Traces the development of critical moral psychology in the central novels of the Brontes and George EliotThis book explains how under the influence of the new mental materialism that held sway in mid Victorian scientific and medical thought the Brontes and George Eliot in their greatest novels broached a radical new form of novelistic moral psychology This was one no longer bound by the idealizing presuppositions of traditional Christian moral ideology and as Henry Staten argues is closely related to Nietzsche s physiological theory of will to power itself directly influenced by Herbert Spencer On this reading Staten suggests the Brontes and George Eliot participate with Flaubert Baudelaire and Nietzsche in the beginnings of the modernist turn toward a strictly naturalistic moral psychology one that is non moral or post moral M p