George Eliot s more than fifty long and short journeys within England took her to dozens of sites scattered around the country. Revising the traditional notion that George Eliot drew her settings and characters only from the areas of her Warwickshire childhood, Kathleen McCormack demonstrates that English travel furnished the novelist with a wide variety of originals for the composite characters and settings she would so memorably create.

McCormack traces the way in which George Eliot gathered material during her travels and also drafted long sections of the novels while away from...