Book description
The works collected in this volume provide an illuminating introduction
to George Eliot's incisive views on religion, art and science, and the
nature and purpose of fiction. Essays such as 'Evangelical Teaching'
show her rejecting her earlier religious beliefs, while 'Woman in
France' questions conventional ideas about female virtues and marriage,
and 'Notes on Form in Art' sets out theories of idealism and realism
that she developed further in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. It also
includes selections from Eliot's translations of works by Strauss and
Feuerbach that challenged many ideas about Christianity; excerpts from
her poems; and reviews of writers such as Wollstonecraft, Goethe and
Browning. Wonderfully rich in imagery and observations, these pieces
reveal the intellectual development of this most challenging and
rewarding of writers.
Mary Ann Evans (1819-80) began her literary career as a translator
and later editor of the Westminster Review. In 1857, she published
SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE, the first of eight novels she would publish
under the name of 'George Eliot', including THE MILL ON THE FLOSS,
MIDDLEMARCH, and DANIEL DERONDA.
A S Byatt is an acclaimed writer, whose novel Possession won the
Booker Prize in 1992. She has written many novels, most recently The
Whistling Woman, alongside non-fiction.
