George Eliot: A Life

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

'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

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Ashton (English, University Coll., London; George Lewes: A Life, Oxford Univ., 1991) offers a warm, appreciative, scholarly biography of the remarkable, unconventional woman and writer of 19th-century Victorian England, George Eliot (1819-80). While Ashton does not offer any new information that cannot be found in previous biographies, she does emphasize the unusualness of Eliot's position among the leading writers and thinkers of 19th-century Europe and America and her inner conflict between nonconformity and the desire to be accepted. Ashton follows Eliot's development from journalist and translator to a writer of imaginative fiction, in the process providing glimpses of Eliot's personality, how the public and critics responded to her and to her individual works, and the encouragement and supportiveness of her long-time companion, George Lewes. Readers familiar or not with Eliot's life and writings will enjoy this critical biography (first published in England last year). For both public and academic libraries.‘Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

She defied her father over religion, lived openly with a married man, and brought a subtle realism to the English novel. It is tempting to think of George Eliot (1819-1880) as better matched to our century than her own. But Ashton's biography draws widely from Eliot's letters and those of her contemporaries to provide a rich social context for a woman who embraced change, yet seldom advertised it. Ashton carefully traces the transformation of the severe but inquiring Midlands girl, Mary Ann Evans, into the agnostic and witty Marian Evans who moved to London in her 20s and began a career as translator and critic. Her widening circle included her soon-to-be lover, the writer and editor G.H. Lewes. Author of an earlier Lewes biography, Ashton adopts a protective tone toward the couple, who shocked even their iconoclastic friends with their lifelong affair. Yet it was Lewes who buoyed Marian's fragile confidence that enabled her to become George Eliot. From the early Scenes of Clerical Life to Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Middlemarch and beyond, Ashton's narrative finds momentum and rhythm, less as literary criticism than as a portrait of the work of writing. (Eliot's publisher, John Blackwood, emerges as a memorably sweet character in his own right.) Ashton's tendency to overpraise her subject is forgivable. She leaves the reader with a rich portrait of Marian Evans and a strong desire to return to George Eliot. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Ashton's intelligent, readable biography succeeds both as an account of the great Victorian writer's life and as a sharp critical discussion of Marian Evans's evolution into George Eliot. Ashton acknowledges her debt, and that of all Eliot scholars, to Gordon Haight's George Eliot: A Biography (CH, Dec'69) and to his edited volume The George Eliot Letters (1954-78; CH, Oct'79), while making clear that her aims are different. Her briefer though substantial work aims at being a critical biography, focusing on the writer's achievement as a brilliant female intellectual and artist in an era inhospitable to women's ambitions. Eliot by temperament sought approval, and her choice of an unconventional marriage added to the difficulty of her struggle. Nearly half the book deals with her life before she turned to writing fiction, and the chapters on Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede, which highlight the birth of George Eliot as a concept and persona, are especially interesting. Ashton keenly connects Marian Evans's earlier nonfiction writing with the novels, and she provides valuable insights about the relationship between the writer's development and life and her work. Includes notes and extensive bibliography. Highly recommended for any college library, especially upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. S. F. Klepetar St. Cloud State University

Kirkus Book Review

The latest life of George Eliot (née Mary Ann Evans), from the biographer of her lifelong companion, G.H. Lewes, brings out this independent-minded woman's shyness and self-doubt as well as her formidable artistic achievements. The opportunity for the Eliot biography industry began when Evans's young widower, John Cross, extended her strong sense of privacy to destroying some of her personal papers and bowdlerizing excerpts from her letters and journals for his respectful official life. This was not enough to stop the rumors and speculation that had begun after Evans made herself notorious by living with the married Lewes well before ``George Eliot'' gained fame as the author of Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede. In the search for the real George Eliot, Ashton (English/University College, London) adds her understated version of Evans's life to the several of the last ten years, the most recent being Frederick Karl's magisterial 1995 volume. Ashton moves swiftly through Evans's life, bringing her up from Midlands provincialism to intellectual cosmopolitanism, without dwelling too long on the religious and personal crises in her life. Evans's break with her family and friends, first over her faith, then over her relations with Lewes, seem especially muted, but the novelist herself always maintained a stoic front in her personal life. Like Evans, Ashton is more at home with intellectual matters, such as her interest in Goethe (and his influence on her), her early journalism for the Westminster Review, and, of course, her novels. Ashton, editor of the Penguin Middlemarch, does her best work in drawing out Evans's perspective from her plots and characterizations. If Gladstone called the first Eliot biography ``a Reticence in three volumes,'' Ashton's is an Admiration in one volume--but a readable and informed one at least. (16 pages b&w photos & illustrations)