George Eliot’s Life, as Related in her Letters and Journals

Compiled from letters and journals, this three-volume biography presents an intimate portrait of George Eliot in her own words.

George Eliot (Author), John Walter Cross (Edited by)

9781108020077, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 October 2010

470 pages, 2 b/w illus.
21.6 x 2.7 x 14 cm, 0.59 kg

Best known for his brief marriage to George Eliot, John Walter Cross (1840–1924) compiled this three-volume 'autobiography' of 1885 from his late wife's journals and letters. Eliot was never married to her long-term partner G. H. Lewes, and she courted further scandal when she married Cross, twenty years her junior, in the spring of 1880. While these volumes offer a valuable insight into Eliot's private reflections, what is perhaps most telling is the material left out or rewritten in Cross' efforts to lend his wife's unconventional life some respectability, which he does at the expense of what one reviewer described as Eliot's 'salt and spice'. George Eliot's Life will be of particular interest to scholars of nineteenth-century biography and literature. Volume 2 covers the years 1858–1866, including Eliot's initial success in fiction and her travels in Italy, Holland, and along the Rhine.

8. January 1858 to December 1858. Success of Scenes of Clerical Life. Adam Bede
9. January 1859 to March 1860. The Mill on the Floss
10. March to June 1860. First journey to Italy
11. July 1860 to December 1861. Silas Marner. Romola begun
12. January 1862 to December 1865. Romola. Felix Holt
13. January 1866 to December 1866. Tour in Holland and on the Rhine.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]