This is the first study to argue that Jewish Mysticism influenced not only her Jewish novel, Daniel Deronda, but all of George Eliot's novels. The reader is left with a very different George Eliot from that assumed by most previous criticism. Though previous studies have attempted to qualify the still-dominant view that Eliot is firmly a part of the realistic tradition, this study goes further by demonstrating that a cohesive mythic structure with its basis in Jewish mysticism is identifiable in her fiction.