' "If a woman really believes herself to be a lower kind of being, she should place herself in subjection . . . If not, let her show her power of choosing something better." ' This is the challenge thrown down to Esther Lyon, George Eliot's heroine in Felix Holt: The Radical (1866). Esther's 'airs and graces', her proud and sensitive dreams of marrying into a life of refinement are transformed in the course of the novel, as she makes her choice between Harold Transome, who has returned to Treby Magna to claim his inheritance, Transome Court, and to campaign in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act for a Radical seat in Parliament, and Felix Holt, a young radical of a different kind. For this Penguin Classics edition Lynda Mugglestone provides an introduction, bibliography and notes, together with appendices on the legal background to the plot and on the 'Address to Working Men, By Felix Holt'.