As Alley shows, no other subject in Eliot branches out so largely, so as to embrace all her artistic concerns, including her vision of her own biography and her need to adopt her pen name. Alley also demonstrates that for Eliot, the transcendent capacity to be unidentified creates a flexibility of mind that allows not only women but also men to shed confining personae and to be, in narrative form, both man and woman at the same time, an ability that imbues only the greatest of artists.