This is a companion to George Eliot's life and works, listing year by year the details of her biography, her wide reading and her literary output. The chronology also offers previously unavailable bibliographical information, listing Eliot's periodical publications.

We recognize George Eliot's distinctive excellences all through: we never detect a flat or trivial mood of mind: if anything, the style is more weighty and piquant than ever, we may even say loaded with thought. Nobody can resort to the time-honourcd criticism that the work would have been better fur more pains, for labour and care are conspicuous throughout, and labour and care which always produce suitable fruit. But the fact is that the reader uever—or so rarelv as not to affect his general posture of mind—feels at home. The author is ever driving at something foreign to his habits of thought. The leading persons—those with whom her sympathies lie—are guided by Interests and motives with which he has never come in contact, and seem to his perception to belong to the stage once tersely described as peopled by such characters as were never seen, conversing in a language which was never heard, upon topics which will never arise in the commerce of mankind.' . . . 'Daniel Deronda' may be defined as a religious novel without a religion.

Vols. for 1871-76, 1913-14 include an extra number, The Christmas bookseller, separately paged and not included in the consecutive numbering of the regular series.

The works collected in this volume provide an illuminating introduction to George Eliot's incisive views on religion, art and science, and the nature and purpose of fiction. Essays such as 'Evangelical Teaching' show her rejecting her earlier religious beliefs, while 'Woman in France' questions conventional ideas about female virtues and marriage, and 'Notes on Form in Art' sets out theories of idealism and realism that she developed further in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. It also includes selections from Eliot's translations of works by Strauss and Feuerbach that challenged many ideas about Christianity; excerpts from her poems; and reviews of writers such as Wollstonecraft, Goethe and Browning. Wonderfully rich in imagery and observations, these pieces reveal the intellectual development of this most challenging and rewarding of writers.