Abstract
George Eliot’s novels are amongst the first that come to mind when Henry James’s description of Victorian novels as ‘large loose baggy monsters’ is invoked. For many critics, the length of Eliot’s fiction, compounded by their months-long publication, raises questions about narrative poetics—how duration, tone, and the relation of narrative to description shape the rhythm of a reader’s experience. This chapter considers how the changeable rhythms of Eliot’s prose reflect her grasp of lived experience as a sequential unpacking of events one after another—and also as part of an overarching pattern that sardonic fate, or a meticulous author, holds in her hand. Rhythmic regularity—its iterability, repetition, and predictability—is both a mainstay of Eliot’s aesthetic and a counterpoint to the messy staccato of onrushing actuality that requires representation. Roland Barthes’s concept of idiorrhythmy may offer a new way into Eliot’s narrative poetics.