George Eliot's way with characters

 Virginia Woolf was a wonderful reader. She kept a commonplace book. She wrote reviews and essays. She noticed things that other readers miss.

In her essay “George Eliot,” Woolf famously described Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

I think her observation about fictional characters is helpful to writers:

Thus one can muse and speculate about the greater number of George Eliot’s characters and find, even in the least important, a roominess and margin where those qualities lurk which she has no call to bring from obscurity.

I love that phrase “roominess and margin.” Many of George Eliot’s characters are capable of who knows what. You can sense the potential for crime, social gaffs, quarrels just beneath the surface. And that’s true of characters that are just passing by.

• Virginia Woolf’s essay “George Eliot” was published in The Times Literary Supplement on Nov. 20, 1919.