George Eliot: The Last Victorian

Biography

...[A]bsorbing....a dense, exhaustively researched biography, as befitting a subject who, according to the author, was among the most intellectually rigorous writers the 19th century produced.

Library Journal

A lecturer in 19th-century English literature and author of The Victorian Governess, Hughes takes a crack at capturing the protean Eliot on paper.

Booknews

A peripatetic scholar of 19th-century English literature and history, Hughes focuses more fully on Eliot's (1819-80) private life than other recent biographers. She details the scandal that cast her into social exile until her literary successes established her at the heart of the London literary elite. She finds her to have been by turns ambitious and insecure, cerebral and earthy, provocative and conservative. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Biography

...[A]bsorbing....a dense, exhaustively researched biography, as befitting a subject who, according to the author, was among the most intellectually rigorous writers the 19th century produced.

Evelyn Toynton

...[A]mong the shining dead, there are still a few who seem as though they must have been free of human foolishness....among the English novelists, the most likely candidate for this company would appear to be...George Eliot....Yet she was silly like us....It remains the task of Eliot's biographers to reconcile, somehow, this dichotomy between the majestic wisdom of her fiction and the follies to which her hunger for love could lead her..... Hughes...has made an honorable attempt to give us a ''relevant'' George Eliot...
— The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

The third biography in scarcely as many years gets personal with the Victorian novelist known primarily through her intellectual achievements. While Frederick Karl's George Eliot: Voice of a Century (1995) perpetuated Eliot's image as a Victorian Sybil ("a massive, mythic figurehad, given to spouting riddles") and Rosemary Ashton's George Eliot: A Life (1997) tried to maintain a balance between her life and her work, Hughes (The Victorian Governess, not reviewed) focuses on her character behind the facade of fame, which Eliot could have done without. Although this approach requires some reading between the lines of early correspondence and Eliot's fiction, while Hughes often skims her intellectual and philosophical development, it also brings a sense of close familiarity with this private, inward woman. Hughes's rendering of Mary Ann Evans's life avoids gossipy revisionism and credibly fleshes out her transformation from Midlands evangelical to cosmopolitan Victorian intellectual and from an unnoticed London literary journalist to world-famous novelist George Eliot. In these pages, Mary Ann's youthful puritanical priggishness is offset by her deep emotional needs, which often arose in egotistic demands for attention from older, maternal women and in affairs with older, libidinous men, such as the philanthropist Charles Bray and the publisher John Chapman—and which typically led to "embarrassingly sudden departures from other people's houses." Evans's break with her family is particularly painful here, as Hughes shows her first quarreling with her revered father over religion, then with her adored brother over her longtime liaison with the married George Henry Lewes ("one ofthe few people in London who was demonstrably plainer than herself"). Hughes gives Lewes special credit not only for his attentive support of Eliot's doubt-ridden career in fiction, but also for their emotional union, which flourished despite his reputation for frivolity and bohemianism. Not the whole story, but a refreshingly intimate portrait. (16 pages b&w photos and illustrations, not seen)