The Many Lives of George Eliot February 09, 2024
In an anonymously published essay, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” George Eliot set out her objections to “mind-and-millinery” novels: those books featuring dazzling heroines—eloquent, accomplished, almost godly—who set off into the world solely in...
George Eliot and the Marriage Question October 20, 2023
“Biographies generally are a disease of English literature,” George Eliot once wrote to a friend. “The best history of a writer is contained in his writing—these are his chief actions.” The disease would seem to be incurable. Literary biography not o...
George Eliot’s Answer to ‘The Marriage Question’ August 23, 2023
We could all use a hype man like George Henry Lewes.George Henry Who’s?Well, exactly. A “littérateur, physiologist and metaphysician,” as an obituary in The New York Times called him in 1878, Lewes is today most remembered as the longtime romantic pa...