This chapter on the Victorian bildungsroman focuses on moments when a heroine pleasurably and passively flies, floats, or is carried into a larger social world. It focuses on episodes from Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Rather than developing a life that establishes her individuality, I argue that the heroine of the bildungsroman gets swept up in an emotion that unites her with a social ingroup. This emotion deeply fulfills the heroine, meeting ordinarily unmet needs for social relatedness and self-esteem. After analyzing the novels, the chapter describes acts of reading through which women and working-class readers affiliate with like-minded others. These include readers who see themselves as part of a group of ardent Dorothea Brookes or fiery Jane Eyres and also working-class readers who felt transported by books that connected them to other book-lovers.

This chapter considers the rhythms of George Eliot’s prose; it shows that George Eliot had a fine ear for the cadences of her writing and that she controlled the fluency and blockage in the progress of her sentences to variously suggestive effects. Her rhythmical prose responds to the balance her realism strikes between immediate description and reflective narration, between dreamy ideals and difficult realities. The tension that her characters experience between a willingness to struggle on and a desire to relent is also registered in the fluency and friction of her sentences.