George Eliot: Voice of a Century : A Biography. This item is unavailable.George Eliot: Voice of a Century : A Biography

Describes Mary Anne Evans's childhood in nineteenth century Coventry, her lifelong resistance to enforced women's roles, intellectual prowess, elopement with George Henry Lewes, and literary successes.

English novelist George Eliot, born Mary Anne Evans, defied Victorian convention and her father's Anglican propriety by eloping in 1854 with biographer-novelist George Henry Lewes, a married man living apart from his wife. Cocooned in this common-law marriage, she adopted her masculine pen name both to facilitate publication and "as a way of taking on power and protection she did not feel." She soon achieved fame and wealth with novels (Silas Marner; Middlemarch) that are preoccupied with retribution, blackmail, murder and secret selves whose disclosure leads to destruction. In the fullest portrait to date of Eliot's (1819-1890) emotional life and artistic development, New York University English professor Karl (Franz Kafka: Representative Man) reveals a woman of deep contradictions. Eliot's fictional heroines are rebels who put to shame male ego and presumptions of power, yet she was politically conservative and believed that women were not ready for the franchise. This masterful biography illumines neglected facets of Eliot's life and work-her lifelong illnesses, her translation of Spinoza and her neglected novels Felix Holt, the Radical and Daniel Deronda; the latter's protagonist, of mixed Jewish and Christian heritage, is emblematic of Eliot's "reaching toward some cure for the Western world as for herself." Photos not seen by PW.
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Mary Anne Evans changed her name several times to match different phases of her unconventional and demandingly creative life. This ongoing self-transformation reflects the qualities that made her, according to Karl, emblematic of the "ambiguities, the anguish, and the divisiveness of the Victorian era." Karl, a biographer of Kafka, Conrad, and Faulkner, has written a meticulously detailed, carefully considered, and quietly dramatic analysis of Eliot's complex life and awesome achievements. As he follows her from her pastoral youth to her cosmopolitan maturity, from her status as outsider to well-paid and all but worshiped celebrity, Karl shows how Eliot obeyed the often frightening dictates of her powerful intellect to transcend gender roles and became an astute journalist, a profoundly psychological novelist, and a woman unafraid to love without a marriage license. None of this came easily. Eliot was "deeply divided" and suffered over her lack of physical beauty and her scandalous notoriety, channeling stress into monumental headaches and other ailments. But Eliot did triumph and elevated the novel to new heights of sophistication as she examined the precarious balance between the needs and desires of the self versus those of society. Donna Seaman