Book description
To mark the publication of Stop What You're Doing and Read
This!, a collection of essays celebrating reading, Vintage
Classics are releasing 12 limited edition themed ebook 'bundles', to
tempt readers to discover and rediscover great books.
MIDDLEMARCH
Dorothea is bright, beautiful and rebellious and 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.
Middlemarch contains all of life: the rich and the poor, the
conventional and the radical, literature and science, politics and
romance. Eliot's novel is a stunningly compelling insight into the
human struggle to find contentment.
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
The serene and maternal Mrs Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr Ramsay,
together with their children and assorted guests, are holidaying on
the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit
to a nearby lighthouse Virginia Woolf constructs a remarkable and
moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family
life, and the conflict between male and female principles.
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. In 1857 Eliot
published Scenes from Clerical Life in Blackwood's Magazine and
in 1859 her novel Adam Bede was published to great acclaim and
established her as a bestselling author. 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.
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of
Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National
Biography. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the
painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of
'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and
writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a
powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. In
1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer.
Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was
published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's
Room (1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia
Woolf's distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this
time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the
publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917,
hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey.
Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded
as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the
poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also
maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction,
journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive
Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate
feminist essay. This intense creative productivity was often matched
by periods of mental illness, from which she had suffered since her
mother's death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the
publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia
Woolf committed suicide.
