This highly praised biography is the first to explore fully the way in which her painful early life and rejection by her brother Isaac in particular, shaped the insight and art which made her both Victorian England's last great visionary and the first modern.
When the radical journalist Marian Evans went to live with her lover, liberal Victorian society decreed that she would never again be invited to dinner. But exiled in suburbia Marian finally found the courage to start writing the novels which had haunted her imagination since childhood. Kathryn Hughes explores the connections between George Eliot's fractured life and her spectacular rejection of the lies and secrets that choked Victorian England.
When the radical journalist Marian Evans went to live with her lover, liberal Victorian society decreed that she would never again be invited to dinner. But exiled in suburbia Marian finally found the courage to start writing the novels which had haunted her imagination since childhood. Kathryn Hughes explores the connections between George Eliot's fractured life and her spectacular rejection of the lies and secrets that choked Victorian England.