cankerworm and caterpillar, Locusts, and all the swarming foul-born broods, fastened upon it with swift, greedy jaws, and turned the harvest into pestilence, until men said, What profits it to sow?

Eliot's mid-period prose — Drayton epigraphs, canal Sundays, political epigrams — balances argument with sensuous Midlands detail, so prose scores 88.

On the first of September, in the memorable year 1832, some one was expected at Transome Court. As early as two o'clock in the afternoon the aged lodge-keeper had opened the heavy gate, green as the tree trunks were green with nature's powdery paint, deposited year after year.

North Loamshire, Treby Magna, Sproxton, and Transome Court render the 1832 Reform election as social anatomy of industrial England, so world scores 86.

Already in the village of Little Treby, which lay on the side of a steep hill not far off the lodge-gates, the elder matrons sat in their best gowns at the few cottage doors bordering the road, that they might be ready to get up and make their courtesy when a travelling carriage should come in sight.

Transome Court's awaited return on Reform year 1832 establishes county expectation before political storm, so hook scores 83.

If Denner had had a suspicion that Esther's presence at Transome Court was not agreeable to her mistress, it was impossible to entertain such a suspicion with regard to the other members of the family.

Radical politics in a county-election frame with a heroine who renounces inherited wealth tests Reform idealism against mob violence, so innov scores 86.

I will only say that Esther has never repented. Felix, however, grumbles a little that she has made his life too easy, and that, if it were not for much walking, he should be a sleek dog. There is a young Felix, who has a great deal more science than his father, but not much more money.

Felix and Esther marry after his release; Esther's renunciation holds without regret though Felix grumbles — honest closure without fortune, so ending scores 87.