George Eliot - Adam Bede/The Mill on the Floss/Middlemarch

Columbia Critical Guides

by Lucie Armitt

George Eliot's reception as a writer has been chequered from the start. Prejudice followed the reluctant revelation of her real identity as a woman, and she suffered from critical neglect at the start of the 20th century, before a post-war renaissance of interest finally established her as one of the most powerful and accomplished of British novelists. Views of Mary Ann Evans, the woman behind the pseudonym, have always been controversial: castigated during her own time for sexual impropriety with a married man, accused by male friends of being an overly intellectual man-woman, rejected by 20th-century feminists for the opinions expressed in her essay Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, she is a figure for our own times as much as for her own.

208 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2001