THE MIDDLE AGE OF MRS. ELIOT (439 pp.)Angus WilsonViking ($4.95).
More than half a century ago Rudyard Kipling advised the world to walk wide of the Widow at Windsor (for '"alf o' creation she owns"). Now British Satirist Angus Wilson offers a look at the other side of the Victorian coina blowsy Widow Britannia, landed tails down on the wet asphalt of the Welfare State.
Author Wilson's heroine is a smart, smug, vastly muddled and grimly girdled figure of middle-class bafflement. Meg Eliot is widowed in a fit of absentmindedness : her husband, a prosperous...