George Eliot’s Life, as Related in her Letters and Journals

by George Eliot, John Walter Cross (Editor)

Best known for his brief marriage to George Eliot, John Cross (1840–1924) compiled this three-volume 'autobiography' of 1885 from his late wife's journals and letters. Eliot was never married to her long-term partner G. H. Lewes, and she courted further scandal when she married Cross, twenty years her junior, in 1880. While these volumes offer a valuable insight into Eliot's private reflections, what is perhaps most telling is the material left out or rewritten in Cross' efforts to lend his wife's unconventional life some respectability, which he does at the expense of what one reviewer described as Eliot's 'salt and spice'. George Eliot's Life will be of particular interest to scholars of nineteenth-century biography and literature. Volume 1 covers Eliot's life from 1819 to 1857, beginning with a brief sketch of her childhood and continuing with her move to Coventry, then to London, and travels to Geneva.

Genres: Nonfiction

518 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2008

About the author

Mary Ann Evans, 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 wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.
Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.