Paperback. Pub Date :1999-07-01 Pages: 560 Language: English Publisher: HarperCollins UK This highly praised biography is the first to explore fully the way in which her painful early life and rejection by her brother Isaac in particular. shaped the insight and art which made her both Victorian Englands last great visionary and the first modern.An immensely readable biography of the 19th century writer whose territory comprised nothing less than the entire span of Victorian society. Kathryn Hughes provides a truly nuanced view of Eliot. and is the first to grapple equally with the personal dramas that shaped her personality - particularly her rejection by her brother Isaac -. and her social and intellectual context Hughes shows how these elements together forged the themes of Eliots work. her insistence that ideological interests be subordinated to the bonds between human be...
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Review:
From Gordon Haight's scrupulous 1968 work George Eliot through Ruby Redinger's 1976 feminist rethinking George Eliot: The Emergent Self and beyond, the unconventional life and probing fiction of Victorian England's loftiest female author has attracted the scrutiny of numerous biographers. British scholar Kathryn Hughes's pungent account distinguishes itself by limning Mary Ann Evans's turbulent emotions with as much acuity as she does the creative drive that eventually led one of London's most prominent editors and critics to reinvent herself as the novelist George Eliot. Cast out of respectable public life when she moved in with the married George Henry Lewes, Eliot found personal happiness with a man who understood her need for all-consuming love and artistic salvation. Lewes demonstrated his dedication to her by screening Eliot from outside criticism and inner doubts that could have prevented her from writing. Hughes's analysis of their relationship is as sympathetic yet candid as the rest of her narrative. She paints a vivid portrait of Victorian intellectual life and Eliot's provocative role within it as a writer who questioned conventional wisdom of all sorts, but whose heroines ultimately chose lives of modest usefulness within the existing society. As her biographer puts it in a typically well turned phrase, "Eliot's novels show people how they can deal with the pain of being a Victorian by remaining one." --Wendy Smith
About the Author:
Kathryn Hughes read modern history at Oxford, creative writing at UEA and has a PhD in Victorian studies. She is a visiting professor in 19th century literature and history at several universities, and reviews regularly for the Daily Telegraph and the Literary Review. Her previous book was The Victorian Governess.
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- PublisherFourth Estate Classic House
- Publication date2000
- ISBN 10 1857028910
- ISBN 13 9781857028911
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages560
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