George Eliot: The Last Victorian Book

It was a scandal when Victorian society realised that the morally sensitive novelist George Eliot was Marian Evans, lover of the married freethinking journalist George Henry Lewes. It was easier to sling accusations of loose morals than to contemplate the very high ethical standards of a value system all the more rigorous for being self-devised. Kathryn Hughes' excellent new biography of the woman who became one of the most appealing of Victorian sages has, at its heart, a sense of just how scandalous George Eliot was in her day and how much courage and nervous energy she had to expend in living a life by her own rules. Hughes suggests, convincingly, that this energy is heavily paralleled in the virtue shared by her most attractive central characters, a capacity to endure and stand by righteousness. And there is also a capacity to feel pain--Hughes attaches this, but not reductively, to the rejection of Eliot by her family for her apostasy to freethinking agnosticism from the Evangelical Christianity in which she grew up. Eliot's has always been a powerful story because she achieved intellectual independence as well as artistic success in a society loaded against her by propriety and sexism; Hughes does it full justice. --Roz Kaveney Read More