Barbara Hardy's Novels of George Eliot is a classic study of Eliots's outstanding powers as a great formal artist. The book's continuing appeal is due not simply to the perceptiveness and freshness of its writing but to the fact that form is interpreted in the widest sense to include whatever is relevant to the novels as organised, articulated, imaginative wholes and also as the direct expression of George Eliot's profound analysis
of the human condition.