Letter: Don't blame Dorothea for her husband's sloppy scholarship

I FIND it hard to decide whether Alison Leonard's 'The Missing Chapter' (20 February) is an embarrassing sequel to Middlemarch or merely a very bad parody.

As George Eliot said of her contemporaries: 'In the majority of women's books you see that kind of facility which springs from the absence of any high standard; that fertility in imbecile combination or feeble imitation which a little self-criticism would check and reduce to barrenness; just as with a total want of musical ear people will sing out of tune, while a degree more melodic sensibility would suffice to render them silent.' (Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, 1856).

Tamara Oppenheimer

Merton College, Oxford