Unlike other Victorian novelists George Eliot rarely incorporated stock market speculation and fraud into her plots, but meditations on money, finance and economics, in relation both to individual ethics and to wider social implications, infuse her novels. This volume examines Eliot's understanding of money and economics, its bearing on her moral and political thought, and the ways in which she incorporated that thought into her novels. It offers a detailed account of Eliot's intellectual engagements with political economy, utilitarianism, and the new liberalism of the 1870s, and also her practical dealings with money through her management of household and business finances and, in later years, her considerable investments in stocks and shares. In a wider context, it presents a detailed study of the ethics of economics in nineteenth-century England, tracing the often uncomfortable relationship between morality and economic utility experienced by intellectuals of the period.

This book examines George Eliot's understanding of money and economics within the context of the ethics of economics in nineteenth-century England.

This volume of essays is comprehensively, scholarly and lucidly written, and at the same time offers original insights into the work of one of the most important Victorian novelists, and into her complex and often scandalous career.

Spanning her entire life, the fully annotated selections in this volume include well known recollections of the great Victorian novelist plus a large assortment not found in her biographies. Altogether they provide a fresh, vivid, and sometimes startling portrait of a controversial genius.

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.

This book gives a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of the relation between works of literature and history.

The great Victorian novelist's complete surviving journals - first publication of new George Eliot text.

This audio compilation features four stories written by George Eliot, including 'Middlemarch', 'Mill on the Floss' and 'Adam Bede', all read by Hannah Gordon, and 'Silas Marner', read by Geraldine James.