George Eliot

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When the radical journalist Marian Evans went to live with her lover, liberal Victorian society decreed that she would never again be invited to dinner. But exiled in suburbia, the 37-year-old Marian finally found the courage to start writing the novels which had haunted her imagination since childhood. As George Eliot she won fame, fortune and the kind of social acceptance which had Queen Victoria asking for an autograph. But the one person whose approval mattered to Marian was the one person who refused to give it. For over twenty years Isaac Evans refused to acknowledge the younger sister whose unconventional religious and domestic life had destroyed his carefully crafted facade of provincial respectability. In this new biography of George Eliot, Kathryn Hughes explores the connections between Marian Evans's fractured early family life and her spectacular rejection of the lies, secrets and silences which choked Victorian England. Yet Marian Evans was typical of her times in wanting rules and continuity too. In her novels she returned again and again to the agricultural communities of her youth. In their social and moral cohesion she found an emotional warmth which was missing from the secular, scientific age which she and her radical intellectual friends had worked so hard to create. In this fascinating psychological study, George Eliot emerges as Victorian England's most acute and qualified chronicler. Cosmopolitan and skeptical, she nonetheless retained a deep understanding of the ties of feeling and memory which kept her millions of readers nourished by their personal and collective past.