Between sensation and realism: George Eliot, gender, and the French episode in <i>Middlemarch</i>

Abstract The article addresses the scholarly underestimation of the sensational French episode in George Eliot's Middlemarch . Drawing on three ideological contexts—marriage and divorce laws, family ideology, and gendered categories of reading—it reinterprets Eliot's complex negotiation with sensation fiction, analyzing how she interrogates the nexus between moral, social, and gender norms. The analysis begins by exploring how the literary‐cultural implications of France expose Eliot's engagement with Victorian discourse surrounding sensation fiction, particularly in relation to female criminality. While Eliot's portrayal of the legally inferior sensation heroine echoes the conventions of sensation fiction, she reconfigures its moral logic by refusing to redeem the transgressive woman, who destabilizes masculine emotional projections and challenges the sympathy shaped by Victorian middle‐class family ideology. Finally, the article argues that Eliot constructs an androgynous reader by integrating feminine affective identification into a male character. It concludes that Eliot does not simply assert realism's superiority over popular genres; instead, she appropriates sensational effects in service of her realist ethics.