George Eliot

Not for publication: 'promises to present the distilled understanding and insight of Professor Hardy's lifetime engagement with George Eliot...strengths lie in the sensitive close reading that distinguishes Barbara Hardy's criticism and in the fascinating links and echoes between life and fiction that her comprehensive knowledge of the novelist's writing enables her to find...the proposed book would be accessible to a wide general readership and Barbara Hardy's established reputation would be a selling point in itself.' Readers report from John Rignall (Reader at University of Warwick and editor of The Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot) 'a genuinely interesting contribution to George Eliot scholarship by one of the leading postwar critics of Victorian fiction. The conception is bold and arresting... it reads excellently but its clarity is also vivid, effective and engaging. It wears its evident deep learning, and informed familiarity with Eliot's world, lightly—It manages to integrate three achievements: to give an animated sense of Eliot's personality as a woman, an intellectual, and a writer; it evokes successfully the milieu in which she lived and worked; and it offers genuine illumination in relation to the fiction.' Professor Rick Rylance, Deputy Head of English Department, University of Exeter (and former Chair of Council for College and University English) Review of Thomas Hardy by NATFHE: 'The community of critics and readers interested in Victorian studies can always expect Barbara Hardy to come up with an interesting perspective on texts we all thought had been read thoroughly into familiarity—The beauty of this book is also that a whole range of people could read it, from A level students to Hardy specialists.'

George Eliot (1819-1880) was one of the leading writers of the Victorian period and she remains one of Britain's greatest novelists. This brief life offers new insights into Eliot's life and work focusing on the themes, patterns, relationships, feelings and language common to both her life and writing. Barbara Hardy discusses Eliot's relations with parents and siblings, her brave but joyful unmarried partnership with George Henry Lewes, her friendships and her late brief marriage to the younger John Cross. Setting her life and fiction side by side, Hardy reveals Eliot's ideas about society, home, foreignness, nature, gender, religion, sex, illness and death and her experiences as translator, journalist, editor and novelist.
Drawing on letters, journals, journalism and the memoirs and biographies written by contemporaries, Hardy brings together a biographical approach with close reading of Eliot's novels to give a combined perspective on her life and art. This book offers students, academics and readers alike an illuminating portrait of George Eliot as a woman and a writer.

Library Journal

Hardy (English literature, emerita, Univ. of London), the author and editor of numerous books of criticism on such 19th-century authors as William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, turns again to the life and works of Eliot, n e Mary Anne Evans, in what she calls a "critic's biography." Hardy combines an examination of Eliot's life with an analysis of the author's works. The six chapters are concerned with Eliot's family life, her travels in England and abroad, the men she loved, her acquaintances and friends, her use of images evoking illness and death, and how certain objects, words, and metaphors are repeated throughout her novels and letters. There is also a useful outline of Eliot's life and writing at the beginning of the book. Hardy's insights will be especially useful for readers very familiar with most if not all of Eliot's fiction, as the critic goes from book to book in her pursuit of the connection between biography and the creation of the works. Recommended primarily for upper-division and graduate-level academic collections as well as for very large public libraries that can afford the stiff price of the hardcover edition.-Morris Hounion, NYC Coll. of Technology Lib., CUNY Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Barbara Hardy is a poet, autobiographer and novelist, as well as a critic whose books include three on George Eliot and three on Dickens. She is Emeritus Professor at Birkbeck, University of London, Honorary Professor of the University of Wales, Swansea, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy.