The Life Of George Eliot

The life story of the Victorian novelist George Eliot is as dramatic and complex as her best plots. This new assessment of her life and work combines recent biographical research with penetrating literary criticism, resulting in revealing new interpretations of her literary work. A fresh look at George Eliot's captivating life story Includes original new analysis of her writing Deploys the latest biographical research Combines literary criticism with biographical narrative to offer a rounded perspective

This richly enjoyable biography of the great Victorian novelist reminds us how truly revolutionary was George Eliot... [Ashton] provides luminously sane readings of the marvellous novels.' A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard 'Excellent... Ashton cites Eliot's achievement in a literary landscape which moves from Scott and George Sand to Dickens, Tennyson and Browning... a fluent, vivid book... it makes one thrill again to the breadth of Eliot's genius and the passionate, vulnerable nature that accompanied her wide-ranging mind.' Jenny Uglow, Independent on Sunday 'An extremely impressive work... the George Eliot who emerges from Professor Ashton's book is a remarkable woman of exceptional integrity whose life expresses the spirit of the Victorian age, even as it goes against the very grain of it.' Susie Boyt, Sunday Express

A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch--and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories. Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.

Bodenheimer defines the personal paradoxes that helped to shape Eliot's fictional characters and narrative style. Bodenheimer revisits pivotal episodes in Mary Ann Evans's life and career, including the "Holy War" through which she asserted her youthful religious skepticism; her decision to elope with the married writer George Henry Lewes; and her marriage with John Cross after Lewes's death. Bodenheimer also discusses the rumor campaign that led to the discovery that "George Eliot" was a woman, and she traces the trajectory of Eliot's impassioned conflict between her ambition and her womanhood.

Biography of George Eliot (1819-1880, born as Mary Anne Evans), British writer and poet. It gives an account of what it means to become a novelist, and to think like a novelist: in particular a realist novelist for whom art exists not for art's sake but in the exploration and service of human life.

This intensely engaging biography examines the extraordinary life of George Eliot from her childhood, through her scandalous liaison and social exile, to her hard-won status as one of Victorian England's literary elite.

An extraordinary masterpiece written from personal experience, Middlemarch is a deep psychological observation of human nature that revolves around the issues of love, jealousy, and obligation. Eliot's feminist views are apparent through the novel: she stresses the fact that women should control their own lives.

This full biography comes at a time when interest in Eliot's work is high. The author has previously written biographies of Conrad, Faulkner and Kafka.

A TLSBOOK OF THE YEAR. Who was the real George Eliot? In Love with George Eliotis a glorious debut novel which tells the compelling story of England's greatest woman novelist as you've never read it before. Marian Evans has scandalised polite society. She lives in sin with a married man, George Henry Lewes, but writes in secret under the pseudonym George Eliot. Gradually, it becomes apparent that the genius Eliot is none other than Evans, the disgraced woman. Her tremendous celebrity begins, and prior indiscretions are forgiven. But when Lewes dies, Evans finds herself in danger of shocking the world all over again. Meanwhile, from one rudderless century to another, two women compete to interpret Eliot as writer and as woman ...