George Eliot: A Life
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| Author(s) | Rosemary Ashton |
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| Subtitle | A Life |
| Publisher | Viking Books |
| Honors | |
| There were other women writers in the 19th century, but Eliot alone left the family circle to follow her own devices at a time when unmarried women generally kept house for others. What is more, she moved in unconventional and Bohemian circles. Her long and loving relationship with the previously married G. H. Lewes scandalized even her closest friends. She was generally admired but shunned socially, except by the boldest radicals and feminists. Rosemary Ashton examines Adam Bede, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, Felix Holt and the unsurpassed… | |
There were other women writers in the 19th century, but Eliot alone left the family circle to follow her own devices at a time when unmarried women generally kept house for others. What is more, she moved in unconventional and Bohemian circles. Her long and loving relationship with the previously married G. H. Lewes scandalized even her closest friends. She was generally admired but shunned socially, except by the boldest radicals and feminists.
Rosemary Ashton examines Adam Bede, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, Felix Holt and the unsurpassed Middlemarch, which all explore the tension between the urge to conform and the imperatives of both the heart and the mind - a paradox which is reflected in George Eliot’s life. This magnificent biography is a detailed examination of the life and the writing of George Eliot. Rosemary Ashton illuminates our understanding of both and reveals the choices and originality of a most remarkable woman.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
George Eliot, née Marian Evans, was born before her time; a liberated woman and an agnostic in the sexually repressive and pious Victorian era, Eliot has long been a favorite of modern feminist critics. Biographer Rosemary Ashton also admires Eliot’s independence and her refusal to bend to the mores of the society and age in which she lived, but in George Eliot: A Life she proves that Eliot was more a product of her time than some might think. Though Eliot was unconventional enough to enter into a series of sexual relationships without benefit of marriage, her choice of men was curiously traditional, illustrated by her attraction to George Lewes, a man several years her senior who loved her, protected her, bolstered her ego, and managed her affairs.
Though Eliot’s sexual liaisons are certainly interesting, Ashton, a thorough researcher and perceptive critic, also delves into Eliot’s novels, analyzing them in light of the social and intellectual milieu in which they were written; this milieu forms one of the most fascinating aspects of Ashton’s biography: Victorian intellectuals’ struggle to find an alternative to Christian orthodoxy in a time when science and philosophy were exploding long-held religious beliefs. From the details of George Eliot’s personal life to the attitudes of the society in which she lived, Rosemary Ashton has done a fine job of conveying not only a life but an entire world.
