Elliot screwed up his face, his eyes disappearing into deep, fleshy crevices. “Wasn’t your dissertation on something to do with Eliot, too? Eliot and class, Eliot and race, something like that?” he asked.
“Gender politics in nineteenth-century novels,” I said, laying out my words carefully, cards in a high stakes game. “So yeah, Eliot was in there.” I had submitted my Eliot chapter with my job application. Hadn’t he read it before he hired me?