Offers a digitally printed version of the 1885 autobiography of George Eliot, which is a collection of journals and letters that was compiled by the author's husband after her death.

Prodigiously learned, alive to the massive social changes of her time, defiant of many Victorian orthodoxies, George Eliot has always challenged her readers. She is at once chronicler and analyst, novelist of nostalgia and monumental thinker. In her great novel Middlemarch she writes of 'that tempting range of relevancies called the universe'. This volume identifies a range of 'relevancies' that inform both her fictional and her non-fictional writings. The range and scale of her achievement are brought into focus by cogent essays on the many contexts - historical, intellectual, political, social, cultural - to her work. In addition there are discussions of her critical history and legacy, as well as of the material conditions of production and distribution of her novels and her journalism. The volume enables fuller understanding and appreciation, from a twenty-first-century standpoint, of the life and work of one of the nineteenth century's major writers.

This book examines the range of the colonial imaginary in Eliot’s works, from the domestic and regional to ancient and speculative colonialisms. It challenges monolithic, hegemonic views of George Eliot — whose novelistic career paralleled the creation of British India — and also dismissals of the postcolonial as ahistorical. It uncovers often-overlooked colonized figures in the novels. It also investigates Victorian Islamophobia in light of Eliot’s impatience with ignorance, intolerance, and xenophobia as well as her interrogation of the make-believe of endings. Drawing on a range of sources from Eugène Bodichon’s Algerian anthropological texts, the Persian journals of John Martyn, and postmodern re-engagements, Postcolonial George Eliot has implications for an understanding of the globalization of English, the decolonization of disciplinarity and periodization, and the roots of present-day conflict in the wider Mediterranean world.

This set reissues 5 books on George Eliot originally published between 1963 and 1989. The volumes examine many of Eliot’s most respected works, including Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. As well as proving in-depth analyses of Eliot’s work, this collection also includes an extensive collection of her critical articles written between 1846 and 1868. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature.

There have been several biographies of George Eliot but this is the first study to focus on her intellectual development. The book provides an analysis of the biographical and intellectual factors which encouraged George Eliot to decide upon fiction as her chosen mode of expression, and demonstrates how that decision was influenced by, and an echoing of, J.S.Mill's and Carlyle's critiques of philosophy.

This comprehensive guide to one of the most successful yet controversial writers of the Victorian period introduces the contexts and many interpretations of her work, from publication to the present. & nbsp.

This richly enjoyable biography of the great Victorian novelist reminds us how truly revolutionary was George Eliot... [Ashton] provides luminously sane readings of the marvellous novels.' A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard 'Excellent... Ashton cites Eliot's achievement in a literary landscape which moves from Scott and George Sand to Dickens, Tennyson and Browning... a fluent, vivid book... it makes one thrill again to the breadth of Eliot's genius and the passionate, vulnerable nature that accompanied her wide-ranging mind.' Jenny Uglow, Independent on Sunday 'An extremely impressive work... the George Eliot who emerges from Professor Ashton's book is a remarkable woman of exceptional integrity whose life expresses the spirit of the Victorian age, even as it goes against the very grain of it.' Susie Boyt, Sunday Express