This set reissues 5 books on George Eliot originally published between 1963 and 1989. The volumes examine many of Eliot’s most respected works, including Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. As well as proving in-depth analyses of Eliot’s work, this collection also includes an extensive collection of her critical articles written between 1846 and 1868. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature.

Prodigiously learned, alive to the massive social changes of her time, defiant of many Victorian orthodoxies, George Eliot has always challenged her readers. She is at once chronicler and analyst, novelist of nostalgia and monumental thinker. In her great novel Middlemarch she writes of 'that tempting range of relevancies called the universe'. This volume identifies a range of 'relevancies' that inform both her fictional and her non-fictional writings. The range and scale of her achievement are brought into focus by cogent essays on the many contexts - historical, intellectual, political, social, cultural - to her work. In addition there are discussions of her critical history and legacy, as well as of the material conditions of production and distribution of her novels and her journalism. The volume enables fuller understanding and appreciation, from a twenty-first-century standpoint, of the life and work of one of the nineteenth century's major writers.

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.