Customer Reviews

George Eliot: The Last Victorian

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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...

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".

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.

I never thought a biography could be such a page-turner. Credos to Hughes for succeeding deliciously in bringing Eliot to life with all her faults and insecurity, in the fullest context of Victorian Britain! The fact that towards the end of the book, the reader starts to tire a bit of the description of repeated character flaws in the person of George Eliot only attests to the realness of the biography, bringing all of the multifacted personality behind the writing to light. Her deep-seated insecurity and her desperate struggle to cope with it should be comforting to know for all who suffer qualms about themselves from time to time. And plus, the touch of humor in Hughes's writing every once in a while was a joy. I never went near Eliot's books since childhood, I did not know much about either her or her works, and it was sheer fluke that I came across this book, but now I am glad I did.

I thought this was a wonderful book. I couldn't put it down, actually. Hughes may not be a great writer; on a few occasions I felt that her style was merely adequate. She is, however, a great biographer. I don't think I have found any recent biography on an author as enjoyable throughout. Hughes appears to me as being a tad Victorian herself, which I do not consider a flaw. I suppose that some of those who deeply detest 19th century sentimentality might find, for example, the account of Eliot's funeral a bit maudlin.

I should point out that I share this biographer's deep sympathy for George Eliot. Hughes truly appreciates Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes as people. A reader who feels that a good biographer should detest her subject - as seems to have been a trend in recent times - will be disappointed by this book.

Though the book was overall a bit biased toward Eliot's needy side, and didn't include quite enough literary criticism for my taste, I still found this a great and very informative read, especially for those with not a lot of background on the subject of this major Victorian writer.

Whata complex person was George Eliot (1819-1880). Mary Ann
was born in the English midlands in a rural, conservative and
evangelical society. She became an agnostic, free thinker whose
brilliant early works were translations of German scholarship dealing with a critical examination of the life of Jesus.
Eliot had a succesion of love affairs which such literary types as John Chapman editor of the Westminster Review and the
brillian but cold Herbert Spencer. Her true love was George
Henry Lewes a literary man who never divorced his unfaithful wife Agnes continuing to support her and his children through the long years he spent living with Eliot.
With the encouragement, nurturing care and support of Lewes the fragile, tempermental, moody and gloomy plain girl from the Midlands became the leading light in the intellectual-literary world of mid 19th century London.
Eliot is in the first rank of Victorian novelists. Her classics include "Adam Bede"; "The Mill on the Floss"; "Silas
Marner"; "Felix Holt the Radical': "The Spanish Gypsy"; "Romola"
"Middlemarch" and "Daniel Deronda.:
Eliot was a brilliant woman who all of her life was concerned about her plain appearance. She married young John Cross in 1880
dying only eight months into the marriage.
Hughes gives a plainly written account of Mary Ann's life from the provincial girl to the grand old lady of English letters.
Her life was sad since her brother Isaac and family refused to accept her arrangement of living with a married man. She was
scorned as a fallen woman by polite society but found a modicum of happiness with Lewes.
Huges provides short adequate summaries of all the novels and poems by Eliot. Some readers may find the infighting among family members and literary people in London tedious.
Hughes had done her homework producing a solid biography.

George Eliot: The Last Victorian is an intimate biography of noted author Mary Ann Evans, who is perhaps better known by the pen name of George Eliot (1819-1880). Some of Ms. Evans' most famous works include the novels Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Adam Bede. This informative biography focuses quite closely on Evans' life, including her friendships with Dickens and Trollope, and the controversial scandal of her relationship to a married writer George Henry Lewes. Biographer Kathryn Hughes also scrutinizes the Victorian society that Mary Evans lived in and wrote so much about. Even Queen Victoria enjoyed books by George Eliot, but you don't need royal blood to enjoy this intriguing and meticulously presented biography.