The Journals of George Eliot

The great Victorian novelist's complete surviving journals - first publication of new George Eliot text.

George Eliot (Author), Margaret Harris (Edited by), Judith Johnston (Edited by)

9780521794572, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 September 2000

474 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm, 0.69 kg

'… the real merit of this book is that it opens a whole field of these quietly resonating details, committed to the privacy of Eliot's treasured and closely guarded notebooks from 1854 to a few months before her death.' Mark Wormald, The Review of English Studies

The Journals of George Eliot publishes for the first time the entire text of the surviving journals of the great Victorian novelist, and constitutes a new text by her - the closest she came to autobiography. The journals span her life from 1854, when she entered into a common-law union with George Henry Lewes, to her death in 1880, revealing the professional writer George Eliot as well as the remarkable woman Marian Evans. Many aspects of her writing life are illuminated, such as the separation of 'George Eliot' - and the account of her work's public reception - from her 'private' self, at the time she began to write fiction. The journals present a George Eliot of many moods, not only the serious sybilline figure so admired in her later years. The edition's extensive apparatus includes a chronology, introduction, headnotes to each diary, and an annotated index supplying valuable contextual and explanatory information.

List of abbreviations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Chronology
Introduction
1. Diary 1854–61: (i) Weimar, 20 July–3 November 1854
(ii) Berlin, 3 November 1854–March 1855
(iii) England, March 1855–19 June 1861
2. Diary 1861–77
3. Diary 1879
4. Diary 1880
5. Recollections of Weimar, 1854
6. Recollections of Berlin, 1854–5
7. Recollections of Ilfracombe, 1856
8. Recollections of the Scilly Isles and Jersey, 1857
9. The Making of George Eliot, 1857–9
10. Germany, 1858
11. Recollections of Italy, 1860
12. Italy, 1864
13. Normandy and Brittany, 1865
Explanatory index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB], Diaries, letters & journals [BJ]