Throughout her career, Eliot wrote with a politically astute pen. From "Adam Bede" to "The Mill on the Floss" and "Silas Marner", Eliot presented the cases of social outsiders and small-town persecution. "Felix Holt, the Radical" and "The Legend of Jubal" were overtly political, and political crisis is at the heart of "Middlemarch", in which she presents the stories of a number of inhabitants of a small English town on the eve of the Reform Bill of 1832; the novel is notable for its deep psychological insight and sophisticated character portraits. The roots of her realist philosophy can be found in her review of John Ruskin's "Modern Painters" in "Westminster Review" in 1856.