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)

9781108020084, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 October 2010

492 pages, 3 b/w illus.
21.6 x 14 x 2.8 cm, 0.62 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 3 focuses on Eliot's final years, including her later literary success, travels in Spain, the death of G. H. Lewes, and her marriage to Cross.

14. January 1867 to December 1867. Tour in Spain
15. January 1868 to December 1868. The Spanish Gypsy
16. January 1869 to December 1872. Poems. Middlemarch
17. January 1873 to December 1875. Conception of Deronda
18. March 1876 to November 1878. Daniel Deronda. Illness and death of Mr Lewes
19. January 1879 to 22nd December 1880. Theophrastus Such. Marriage with Mr Cross. Death
Index.

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