Wordsworth Classics "Felix Holt" is set, like "Middlemarch", in the Midlands at the time of the Great Reform Bill of 1832. The novel brings social and political history vividly to life with its magnificent rendering of provincial England in the ferment of electioneering. Against this background, Eliot tells a love story and weaves a plot which has many elements of the sensation novel, such as illegitimacy, blackmail, and the discovery of an heiress, where the suspense is maintained until the end. Eliot"s vision is both conservative and radical; her moral analysis is, as always, subtle and penetrating, and her dramatic powers as fine here as in any of her work.