GEORGE ELIOT AND HER TIMES. By Elizabeth S. Haldane. Appleton and Co., New York, 1927. $3.50.

THIS study of George Eliot is only for those who are interested in the great Victorian novelist, and for those who are willing to lay aside their prejudice and be convinced, by a rational and quiet style, of her greatness. As Miss Haldane says in the last chapter, there is not one of the great Victorians who has suffered more from neglect since the war; the novels have not the satire of Thackeray's stories of London society, nor the luridness of Dickens tales of the slums; there is nothing but an unwavering view of the human heart, and a pervading sense of the law that we reap what we sow."

There is no sensationalism in this biography; the fact that George Eliot lived for many years with a man to whom she was not married, because of the inexorable divorce laws of the period, is treated with the common sense and dignity with which George Eliot herself regarded it. As a matter of fact Miss Haldane does not have the talent for "human interest"; she gives the background of Mary Ann Evans in a thoughtful and competent style, but she does not attempt to give color and sparkle to an essentially serious story Yet in the end the figure of the brilliant, high-minded woman emerges, the writer who as she was one of the most retiring of the great novelists of the last century, saw deeper, perhaps, below the surface of life than any of them.

Miss Haldane has sympathy both for George Eliot and for her times. She says of the novelist's unsuccessful attempts at verses, "we have to thank their author for raising her eyes to the stars even if, like the old philosopher, her footsteps sometimes stumbled on the ground." She is at her best in discussing the novels; frankly stating the defects of each and the length and the occasional excursions into philosophy which hold off the modern reader, she yet brings out strongly the beauty, truth and power of the author at her best. She writes as one who admires George Eliot; but who is aware of her limitations, while even more aware of her extraordinary powers.

George Henry Lewes, the lifelong lover and helper of the woman of genius, also has Miss Haldane's sympathy--"he did for George Eliot what the Prince Consort did for Queen Victoria." The reader is not surprised to learn that in spite of her unconventional marriage the novelist enjoyed the friendship and esteem of most of the other great ones of her time, and that when Lewes was ill a messenger enquired after his health from the court of Queen Victoria.

There are excellent chapters on George Eliot's religion, showing how, though she was brought up an extreme evangelical, under the vaguer beliefs of her later life there was always a deeply religious nature. She loved the past, and the old life there was always a deeply religious nature. She loved the past, and the old life of England, and yet she was one of the first, as she remains one of the greatest, of realists; for she saw through the green and sunny surface of country life to the wretchedness beneath. "The Mill on the Floss" and "Adam Bede", dealing with English life an with people whom the author knew, are analyzed clearly in Miss Haldane's book, and recommended as the best for the casual reader whose acquaince is limited to "Silas Marner."