Covering all of George Eliot's novels, this book offers a challenging re-assessment of the writer's contribution to the critical debates of her own period and of our time. It examines Eliot's literary exploration of ethics, especially in relation to the negotiation of difference, and demonstrates that through a reading of the novels' complex and sophisticated drama of otherness, her work can be seen as freshly relevant to contemporary debates in feminism, post-colonial studies, psychoanalysis and moral philosophy.