The author, whose real name was Mary Ann Evans, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Her work was mostly set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.

Adam Bede was George Eliot's first full-length novel. Set in the English Midlands of farmers and village craftsmen at the turn of the eighteenth century, the book tells a story of seduction, and is also a pioneering record of a long lost rural world.Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate, illuminating the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.The Mill on the Floss is a masterpiece of ambiguity in which moral choice is subjected to the hypocrisy of the Victorian age. Maggie Tulliver's love for her brother Tom turns to conflict. His bourgeois standards contrasting with her own lively intelligence, and the result, is tragedy.Silas Marner tells the tender and moving story of the unjustly exiled linen weaver, Silas Marner of Raveloe in the agricultural heartland of England. It tells of how he is restored to life and his sadness ended by the unlikely means of the orphan child Eppie.

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.

Famous for her powerful and popular fiction, George Eliot was also a remarkable critic, translator, and editor. This volume presents Eliot's views on science, religion, positivism, feminism, and politics, as well as her literary critical work on a range of authors and forms, including Tennyson, Browning, Goethe, Heine, German historical criticism of the Bible, classical drama, and popular contemporary novels. Most of the pieces in this volume were written before Eliot began to write fiction in 1856. They are a vivid representation of the analogical mind, the wit, and the sympathy which also characterize the narrators of her novels.

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

Barbara Hardy's Novels of George Eliot is a classic study of Eliots's outstanding powers as a great formal artist. The book's continuing appeal is due not simply to the perceptiveness and freshness of its writing but to the fact that form is interpreted in the widest sense to include whatever is relevant to the novels as organised, articulated, imaginative wholes and also as the direct expression of George Eliot's profound analysis of the human condition.

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.

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.

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 ...