Dorothea Brooke, Gwendolyn Harleth and Hetty Sorrel on the Brink of the Impossible: George Eliot and the Female Bildungsroman

This paper examines the tension between ambition and failure in the trajectories of the female protagonists in three George Eliot novels—Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede (1859), Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch (1871-72), and Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda (1876). Building on Franco Moretti’s notion of a ‘distinct female Bildungsroman’, I argue that these characters’ development follows a similar three-step structure as they navigate the constraints of gender, class, and socioeconomic status. The dialectical interplay between ambition and coercion sustains the narratives on the brink of possibility and impossibility, while Eliot’s narrative choices challenge traditional forms of the Bildungsroman, offering a critique of the genre as it applies to women.