Vintage Love (Middlemarch + Possession) - Softcover

Eliot, George; Byatt, A.S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099511355 ISBN 13: 9780099511359

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2007

Synopsis

"Vintage Love" is a limited edition gift pack which consists of beautifully designed separate volumes of "Middlemarch" by George Eliot and A S Byatt's highly acclaimed novel "Possession." "Vintage Love" is just one of ten "Vintage Classic Twins" to collect. Each twin consists of two books: a specially designed limited edition of one modern classic title and one established classic work. The books in each pair have been carefully selected to provide a thought-provoking combination. "Middlemarch": Dorothea as a bright, beautiful and rebellious who has married the wrong man. Lydgate is the ambitious new doctor in town and has married the wrong woman. Both of them long to make a positive difference in the world. But their stories do not proceed as expected and both they, and the other inhabitants of Middlemarch, must struggle to reconcile themselves to their fates and find their places in the world. "Possession": Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, both a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.

About this title

About the Author:

Mary Anne Evans was born near Nuneaton on 22 November 1819. She adopted the pseudonym George Eliot when she began her writing career. After her father's death she moved to London and helped to edit the radical journal the Westminster Review from 1851 to 1854. In 1851 she also met the journalist George Henry Lewes and, despite Lewes's marriage, they became partners for the rest of his life. In 1854 Lewes and Eliot openly set up home together, a scandalous arrangement by the social standards of the day. Her first attempt to write her most famous novel, Middlemarch, ended in failure. Abandoning it, she began a short novella entitled Miss Brooke which eventually became part of the final version of Middlemarch, which was published serially in 1871. Lewes died in 1878 and, in 1880, Eliot married John Walter Cross, an American who was twenty years her junior. George Eliot died on 22 December 1880 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery next to Lewes. A. S. Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short story writer and critic. Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999. Her most recent novel is A Whistling Woman, the conclusion of the famous 'Frederica' quartet.

Review:

"Middlemarch: Perhaps the greatest novel of them all... An enormous canvas and a vast and poignant range of character...a marvellous portrait of nineteenth-century provincial life" -- Joanna Trollope "Middlemarch: Another great romantic story, in which the adorable intellectually pretentious heroine makes a disastrous marriage to a desiccated fossil before finding true love with a penniless somebody" -- Jilly Cooper "Middlemarch: In Middlemarch her serious intelligence produced a novel that no one else could have been capable of - a picture of society as an organic, living, breathing synthesis - order and disorder, hope and hopelessness, pride and humility, charity and greed. If only she had seen fit to marry Dorothea to Lydgate" -- Kate Atkinson "Possession: As always, Byatt wields beautiful prose, and the mix of prose and poetry gives the book a sensuality as mysterious as anything in the plot" -- Elizabeth Kostova "Possession: Intelligent, ingenious and humane" Times Literary Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0099511355
• ISBN 13: 9780099511359
• Binding: Paperback