Coming across this bit amused me:

An excerpt from George Eliot's "Silly Novels by Lady Noveslists", which A.S. Byatt quotes in her book, Passions of the Mind:

"Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph and reads the Bible in the original tongues... Rakish men either bite their lips in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her reproofs; indeed there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her recorded conversations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded conversations, amazingly witty."

George Eliot was laughing at the archetypal heroine much written about in her day, and Byatt did well in quoting this passage.

Plus, the term/phrase mind-and-millinery.

Now, back to reading.