George Eliot, The Last Victorian
Winner of the James Tait Black Prize
Filmed by the BBC as ‘George Eliot: a Scandalous Life’, starring Maureen Lipman, Harriet Walter and John Sessions.
An immensely readable biography of the nineteenth century novelist whose territory comprised nothing less than the entire span of Victorian society. Kathryn Hughes is the first scholar to grapple equally with the personal dramas that shaped Eliot’s personality and the wider social and intellectual context.
Eliot’s masterworks, including Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede, were written after years of living an unconventional life with the married writer and editor George Henry Lewes. Despite the enduring personal scandal, Eliot’s phenomenal literary success made it impossible for respectable society to dismiss her genius (even Queen Victoria enjoyed her books). Eliot became the richest self-made women in Britain and was supported by many male literary friends including Dickens and Trollope. Even so, no respectable lady would dream of visiting ‘Mrs Lewes’ as she insisted on being called in private life.
Kathryn Hughes shows how these elements together forged the themes of Eliot’s work, in particular her insistence that ideological interests and social conventions should be subordinated to the bonds between human beings – a message that speaks to us now more keenly than ever.
PRAISE FOR GEORGE ELIOT, THE LAST VICTORIAN
‘A triumph, intelligent, persuasive, and beautifully written’
– Sunday Times
‘Fresh, graceful and erudite’
– Observer
‘Utterly compelling, a joy to read’
– Spectator
‘An admirable biography’
– New York Review of Books
‘Hughes tells Eliot’s story with gusto and scholarly perception’
– Daily Mail
‘Fascinating’
– Sunday Telegraph
‘This fine biography-fluid, readable, and intelligent-may become the definitive study of Eliot’
– Elle
‘Catty, sexy and funny’
– Independent on Sunday
‘Eloquent, frequently very funny, and defiantly underawed’
– Telegraph
‘It is Kathryn Hughes’ achievement in this excellent, extremely readable biography to show that neither George Eliot nor the Victorians were what we sometimes lazily think them’
– New Republic