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


From Library Journal
Hughes's biography examines the remarkable life of Eliot (n?e Mary Anne Evans, 1819-80), who wrote some of the 19th century's most outstanding literature. The book chronicles her complex life from childhood, showing her transformations as she matured and developed into adulthood. Eliot took care of her father, at age 17, after her mother's death and the marriage of her elder sister. She met George Lewes, a philosopher, scientist, and critic, and it changed her life; they shared a long-term relationship without the benefit of marriage. Lewes, who was several years her senior, loved, protected, and encouraged her and took care of her affairs. Upon his death in 1878, Eliot became a hermit and stopped writing. This work is intelligent, adept, and full of insight. Nadia May's narration is clear and precise; a welcome addition to public libraries. Carol Stern, Glen Cove P.L., NY Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Kathryn Hughes, a university lecturer on nineteenth-century English literature and history, has written a thoroughly modern biography of a writer whose phenomenal popularity in her lifetime is fascinating, seen from the vantage of our own culture of celebrity. As emotionally needy and erratic as she was intellectually strong-minded, George Eliot was not at all modern. The impact of her fame and her scandalous lifelong liaison with the married writer George Lewes upon her personality and her work makes illuminating reading. Nadia May's performance is, as usual, impeccable. B.G. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
The third biography in scarcely as many years gets personal with the Victorian novelist known primarily through her intellectual achievements. While Frederick Karl's George Eliot: Voice of a Century (1995) perpetuated Eliot's image as a Victorian Sybil (a massive, mythic figurehad, given to spouting riddles) and Rosemary Ashton's George Eliot: A Life (1997) tried to maintain a balance between her life and her work, Hughes (The Victorian Governess, not reviewed) focuses on her character behind the facade of fame, which Eliot could have done without. Although this approach requires some reading between the lines of early correspondence and Eliot's fiction, while Hughes often skims her intellectual and philosophical development, it also brings a sense of close familiarity with this private, inward woman. Hughes's rendering of Mary Ann Evans's life avoids gossipy revisionism and credibly fleshes out her transformation from Midlands evangelical to cosmopolitan Victorian intellectual and from an unnoticed London literary journalist to world-famous novelist George Eliot. In these pages, Mary Ann's youthful puritanical priggishness is offset by her deep emotional needs, which often arose in egotistic demands for attention from older, maternal women and in affairs with older, libidinous men, such as the philanthropist Charles Bray and the publisher John Chapmanand which typically led to ``embarrassingly sudden departures from other people's houses.'' Evanss break with her family is particularly painful here, as Hughes shows her first quarreling with her revered father over religion, then with her adored brother over her longtime liaison with the married George Henry Lewes (``one of the few people in London who was demonstrably plainer than herself). Hughes gives Lewes special credit not only for his attentive support of Eliot's doubt-ridden career in fiction, but also for their emotional union, which flourished despite his reputation for frivolity and bohemianism. Not the whole story, but a refreshingly intimate portrait. (16 pages b&w photos and illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
This intensely engaging biography examines the extraordinary life of George Eliot from her childhood, through her scandalous liaison and social exile, to her hard-won status as one of Victorian England's literary elite.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A major new biography of a great english writer who has particular relevance for our own age.

For the sheer breadth of experience embodied in her life and work, George Eliot presents an ever alluring subject for biographers. The daughter of one of the new breed of self-made businessmen, she had a scandalous liaison with the married writer and editor George Henry Lewes that made an outcast of her until literary fame overcame "polite" scruples. Unparalleled among the great English novelists for her understanding of the important intellectual and political debates of her day, she nonetheless maintained a fervent attachment to the pragmatic middle ground, where idealism is tempered by love, habit, and history. It is no wonder that many a previous biographer has foundered in the face of so much richness and complexity, producing lopsided or not entirely coherent portraits of the writer.

Kathryn Hughes's sympathetic, human, and immensely readable biography provides a truly nuanced view of Eliot, and is the first to grapple equally with the personal dramas that shaped her psyche-particularly her rejection by her brother Isaac-and her social and intellectual context. Hughes shows how these elements together forged the themes of Eliot's work, her insistence that ideological interests be subordinated to the bonds between human beings-a message that has keen resonance in our own uneasy time.

FROM THE CRITICS

Biography

...[A]bsorbing....a dense, exhaustively researched biography, as befitting a subject who, according to the author, was among the most intellectually rigorous writers the 19th century produced.

Library Journal

A lecturer in 19th-century English literature and author of The Victorian Governess, Hughes takes a crack at capturing the protean Eliot on paper.

Booknews

A peripatetic scholar of 19th-century English literature and history, Hughes focuses more fully on Eliot's (1819-80) private life than other recent biographers. She details the scandal that cast her into social exile until her literary successes established her at the heart of the London literary elite. She finds her to have been by turns ambitious and insecure, cerebral and earthy, provocative and conservative. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Evelyn Toynton - The New York Times Book Review

...[A]mong the shining dead, there are still a few who seem as though they must have been free of human foolishness....among the English novelists, the most likely candidate for this company would appear to be...George Eliot....Yet she was silly like us....It remains the task of Eliot's biographers to reconcile, somehow, this dichotomy between the majestic wisdom of her fiction and the follies to which her hunger for love could lead her..... Hughes...has made an honorable attempt to give us a ''relevant'' George Eliot...

Biography