When George Eliot agreed (reluctantly, by all accounts) to have her portrait made in 1865, she surely never imagined that her face would be forever linked with her published works. Yet today when we ...

THE critic’s first duty in the presnce of an author’s collective works is to seek out some key to his method, some utterance of his literary convictions, some indication of his ruling theory. The ...

New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead first read George Eliot's "Middlemarch" at age 17, when she was an ambitious schoolgirl studying for entrance exams to Oxford. She recalls identifying "completely" with ...

THE writer of these pages has observed that the first question usually asked in relation to Mr. Cross’s long-expected biography is whether the reader has not been disappointed in it. The inquirer is ...

Ablow, Rachel. The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. Anderson, Amanda, and Harry E. Shaw, eds. A Companion to George Eliot. Blackwell ...

Author Kathryn Hughes has written in depth about 19th century Britain, writing about governesses and George Eliot and—a personal favorite—the birth of the women’s magazine and the life of Isabella ...