Jeanie Thomas takes issue with modern feminist critics who have reproached George Eliot’s texts, particularly Middlemarch, on the basis that they do not go far enough in espousing female independence. While George Eliot lived a non-traditional lifestyle herself, those critics say, she was not willing to allow Dorothea the same kind of latitude, instead marrying her off to Ladislaw in the end. A Dorothea free of marriage and equipped with a healthy income, it has been argued, should have been able to shape her life more and do better things. Her failure to do so is seen as a lack of commitment to women’s rights by the author.