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George Eliot: The Last Victorian
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, the 37-year-old Marian finally found the courage to start writing the novels which had haunted her imagination since childhood.
As George Eliot she won fame, fortune and the kind of social acceptance which had Queen Victoria asking for an autograph. But the one person whose approval mattered to Marian was the one person who refused to give it. For over twenty years Isaac Evans refused to acknowledge the younger sister whose unconventional religious and domestic life had destroyed his carefully crafted facade of provincial respectability.
In this new biography of George Eliot, Kathryn Hughes explores the connections between Marian Evans's fractured early family life and her spectacular rejection of the lies, secrets and silences which choked Victorian England.
Yet Marian Evans was typical of her times in wanting rules and continuity too. In her novels she returned again and again to the agricultural communities of her youth. In their social and moral cohesion she found an emotional warmth which was missing from the secular, scientific age which she and her radical intellectual friends had worked so hard to create.
In this fascinating psychological study, George Eliot emerges as Victorian England's most acute and qualified chronicler. Cosmopolitan and skeptical, she nonetheless retained a deep understanding of the ties of feeling and memory which kept her millions of readers nourished by their personal and collective past.
As George Eliot she won fame, fortune and the kind of social acceptance which had Queen Victoria asking for an autograph. But the one person whose approval mattered to Marian was the one person who refused to give it. For over twenty years Isaac Evans refused to acknowledge the younger sister whose unconventional religious and domestic life had destroyed his carefully crafted facade of provincial respectability.
In this new biography of George Eliot, Kathryn Hughes explores the connections between Marian Evans's fractured early family life and her spectacular rejection of the lies, secrets and silences which choked Victorian England.
Yet Marian Evans was typical of her times in wanting rules and continuity too. In her novels she returned again and again to the agricultural communities of her youth. In their social and moral cohesion she found an emotional warmth which was missing from the secular, scientific age which she and her radical intellectual friends had worked so hard to create.
In this fascinating psychological study, George Eliot emerges as Victorian England's most acute and qualified chronicler. Cosmopolitan and skeptical, she nonetheless retained a deep understanding of the ties of feeling and memory which kept her millions of readers nourished by their personal and collective past.
400 pages, Paperback
First published November 5, 1998
About the author
Kathryn Hughes
22 books40 followersKathryn Hughes is a British journalist and biographer. She holds a PhD in Victorian History. She is a contributing editor to Prospect magazine as well as a book reviewer and commentator for the Guardian and BBC Radio. Hughes also teaches biographical studies at University of East Anglia in Norwich, U.K.
Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 56 reviews
September 27, 2016
Excellent, thorough, interesting biography of a fascinating person in a complex time. Hughes negotiates everything very well, and keeps a good balance of writing about her life and work together. Also very readable. Recommended for anyone who likes Eliot's work. This is what I always hope biographies will be like, and I'll be looking for anything else by Hughes.
March 26, 2021
Buried within the mass of gossipy obsession with guesswork as to ME's emotional life (and sex life) and far too much statement of opinion as though it were fact, is about 50 pages of interest.
The problems with this as a bio of a writer can be seen from the fact that I would estimate only about 10% actually deals with her writing, her reading, her intellectual life etc. The rest is either her social life or spending pages retelling the plots of her novels. I cant tell you how frustrating it was, for example, to suddenly realise I was almost at the end of the chapter on Deronda and barely anything had been said about her work on it.
Judging from the reviews on here, obviously there are many people for whom that is just what they want, but it was not what I was hoping for.
The problems with this as a bio of a writer can be seen from the fact that I would estimate only about 10% actually deals with her writing, her reading, her intellectual life etc. The rest is either her social life or spending pages retelling the plots of her novels. I cant tell you how frustrating it was, for example, to suddenly realise I was almost at the end of the chapter on Deronda and barely anything had been said about her work on it.
Judging from the reviews on here, obviously there are many people for whom that is just what they want, but it was not what I was hoping for.
May 2, 2018
As I’ve mentioned before, for many years, it’s been my ambition to research whether or not George Eliot had any contact with Rav Hirsch’s community in Frankfurt when she researched Daniel Deronda. I’ve taken a few steps toward that goal in recent months, and reading this biography was one of them. It was impressively thorough, so I learned plenty about the life and work of Marian Lewes/George Eliot, but not a whole lot about the writing of
Daniel Deronda
specifically. The author doesn’t share my enthusiasm for the book; her reaction parallels the British one in George Eliot’s era, and mine parallels the Jews’. But no matter, I’m one step closer to being a George Eliot scholar now, and because the book paints such a kind and maternal portrait of her, I love her as a person even more.
March 27, 2015
On the one hand, George Eliot was easily one of the most sensational women of the nineteenth century, to say nothing of the millenium, and this bio makes her accessible to someone who read and liked _Mill on the Floss_, but doesn't know much about Eliot's contemporary world. On the other hand, George Eliot was a woman who lived intensely through ideas, and beyond explaining Eliot's falling away from orthodox Christianity, and then very obliquely nodding toward the fact that the notion of natural history informed her novels, this bio is strikingly mum on what Eliot read and how it informed her work. Instead, it's a chatty and gossipy, minutely attentive to George Eliot's hurt feelings, the changing dynamics of her friendships, and of course, the ups and downs of those endlessly speculated-upon romances with men. If you know nothing about Eliot's life, it's fascinating. If you know even a bit about Eliot's life, it's rather hackneyed. The book is premised on the idea that your emotional engagements with people are what shape you first and foremost, and the author's interpretations of Eliot's novels proceed accordingly. But Eliot herself didn't believe this -- at least not about the life that she was leading. Part of what made Eliot sensational and unorthodox and what led her to write at all was how intensely the ideas she encountered in books lit up her entire world. You'll get none of that from Kathryn Hughes's version of her life.
On the one hand I want to recognize and applaud the fact that this book makes the life of Eliot accessible to the modern reader. On the other hand, I'm disappointed that it didn't do the *truly* hard but worthwhile task of making her full life -- both emotional and intellectual -- vivid and engaging.
On the one hand I want to recognize and applaud the fact that this book makes the life of Eliot accessible to the modern reader. On the other hand, I'm disappointed that it didn't do the *truly* hard but worthwhile task of making her full life -- both emotional and intellectual -- vivid and engaging.
January 11, 2021
I must have really enjoyed this book because after finishing it (and My Life in Middlemarch) I went out to read George Elliot’s entire oeuvre. I think this famous biographer helped me to realize that Elliot was one of the most sophisticated thinkers who ever wrote creative fiction. In fact, this book reminded me that Victorian intellectuals weren’t as dull as we might sometimes suppose. I mean, Elliot was translating German thinkers, editing important journals, and discussing scientific innovation with her common law husband, etc. and so on.
September 16, 2025
Excellent. I learned a great deal about George Eliot's life, the background of those wonderful novels of hers with which I am familiar, and the basic outline of those of them with which I am not. Eliot was a writer with an incredible moral sensibility, and it was not much shock to learn that she made as strong an impression upon readers and associates in her own time as she does in our own. Hughes' biography is engaging, clear, and sympathetic, and full of delightful surprises. What did Eliot write in her letter to Herbert Spencer begging him to be her boyfriend? Why did John Cross jump out the window of their room in Venice during their honeymoon? And who is 30 year old "Gusher" who lived with his mother and put together a (delightful) collection of Eliot's "wise, witty, and tender sayings"? You'll just have to read to find out.
May 24, 2008
George Eliot! What a hot tamale. I thought this biography was slightly superficial at times, but at others very insightful. And what fascinating material! Overall I quite liked it.
June 1, 2026
The more I think about this biography, the less I like it.
A picture of George Eliot emerges very clearly from it and at first I was grateful for this, as I knew only the bare outlines of her life. The book is very easy to read and, as you might expect, it follows her life chronologically, taking each of her books in turn as the focus for the chapters.
Hughes quotes liberally from George Eliot's letters, which is helpful, as it gives us her authentic voice, which we can more or less trust. However, we have to bear in mind that George Eliot destroyed a lot of letters and urged her friends to do the same. If there was one thing she hated, it was the idea of a gossipy biographer rooting around in her personal effects. She thought it was odious that
Kathryn Hughes is precisely this kind of gossipy biographer.
She doesn’t seem to hold any of the novels in high regard, except Middlemarch and parts of Daniel Deronda. She sums up Eliot’s literary career from 1857 to 1870, when she wrote five of her seven novels, with very faint praise.
This is as close as she comes to critical analysis. Her aim is to give a very light summary of the novels and make a few casual remarks, with some suggestions as to what in George Eliot's life may have prompted some of the themes.
Quite apart from these cursory references to books that made her internationally famous in these years, I'm not sure I trust everything Kathryn Hughes tells us. She offers opinions as facts, and they are quite disapproving opinions much of the time. She depicts a needy woman who must be shielded from criticism because of her tendency to descend into “dank pessimism” or “marshy gloom”. She upbraids her for rushing to collect famous people while brushing off foreign dignitaries when it suits her. She trivialises her deepest relationships. Typical of her approach is the way she dismisses some of her female friends as young women with a lesbian crush, while at the same time telling us that lesbianism as we know it didn’t exist in Victorian England.
Her characterisations of George Eliot’s long relationship with George Henry Lewes and her brief marriage to John Cross are achieved by paraphrasing rumours that were apparently circulating at the time.
In this way Hughes slyly conveys impressions without having to take responsibility for them.
One of the things I wanted to know was what influences shaped George Eliot’s early life. I admire her early works more than Hughes does and think her final novel, Daniel Deronda, is one of the best I’ve ever read. How did she get the stimulation she needed to shape her unusually brilliant mind?
The biography answered my questions about this to a large extent. It presented a convincing portrait of a woman who worked 'like a Trojan' all her life. I could see that her early efforts to translate and understand philosophical works written in German shaped the way she thought. It was clear that she struggled to find companions with whom she could discuss the implications of these works in the depth she desired but, when she did, she latched onto them and made the very most of her opportunities.
It’s also clear that she made a strong impression on nearly everyone she met. For the most part, this impression was favourable. She was articulate, kind, charismatic and an excellent listener.
Eliot’s relationship with John Blackwood, her publisher, is perhaps the one that is depicted with the most fairness and objectivity in this biography. We are shown excerpts from letters on both sides showing how warmly they respected one another, the hurt they felt when negotiations became difficult, and their mutual magnanimity in admitting when they were wrong. The fact that, almost from the start of her career, George Eliot was being offered record sums for her novels, undermines Hughes’s contention that hers was just a middling talent. The fact, also, that George Eliot stayed loyal to Blackwood despite being offered greater sums by other publishers, shows how much she appreciated his ability to understand, encourage and appreciate her extraordinary talent.
The Epilogue is a somewhat tepid appraisal of the relevance of George Eliot's work today. Hughes suggests her reputation declined rapidly after her death and didn't benefit much from a positive reappraisal of it in the twentieth century. This, she says, was because George Eliot didn't appeal to feminists, who wanted her to be more radical.
This doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. A much stronger case for her enduring relevance could be made. But let’s just say that in a recent survey conducted by The Guardian to determine the ranking of novels available in English (including translations), and compiled from the votes of more than 170 experts from around the world, George Eliot’s Middlemarch was judged to be the best.
Middlemarch was not an accident but emerged organically from a lifetime of writing, translating and editing essays, poems, philosophy, scientific papers and the highest quality literary fiction. Hughes could have done much more to demonstrate this.
A picture of George Eliot emerges very clearly from it and at first I was grateful for this, as I knew only the bare outlines of her life. The book is very easy to read and, as you might expect, it follows her life chronologically, taking each of her books in turn as the focus for the chapters.
Hughes quotes liberally from George Eliot's letters, which is helpful, as it gives us her authentic voice, which we can more or less trust. However, we have to bear in mind that George Eliot destroyed a lot of letters and urged her friends to do the same. If there was one thing she hated, it was the idea of a gossipy biographer rooting around in her personal effects. She thought it was odious that
as soon as a man is dead his desk is raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant for the public, is printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to read his books
Kathryn Hughes is precisely this kind of gossipy biographer.
She doesn’t seem to hold any of the novels in high regard, except Middlemarch and parts of Daniel Deronda. She sums up Eliot’s literary career from 1857 to 1870, when she wrote five of her seven novels, with very faint praise.
…what would have happened if Marian had simply stopped writing in 1868, silenced by death or despair? She would be remembered for the great trio of English provincial novels, Adam Bede, The Mill and Silas Marner, and perhaps for the minor triumph of Felix Holt. But she would have been set down as a medium talent…
This is as close as she comes to critical analysis. Her aim is to give a very light summary of the novels and make a few casual remarks, with some suggestions as to what in George Eliot's life may have prompted some of the themes.
Quite apart from these cursory references to books that made her internationally famous in these years, I'm not sure I trust everything Kathryn Hughes tells us. She offers opinions as facts, and they are quite disapproving opinions much of the time. She depicts a needy woman who must be shielded from criticism because of her tendency to descend into “dank pessimism” or “marshy gloom”. She upbraids her for rushing to collect famous people while brushing off foreign dignitaries when it suits her. She trivialises her deepest relationships. Typical of her approach is the way she dismisses some of her female friends as young women with a lesbian crush, while at the same time telling us that lesbianism as we know it didn’t exist in Victorian England.
… it would be be anachronistic to describe any of these situations as ‘lesbian’ (or not) because lesbianism had not been defined in the way we understand it today.
Her characterisations of George Eliot’s long relationship with George Henry Lewes and her brief marriage to John Cross are achieved by paraphrasing rumours that were apparently circulating at the time.
In the original 1854 rumour Lewes had been viewed as Marian’s partner in crime, a man whose urge to sexual misconduct was matched only by her own. In the 1880 version Cross was cast as the naive virgin, and perhaps even unacknowledged homosexual, chased around the bed by a hideous, lascivious woman demanding sex.
In this way Hughes slyly conveys impressions without having to take responsibility for them.
One of the things I wanted to know was what influences shaped George Eliot’s early life. I admire her early works more than Hughes does and think her final novel, Daniel Deronda, is one of the best I’ve ever read. How did she get the stimulation she needed to shape her unusually brilliant mind?
The biography answered my questions about this to a large extent. It presented a convincing portrait of a woman who worked 'like a Trojan' all her life. I could see that her early efforts to translate and understand philosophical works written in German shaped the way she thought. It was clear that she struggled to find companions with whom she could discuss the implications of these works in the depth she desired but, when she did, she latched onto them and made the very most of her opportunities.
It’s also clear that she made a strong impression on nearly everyone she met. For the most part, this impression was favourable. She was articulate, kind, charismatic and an excellent listener.
Eliot’s relationship with John Blackwood, her publisher, is perhaps the one that is depicted with the most fairness and objectivity in this biography. We are shown excerpts from letters on both sides showing how warmly they respected one another, the hurt they felt when negotiations became difficult, and their mutual magnanimity in admitting when they were wrong. The fact that, almost from the start of her career, George Eliot was being offered record sums for her novels, undermines Hughes’s contention that hers was just a middling talent. The fact, also, that George Eliot stayed loyal to Blackwood despite being offered greater sums by other publishers, shows how much she appreciated his ability to understand, encourage and appreciate her extraordinary talent.
The Epilogue is a somewhat tepid appraisal of the relevance of George Eliot's work today. Hughes suggests her reputation declined rapidly after her death and didn't benefit much from a positive reappraisal of it in the twentieth century. This, she says, was because George Eliot didn't appeal to feminists, who wanted her to be more radical.
This doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. A much stronger case for her enduring relevance could be made. But let’s just say that in a recent survey conducted by The Guardian to determine the ranking of novels available in English (including translations), and compiled from the votes of more than 170 experts from around the world, George Eliot’s Middlemarch was judged to be the best.
Middlemarch was not an accident but emerged organically from a lifetime of writing, translating and editing essays, poems, philosophy, scientific papers and the highest quality literary fiction. Hughes could have done much more to demonstrate this.
October 31, 2020
This has been a rollercoaster of an experience. I had no idea of the complexity of George Eliot’s character prior to reading this.
The struggles that she went through in being ostracised, vilified and lauded all fed into her desperately needy character, according to the author.
By 21st century standards, George’s psychological needs are not so different to many we regularly see. Back in that time though, it was a rare person who was able to and did aid the patient. Mary Anne Evans was lucky to have met her saviour, who was able to cosset and protect her into producing her novels. Without the love of George Henry Lewes, we would almost certainly not have had her contribution to literature.
A fascinating story and I’m deeply in awe of the author’s ability in sifting through primary evidence to come up with such an outstanding view of the woman, warts and all.
The struggles that she went through in being ostracised, vilified and lauded all fed into her desperately needy character, according to the author.
By 21st century standards, George’s psychological needs are not so different to many we regularly see. Back in that time though, it was a rare person who was able to and did aid the patient. Mary Anne Evans was lucky to have met her saviour, who was able to cosset and protect her into producing her novels. Without the love of George Henry Lewes, we would almost certainly not have had her contribution to literature.
A fascinating story and I’m deeply in awe of the author’s ability in sifting through primary evidence to come up with such an outstanding view of the woman, warts and all.
November 12, 2017
I love biographies of women writers, and Eliot is one of the pillars of Victorian literature. In a repressive time she contrived to live her life and do her art exactly as she wanted.
January 17, 2019
Kathryn Hughes's 1998 biography of the author of *Silas Marner,**The Mill on the Floss,* and *Middlemarch,* among other novels, is well researched, engaging, and sometimes wryly humorous. Hughes shows George Eliot in all her contradictions and complexity, explaining as much as anyone could how the writer got the way she was.
Eliot is frustrating to many feminists because despite living an unconventional life, she highly valued conventionality. She was the "Last Victorian" in the sense that her brilliant heroines usually chose to renounce the full development of their brains for a quiet domestic life. Eliot herself had a remarkable career and 23 years of living with a married man who couldn't get a divorce under contemporary British law. For many years she was a social outcast, even from her family.
But she was in many ways a conservative, believing in gradual and incremental change over revolution or anything imposed from the top down if people weren't psychologically and socially ready. She passed through passionate religious phases, ending up what I'd call a highly moral humanist. Together with "husband" George Henry Lewes, she financially supported his actual wife, the woman's many illegitimate children, and a long list of Lewes's relatives without complaint.
It was fascinating to learn from this book that there never would have been a George Eliot, novelist, if not for Lewes, who encouraged her to move from journalism into fiction and became Cheerleader No. 1. After once expressing the mildest doubt about her untested ability to write dramatically, he learned a lesson -- thereafter keeping his and everyone's reservations from her, propping her up through her paralyzing bouts of depression and dark periods of low self-esteem, even getting publisher Blackwell to write his pathologically touchy author fulsome letters of encouragement. After Lewes died, Eliot married a man 20 years younger, who during the short time they were together before her own death, performed the same sustaining function.
If you don't believe me, read the book and see what a strong case Hughes makes from the available data. Eliot was undoubtedly a genius but also a victim of debilitating insecurities.
Eliot is frustrating to many feminists because despite living an unconventional life, she highly valued conventionality. She was the "Last Victorian" in the sense that her brilliant heroines usually chose to renounce the full development of their brains for a quiet domestic life. Eliot herself had a remarkable career and 23 years of living with a married man who couldn't get a divorce under contemporary British law. For many years she was a social outcast, even from her family.
But she was in many ways a conservative, believing in gradual and incremental change over revolution or anything imposed from the top down if people weren't psychologically and socially ready. She passed through passionate religious phases, ending up what I'd call a highly moral humanist. Together with "husband" George Henry Lewes, she financially supported his actual wife, the woman's many illegitimate children, and a long list of Lewes's relatives without complaint.
It was fascinating to learn from this book that there never would have been a George Eliot, novelist, if not for Lewes, who encouraged her to move from journalism into fiction and became Cheerleader No. 1. After once expressing the mildest doubt about her untested ability to write dramatically, he learned a lesson -- thereafter keeping his and everyone's reservations from her, propping her up through her paralyzing bouts of depression and dark periods of low self-esteem, even getting publisher Blackwell to write his pathologically touchy author fulsome letters of encouragement. After Lewes died, Eliot married a man 20 years younger, who during the short time they were together before her own death, performed the same sustaining function.
If you don't believe me, read the book and see what a strong case Hughes makes from the available data. Eliot was undoubtedly a genius but also a victim of debilitating insecurities.
January 11, 2021
I found the author's final comments arguing that Eliot be celebrated as a voice of political centrism/"moderation" tedious and unpersuasive, and just generally found the author's conservative political perspectives boring and irritating, but otherwise it's a fascinating biography especially for people like me who love Eliot's novels but didn't know a lot about her life.
January 10, 2023
I’ve never come across a biography that had so much disdain for its subject, and it broke my heart, and also made me feel like barfing for five hundred years. Over and over, the author expresses grotesquely confident bafflement— shock!— as to how anyone could find Eliot attractive, much less beguiling, as many did. The facts of Eliot’s life demonstrate that she had the same amount of suitors, lovers, crushes, and long term relationships as any woman, and far more sexual intrigue than most Victorians, thanks to intermittent stretches of polyamory. Her ostensible marriage to the love of her life, George Henry Lewes, lasted over 20 years. Still, the author seems to relish depicting Eliot with pity and barely-veiled contempt for daring to believe that anyone might reciprocate her affection or desire. This is bad math.
At times it reads like Regina’s burn book from Mean Girls, which might be a funny detail if it didn’t demonstrate such corrosive internalized misogyny. I gasped at patronizing passages that paint this complex luminary in possession of an unparalleled mind, the creator of Middlemarch (FFS!), as a needy, deluded hornball. I mean, yes, both things can be possible— and I expect any biography to explore its subject’s real and assumed flaws. But in this book, the biographer tells on herself, clearly stunted by her own inability to process the simple reality of Eliot having a romantic life despite famously looking kind of weird. At the end of the day, it reads like Rosamund Vincy writing about Dorothea Brooke, which might be funny if this wasn’t one of the only primary records of Eliot’s life. She deserves better than this petty, dim garbage by a scholar who struggles to see her as little more than a tragic uggo who wrote some books.
At times it reads like Regina’s burn book from Mean Girls, which might be a funny detail if it didn’t demonstrate such corrosive internalized misogyny. I gasped at patronizing passages that paint this complex luminary in possession of an unparalleled mind, the creator of Middlemarch (FFS!), as a needy, deluded hornball. I mean, yes, both things can be possible— and I expect any biography to explore its subject’s real and assumed flaws. But in this book, the biographer tells on herself, clearly stunted by her own inability to process the simple reality of Eliot having a romantic life despite famously looking kind of weird. At the end of the day, it reads like Rosamund Vincy writing about Dorothea Brooke, which might be funny if this wasn’t one of the only primary records of Eliot’s life. She deserves better than this petty, dim garbage by a scholar who struggles to see her as little more than a tragic uggo who wrote some books.
July 8, 2018
On the very last page of this excellent, engrossing biography, Hughes makes a case for the newly minted 21st century—as it was upon publication—needing Eliot and her particular brand of Victorian social conservatism. “For Eliot believed that it was possible for society to move forward from the centre [shunned by Post-Modernism]. The pace would be slow, certainly, the mood both sceptical and humble. But there would also be value, purpose, a sense that this was *right*. Eliot despaired of Progress, with its crude ‘Victorian’ triumphalism and lack of doubt. In its place she proposed Meliorism, a slow, consensual grasping towards something better. It is Meliorism which we need now.”
Given all that’s happened in the seventeen years since these words were written, and given the last year and a half alone, I wonder if Hughes still thinks this. I get the idea she’s advocating, just as I get it when Eliot preaches it herself. I don’t totally buy it—I think Eliot’s portrayal of Radicalism, while valid, is incomplete, and that the provincial creatures she portrays might have done well with a, say, Ida Wells or Grimke sisters in their midst. It’s the part of Eliot I can’t quite square with the enjoyment I get from her novels.
Fruitless, foolish and tone deaf though such wishes may be, I don’t want a George Eliot advising caution or the right kind of nationalism. I need her on the #MeToo side.
Given all that’s happened in the seventeen years since these words were written, and given the last year and a half alone, I wonder if Hughes still thinks this. I get the idea she’s advocating, just as I get it when Eliot preaches it herself. I don’t totally buy it—I think Eliot’s portrayal of Radicalism, while valid, is incomplete, and that the provincial creatures she portrays might have done well with a, say, Ida Wells or Grimke sisters in their midst. It’s the part of Eliot I can’t quite square with the enjoyment I get from her novels.
Fruitless, foolish and tone deaf though such wishes may be, I don’t want a George Eliot advising caution or the right kind of nationalism. I need her on the #MeToo side.
October 2, 2012
A very delightful and thorough biography of Marian Evans/Lewes. I'm not sure the lay reader who hasn't read at least two of Eliot's works would enjoy it, but the textual interplay between art and life was really fun to uncover. I think I actually enjoyed the beginning sections of the book when Evans was still finding her way towards fiction the most. Many fascinating letters survive from this time. One real tragedy is that no letters survive between Eliot and her longtime companion George Henry Lewes. Surely one of the most enduring and passionate literary love stories of all time, between such unlikely figures! Alas. I bet they wrote some great letters. However, still highly recommend this biography for any fan of Eliot and the Victorians!
September 21, 2018
Disclaimer- I haven't read anything else about Marian Evans (Lewes) aside from her Wikipedia page, so I can't vouch for the book's factual accuracy. But it's engrossing and informative. One quibble- in the first half of the book Hughes seems to have a tendency to favor the most scandalous and dramatic interpretation of a given piece of personal correspondence. This isn't a huge deal because she shares enough quotations that the reader can form their own opinions, but it is a slight annoyance in an otherwise wonderful book.
March 25, 2020
Five hundred densely worded pages makes this book not for the populist reader. Everything you want to know about George Eliot is here, every letter she wrote and received, every rise and dip in each of her relationships with family and friends. I liked the way Kathryn Hughes ties these events into Eliot’s characters and events in the novels. I should not have been surprised because what author does not draw from their life? I do object to Hughes constantly harping on about Eliot’s ugliness when the cover of the book has her looking quite beautiful. Still, for an Eliot fan, a must read.
June 5, 2012
Kathryn Hughes succeeds in presenting a vivid and psychologically acute portrayal of George Eliot - one of the giants of English literature. Eliot is definitely my most favourite author and while I already had a fair amount of knowledge concerning her notoriously controversial life, after reading Hughes's biography I am able to perceive Eliot's work with a totally refreshing insight, as determined by her moral and philosophical outlook.
I am glad that Hughes avoids the typical feminist buffoonery of simply blaming the men for the difficulties and predicaments faced by the women artists. In fact, Hughes identifies that the one of the main causes of Eliot's life-long morbid sensitivity and self-doubt was as a consequence of rejection by her mother at such a young age. Her mother preferred her older brother Isaac over her and at the age of five, Eliot was sent off to a distant boarding school where she failed to find the emotional attachment she so craved and needed. For most of her young life, Eliot looked for a mother-figure and she would often poignantly re-interpret her friends' kindness towards her as a devotion shown by a mother to her child.
Eliot's already emotional detachment from her mother was exacerbated by her brother Isaac's increasing alienation, which she later in life so masterfully recreates in her most autobiographical novel The Mill on the Floss.
Eliot's life was not easy and her 'plain' appearance only further increased her difficulties. It was very painful to read the continuous rejections and humiliations she had to suffer because of her ugliness. The flattering and prettified cover image of this biography doesn't do her justice at all. She had a "heavy jaw, a large mouth and big nose" and was often a butt of malicious jokes concerning her appearance. The irony is that Hughes criticises early biographers of Eliot for toning down or being embarrassed by her 'horse-like' features, yet her own biography's cover image is the least representation of what Eliot looked liked in real life. One could argue that it doesn't really matter if Eliot wasn't exactly a 'looker', but to ignore it is to undermine the damaging effect it had on her personality and her relationships with men prior to G.H. Lewis. Men were attracted by her charm and her prodigious intelligence, which was often misinterpreted by her as sexual attraction and she would form embarrassing attachments to them which would of course end up in tears of self-loathing and humiliation.
Hughes shines when she tackles the ultimate Eliot question which no modern biographer can eschew. Why Eliot who as a Victorian woman led the most radical life imaginable, adopted a socially conservative attitude in her novels? Women (and men) who try to cross social and class boundaries in her novels are pushed back and often punished very severely. It's not that Eliot rejected feminism or she was against the idea of 'progress', she was just not a Utopian. She championed literary realism because it was her aim to present life as it is, not as it should be. Applying the darwinian principle to human societies, she insisted that human development must be slow and organic, that change must not be imposed from above but must come gradually and from within. She shared the Wordsworthian view of the significance of nature and "native land" in the life of a man. Most of her novels are set in provincial, countryside communities and she was afraid that the rapid industrialization would completely destroy the landscape which she loved and treasured so much as a child and always looked back it wistfully whenever she was exiled to London's Suburbia which she found so suffocating.
The biography lags behind in providing a solid literary criticism of Eliot's novels (hence the 4 stars). Often Hughes would resort to writing mere summaries of novel's plots and would spend too much time on searching for 'real' people Eliot based her characters on. Sometimes, she gets her information wrong. For example, she says that Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede gives birth in a 'field', when in actual fact, she gives birth in a room. She actually abandons the baby in the field. Or that, G.H Lewis wrote the review of Bronte's Jane Eyre in 1847, when in fact, he wrote it in 1848. I found it ironic and amusing when G.H. Lewis defended Eliot's right to remain anonymous behind her masculine pseudonym, so that her book could be "judged on it's own merits, and not prejudiced as a work of a woman, or of a particular woman". I wonder whether he realised that only few years ago when he himself wrote reviews of Bronte's novels, he couldn't bear not to refer to her sex, calling her novel Shirley 'masculine' and 'a very antipode of lady-like'.
In the end, it was her relationship with G.H. Lewis which actually sustained Eliot and gave her life a meaningful direction. He gave her the love and self-confidence she needed to write her novels. For twenty years, it was Lewis who managed her literary career from sorting out minor quibbles with her publisher to boosting her morale whenever she fell into her usual morbid despair and self-doubt. As Hughes correctly points out that "without George Henry Lewis, there could have been no George Eliot."
I've made the review unnecessary longer, only because I love Eliot so much, both as a truly unique person and also as a greatest novelist. In her time, she was a critical and commercial success. I emphasize 'critical' because there were many others who wrote absolute trash but still were a commercial success. Later in her life, people would go mad about her wherever she went - a stark contrast to a woman who in her earlier life twice got kicked out of her friends' house. In our modern time, she will perhaps never be as popular and widely read as Dickens. Unlike Dickens, her novels are not page-turners or filled with sinister plots. They also lack the cloying sentimentality which permeates Dickens's work. What Eliot offers in her novels is humanity stripped naked to its very core, with its raw and conflicting emotions. We could see our own reflection in her deeply flawed characters. She hated bigotry and rejected the dogmatic doctrines of organised religion. Instead, she believed that morality should come from within ourselves, not from some supernatural power. She believed in the effectiveness of meliorism in order to improve human society, saying that "The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.” Not a bad thing, I guess.
I am glad that Hughes avoids the typical feminist buffoonery of simply blaming the men for the difficulties and predicaments faced by the women artists. In fact, Hughes identifies that the one of the main causes of Eliot's life-long morbid sensitivity and self-doubt was as a consequence of rejection by her mother at such a young age. Her mother preferred her older brother Isaac over her and at the age of five, Eliot was sent off to a distant boarding school where she failed to find the emotional attachment she so craved and needed. For most of her young life, Eliot looked for a mother-figure and she would often poignantly re-interpret her friends' kindness towards her as a devotion shown by a mother to her child.
Eliot's already emotional detachment from her mother was exacerbated by her brother Isaac's increasing alienation, which she later in life so masterfully recreates in her most autobiographical novel The Mill on the Floss.
Eliot's life was not easy and her 'plain' appearance only further increased her difficulties. It was very painful to read the continuous rejections and humiliations she had to suffer because of her ugliness. The flattering and prettified cover image of this biography doesn't do her justice at all. She had a "heavy jaw, a large mouth and big nose" and was often a butt of malicious jokes concerning her appearance. The irony is that Hughes criticises early biographers of Eliot for toning down or being embarrassed by her 'horse-like' features, yet her own biography's cover image is the least representation of what Eliot looked liked in real life. One could argue that it doesn't really matter if Eliot wasn't exactly a 'looker', but to ignore it is to undermine the damaging effect it had on her personality and her relationships with men prior to G.H. Lewis. Men were attracted by her charm and her prodigious intelligence, which was often misinterpreted by her as sexual attraction and she would form embarrassing attachments to them which would of course end up in tears of self-loathing and humiliation.
Hughes shines when she tackles the ultimate Eliot question which no modern biographer can eschew. Why Eliot who as a Victorian woman led the most radical life imaginable, adopted a socially conservative attitude in her novels? Women (and men) who try to cross social and class boundaries in her novels are pushed back and often punished very severely. It's not that Eliot rejected feminism or she was against the idea of 'progress', she was just not a Utopian. She championed literary realism because it was her aim to present life as it is, not as it should be. Applying the darwinian principle to human societies, she insisted that human development must be slow and organic, that change must not be imposed from above but must come gradually and from within. She shared the Wordsworthian view of the significance of nature and "native land" in the life of a man. Most of her novels are set in provincial, countryside communities and she was afraid that the rapid industrialization would completely destroy the landscape which she loved and treasured so much as a child and always looked back it wistfully whenever she was exiled to London's Suburbia which she found so suffocating.
The biography lags behind in providing a solid literary criticism of Eliot's novels (hence the 4 stars). Often Hughes would resort to writing mere summaries of novel's plots and would spend too much time on searching for 'real' people Eliot based her characters on. Sometimes, she gets her information wrong. For example, she says that Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede gives birth in a 'field', when in actual fact, she gives birth in a room. She actually abandons the baby in the field. Or that, G.H Lewis wrote the review of Bronte's Jane Eyre in 1847, when in fact, he wrote it in 1848. I found it ironic and amusing when G.H. Lewis defended Eliot's right to remain anonymous behind her masculine pseudonym, so that her book could be "judged on it's own merits, and not prejudiced as a work of a woman, or of a particular woman". I wonder whether he realised that only few years ago when he himself wrote reviews of Bronte's novels, he couldn't bear not to refer to her sex, calling her novel Shirley 'masculine' and 'a very antipode of lady-like'.
In the end, it was her relationship with G.H. Lewis which actually sustained Eliot and gave her life a meaningful direction. He gave her the love and self-confidence she needed to write her novels. For twenty years, it was Lewis who managed her literary career from sorting out minor quibbles with her publisher to boosting her morale whenever she fell into her usual morbid despair and self-doubt. As Hughes correctly points out that "without George Henry Lewis, there could have been no George Eliot."
I've made the review unnecessary longer, only because I love Eliot so much, both as a truly unique person and also as a greatest novelist. In her time, she was a critical and commercial success. I emphasize 'critical' because there were many others who wrote absolute trash but still were a commercial success. Later in her life, people would go mad about her wherever she went - a stark contrast to a woman who in her earlier life twice got kicked out of her friends' house. In our modern time, she will perhaps never be as popular and widely read as Dickens. Unlike Dickens, her novels are not page-turners or filled with sinister plots. They also lack the cloying sentimentality which permeates Dickens's work. What Eliot offers in her novels is humanity stripped naked to its very core, with its raw and conflicting emotions. We could see our own reflection in her deeply flawed characters. She hated bigotry and rejected the dogmatic doctrines of organised religion. Instead, she believed that morality should come from within ourselves, not from some supernatural power. She believed in the effectiveness of meliorism in order to improve human society, saying that "The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.” Not a bad thing, I guess.
April 14, 2020
This is enjoyable, but dense reading...it took me at least six months. And it definitely picks up speed in the last half once Marian launches into her fiction career, around age 40.
Kathryn Hughes covers George Eliot's entire life in minute details; some of it possibly kind of speculative on her states of mind as surmised from letters to different groups of family and friends she cycled through over the years. George Eliot has been my favorite author for many years, because I've assumed she's the same as the wise, narrative voice in the best of her novels; so compassionate and understanding of human frailties, having suffered rejection and repeated humiliation since childhood. Her contemporary readers assumed this too and swamped her with letters seeking advice. But of course she was much more complex than that, given to depression and deep insecurities about her looks; and she's especially prickly about criticism.
In her personal life too, she was moody and mercurial. She was many years ahead of her time in her approach to her relationships and writing, and suffered from Victorian hypocrisy throughout her life by even close friends. This book gives the impression that Eliot was rarely happy, and didn't even experience much satisfaction at her literary success. In the epilogue Hughes also leaves us with the impression that Eliot has largely been forgotten, which I don't think is really the case.
Kathryn Hughes covers George Eliot's entire life in minute details; some of it possibly kind of speculative on her states of mind as surmised from letters to different groups of family and friends she cycled through over the years. George Eliot has been my favorite author for many years, because I've assumed she's the same as the wise, narrative voice in the best of her novels; so compassionate and understanding of human frailties, having suffered rejection and repeated humiliation since childhood. Her contemporary readers assumed this too and swamped her with letters seeking advice. But of course she was much more complex than that, given to depression and deep insecurities about her looks; and she's especially prickly about criticism.
In her personal life too, she was moody and mercurial. She was many years ahead of her time in her approach to her relationships and writing, and suffered from Victorian hypocrisy throughout her life by even close friends. This book gives the impression that Eliot was rarely happy, and didn't even experience much satisfaction at her literary success. In the epilogue Hughes also leaves us with the impression that Eliot has largely been forgotten, which I don't think is really the case.
October 23, 2018
I THOROUGHLY enjoyed this book. So often you read short bios of an author and all you get is the "quick and dirty overview" (although Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia will remain with me to the death -- notwithstanding the existence of Wikipedia) and none of the immense collection of details that gives the essence and underlying meaning behind an artist's life. This book helped me understand that George Eliot's essence was not "lived with a guy in Victorian-era England without being married" . Her lover was her muse and without him we wouldn't have the masterpiece that is Middlemarch. Seems so funny that their lack of legal marriage is the always the first (and sometimes only) fact mentioned about her.
I was also encouraged by the pure, unadulterated labor that George Eliot put into her writing. Headaches, misgivings, self-doubt. Anyone who produces anything of value -- carpenter to programmer, milliner to farmer -- works under these stresses. Although I'm not a writer, I'm pretty sure that novels don't pop into existence, Stephen King-like, for every author.
I also want to point out (if only for my own reference) that having had severe headaches all my life, I'm comforted by the knowledge that "our modern age/computers/5-lane freeways/terrorism" is not to blame. Life has been stressful since Ally Oop fashioned his first club.
I was also encouraged by the pure, unadulterated labor that George Eliot put into her writing. Headaches, misgivings, self-doubt. Anyone who produces anything of value -- carpenter to programmer, milliner to farmer -- works under these stresses. Although I'm not a writer, I'm pretty sure that novels don't pop into existence, Stephen King-like, for every author.
I also want to point out (if only for my own reference) that having had severe headaches all my life, I'm comforted by the knowledge that "our modern age/computers/5-lane freeways/terrorism" is not to blame. Life has been stressful since Ally Oop fashioned his first club.
February 25, 2024
They were the two Georges. George Lewes, who left his wife for Marian Evans, who took his Christian name as her nom de plume, George Eliot. They were together thirty years, until his death. Her life, therefore, was simultaneously scandalous and bourgeois. As her biographer, Kathryn Hughes does an admirable job of squaring that circle, recognizing Eliot both as a woman of her time who appreciated domesticity and community, and a woman out of time, an agnostic free spirit whose books brought her wealth and renown.
Eliot once said, "I am so tired of being set on a pedestal and expected to vent wisdom," which makes me believe she would have approved of this biography. There's no shortage of vented wisdom-- how could there be in a book that freely quotes her? But Marian Evans Lewes comes alive here in all her complexity, from her struggle to meet her own literary standards, to her vexed relationship with her scandalized family, and her sensitivity at being so unattractive that men befriend her rather than love her-- all but two men, anyway.
I suggest reading the Epilogue first. It puts Eliot's work, as well as her life, in perspective in a way that illuminates the entire book.
NB: It's 4-star rating because of Hughes' tendency toward prolixity; her default to the superlative degree; and the heavy use of exaggerating modifiers (constantly, increasingly, perfectly, wildly, etc.).
Eliot once said, "I am so tired of being set on a pedestal and expected to vent wisdom," which makes me believe she would have approved of this biography. There's no shortage of vented wisdom-- how could there be in a book that freely quotes her? But Marian Evans Lewes comes alive here in all her complexity, from her struggle to meet her own literary standards, to her vexed relationship with her scandalized family, and her sensitivity at being so unattractive that men befriend her rather than love her-- all but two men, anyway.
I suggest reading the Epilogue first. It puts Eliot's work, as well as her life, in perspective in a way that illuminates the entire book.
NB: It's 4-star rating because of Hughes' tendency toward prolixity; her default to the superlative degree; and the heavy use of exaggerating modifiers (constantly, increasingly, perfectly, wildly, etc.).
December 13, 2022
As a biography of Marianne Evans/Lewis, this book is excellent. It does an excellent job of covering her private life and personality, as well as her books and how they interacted with her thoughts and experiences. All of these are topics that make for a proper biography, but the balance is rarely found elsewhere as it is here.
However, I was absolutely shocked by a blatantly false statement in Chapter 14. Author Kathryn Hughes claims that “Jewish history is as bloody and shameful as Christianity’s. There is no reason to believe that a Jewish state would run its affairs better than Catholic Spain or Protestant Sweden.” What the actual f**k??? The author has literally not a single example in Jewish history to point to in which the Jews perpetrated anything on the order of the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades or the Holocaust or the Blood Libel massacres etc etc etc yet she out of thin air claims that Jewish history is full of the same type of horrors? She has just revealed herself as a massive antisemite. I have never heard anyone claim this level of bizarre self-serving untruth about Jewish history before. Wow.
However, I was absolutely shocked by a blatantly false statement in Chapter 14. Author Kathryn Hughes claims that “Jewish history is as bloody and shameful as Christianity’s. There is no reason to believe that a Jewish state would run its affairs better than Catholic Spain or Protestant Sweden.” What the actual f**k??? The author has literally not a single example in Jewish history to point to in which the Jews perpetrated anything on the order of the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades or the Holocaust or the Blood Libel massacres etc etc etc yet she out of thin air claims that Jewish history is full of the same type of horrors? She has just revealed herself as a massive antisemite. I have never heard anyone claim this level of bizarre self-serving untruth about Jewish history before. Wow.
June 29, 2019
This was a good, not great, biography that helped me better understand the context of George Eliot's novels. Mill on the Floss makes more sense knowing she was disowned by her brother. I like that the author talked about feminism's disappointment with Eliot novels. She was a female writer who for a brief period held the position of greatest living writer in Britain, and was rejected by society for her scandalous relationships. So with those things in mind, people expect her female characters to have happier endings. The author of this biography did a good job of exploring that aspect and explaining Eliot's views.
December 14, 2024
The chattiest bio of George Eliot ever. More like a portrait of Victorian society interspersed with gossip about Eliot and her circle. More busybody than literary. And I honestly HATE her reading of Romola. I find it nearing abusive in its dismissal of some beautiful, rich and idiosyncratic things I love in GE’s work… I much preferred The Marriage Question I read earlier this year…. but this is a story-person’s story about Eliot. And the more we get on GE, the better life gets.
August 15, 2026
An excellent introduction to the unconventional life of George Elliot. Rating 3* as whilst there were sections that were brilliantly interesting I felt there were points that ended up being repeated too many times and I wasn’t quite sure there was enough balance between her time before meeting George Lewes (and before writing fiction) and her years as an author. Whilst both sections were covered I felt more weight could/ should have been given to her later years.
May 7, 2023
Have read quite a bit of biographical material on George Eliot, but this rings true and in a very readable way. Kathryn Hughes writes very well about literary figures and her specialism here on Eliot is clear to see, whether she is writing about Eliot, or reviewing other authors on the Last Victorian in the Guardian. An excellent biography.
December 23, 2019
Knowing very little of George Eliot and having finally gotten around to reading Middlemarch I found this biography interesting and helpful to place both the characters in the book and the character of the author.
March 5, 2021
Superbly researched and written. Ms. Hughes has a innate gift for words, phrases and metaphors. And so too George Eliot. Subsequently bought Eliot’s Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse.
February 9, 2022
Last year after finishing George Eliot’s Romola and Daniel Deronda, I wanted to know more about the author. This excellent biography deals sensitively with her life and career, writings of all kind (translations, journalism, novels) and her position in society. Recommended.
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