Book description
'She did not know then that it was Love who had come to her briefly
as in a dream before awaking, with the hues of morning on his wings
- that it was Love to whom she was sobbing her farewell as his image
was banished by the blameless rigour of irresistible day'
George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of
diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community.
Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose
search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous
marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless
Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and
pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career; and the
religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past.
As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and
moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as 'one of the few English
novels written for adult people'.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in
English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the
beginning of the First World War.
Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) (1819-80) was a philosopher,
journalist and translator before she became a novelist, her first
stories being published in 1856. She led an unconventional life,
co-editing the liberal journal Westminster Review for three
years and living with the married man and philosopher George Henry
Lewes. Her novels are among the greatest of the nineteenth century.
The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Daniel
Deronda are all published in the Penguin English Library.
