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 ...

George Eliot is one of the most celebrated novelists in history. Her books, including Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, and Adam Bede, are as appreciated now as they were in the nineteenth century. Yet her nonconformist and captivating personal life—a compelling story in itself—is not well known. Ridiculed as an ugly duckling, Eliot violated strict social codes by living with a married man for most of her adult life. Soon after he died, she married a much younger man who attempted suicide during their honeymoon. The obstacles Eliot overcame in her life informed her work and have made her legacy an enduring one. Brenda Maddox brings her lively style to bear on the intersection of Eliot's life and novels. She delves into the human side of this larger-than-life figure, revealing the pleasure and pain behind the intellectual's public face. The result is a deeply personal biography that sheds new light on a woman who lived life on her own terms and altered the literary landscape in the process.

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.

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.

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.

With dashing originality and in prose that sings like an entire choir of sirens, Cynthia Ozick relates the life and times of her most compelling fictional creation. Ruth Puttermesser lives in New York City. Her learning is monumental. Her love life is minimal (she prefers pouring through Plato to romping with married Morris Rappoport). And her fantasies have a disconcerting tendency to come true - with disastrous consequences for what we laughably call "reality." Puttermesser yearns for a daughter and promptly creates one, unassisted, in the form of the first recorded female golem. Laboring in the dusty crevices of the civil service, she dreams of reforming the city - and manages to get herself elected mayor. Puttermesser contemplates the afterlife and is hurtled into it headlong, only to discover that a paradise found is also paradise lost. Overflowing with ideas, lambent with wit, The Puttermesser Papers is a tour de force by one of our most visionary novelists. "The finest achievement of Ozick's career... It has all the buoyant integrity of a Chagall painting." -San Francisco Chronicle "Fanciful, poignant... so intelligent, so finely expressed that, like its main character, it remains endearing, edifying, a spark of light in the gloom." -The New York Times "A crazy delight." -The New York Time Book Review

Originally published: George Eliot: novelist, lover, wife. London: HarperPress, 2009.

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.

"How long it’s taken for these two mad, bad and dangerous writers to get together!" —Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle Acclaimed biographer of James Joyce, Edna O’Brien has written a "jaunty" (The New Yorker) biography that suits her fiery and charismatic subject. She follows Byron from the dissipations of Regency London to the wilds of Albania and the Socratic pleasures of Greece and Turkey, culminating in his meteoric rise to fame at the age of twenty-four. With "a novelist’s understanding of tempo and characterization" (Miami Herald), O’Brien captures the spirit of the man and creates an indelible portrait that explodes the Romantic myth. Byron, as brilliantly rendered by O’Brien, is the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, and defiantly immortal.

Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of which are set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight. She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure that her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women writing only lighthearted romances. She also wished to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic.