George Eliot: The Last Victorian [Paperback]

Kathryn Hughes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2, 2001

Mary Ann Evans, aka George Eliot (1819-1880) achieved lasting renown with the novels Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Adam Bede. Her masterworks were written after years of living an unconventional life, including a scandalous voyage to Europe with the married writer and editor George Henry Lewes. The scandal intensified when she moved in with Lewes after he separated from his wife. Eliot re-entered London's social life years later, when her literary success made it impossible for respectable society to dismiss her (even Queen Victoria enjoyed her books). She counted among her friends and supporters Dickens, Trollope, and several other Victorian literati. In this intimate biography, author Hughes provides insight into Eliot's life and work, weighing Eliot's motivations for her controversial actions, and examining the paradoxical Victorian society which she documented to perfection in her novels.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From 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.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Cooper Square Press (July 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0815411219
• ISBN-13: 978-0815411215
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #601,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #24 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Movements & Periods > Victorian

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Workmanlike Bio, January 25, 2003

By 

schapmock (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: George Eliot: The Last Victorian (Paperback)

Hughes' life of Eliot is solid, comprehensive, and given its dazzling subject, remarkably tedious. The book provides an ample chronicle of Eliot's documented life without ever bringing Marian Evans or her marvelous writings to life.

Hughes is much better at piling on the details of Victorian intellectual life than working her way inside the creative processes that created Middlemarch, Adam Bede, and Daniel Deronda. The first half of the book, covering Evans' family life and difficult early adulthood, reads well, the impressive accumulation of research making up for lack of narrative.

But when Evans creates Eliot and the first of her fictions, the book should snap to life. It instead deflates, dutifully cranking out novel synopses and recounting scandals without ever getting at why Eliot's fiction was so beloved in her day, and remains so today.

A novelist of uncanny power and tremendous influence, Eliot deserves a biography at the level of Peter Ackroyd's spectacular life of Dickens. We're still waiting...

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, flawed, March 12, 2000

By 

Jonathan Bennett - See all my reviews

This review is from: George Eliot: The Last Victorian (Hardcover)

Kathryn Hughes' biography of George Eliot is informative and interesting, written in a manner that is always lively if sometimes a touch vulgar. It helped me to get a sense of how the supreme inwardness of GE's mature work came through her life-long and never fully successful struggle towards freedom and maturity for herself. What KH has to say about GE's novels, though nowhere deep or original, is mainly adequate for her purpose, which makes it surprising that the only things she says about Dickens's work are childish. Her insulting treatment of F. R. Leavis's great contributions to our understanding of GE is less surprising if no less deplorable. It is also a shame that the cover on the paperback is from the most untruthful of all the portraits of GE - the one that goes furthest in rendering as insipidly pretty a face which was, as Henry James said, "magnificently ugly".

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thanks, Kathryn, August 22, 2005

By 

Alicia (Burlington, VT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: George Eliot: The Last Victorian (Paperback)

I have started to read a lot of biographies, and somehow most of the authors manage to extinguish my passionate interest in the lives of the greats by a tedious writing style. Kathryn Hughes' book George Eliot: The Last Victorian is innocent of such charges. In fact, the book is both eruditely scholarly and reads like an exciting novel. I hope Kathryn Hughes writes more biographies.