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George Eliot: The Last Victorian
 
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George Eliot: The Last Victorian (Paperback)

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3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)

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George Eliot: The Last Victorian + Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings (Penguin Classics) + Scenes of Clerical Life (Penguin Classics)
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  • This item: George Eliot: The Last Victorian by Kathryn Hughes

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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.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 416 pages
  • Publisher: Cooper Square Press (August 25, 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.com Sales Rank: #486,930 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #41 in  Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Movements & Periods > Victorian

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George Eliot: The Last Victorian
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George Eliot: The Last Victorian 3.8 out of 5 stars (8)
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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.8 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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6 of 6 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
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...

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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, flawed, March 12, 2000
By Jonathan Bennett (Bowen Island, BC Canada) - See all my reviews
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".
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6 of 7 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
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars the basic essentials you need to know on Eliot are in this book
Whata complex person was George Eliot (1819-1880). Mary Ann
was born in the English midlands in a rural, conservative and
evangelical society. Read more
Published on July 22, 2005 by C. M Mills

4.0 out of 5 stars Fine basic biography on the life of this essential writer
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... Read more
Published on October 22, 2004 by Bluestalking Reader

5.0 out of 5 stars Scrutinizes the Victorian society that Mary Evans lived in
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). Read more
Published on September 11, 2001 by Midwest Book Review

4.0 out of 5 stars Eliot: All Too Human
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... Read more
Published on November 29, 1999 by ivoryk

4.0 out of 5 stars A Thoroughly Enjoyable Biography
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. Read more
Published on October 15, 1999

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