Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings

The works assembled here introduce George Eliot’s incisive views on religion, art, and science, and the nature and purpose of fiction. Essays show her rejecting her earlier religious beliefs, questioning conventional ideas about female virtues and marriage, and setting out theories of idealism and realism that she developed further in her famous novels. Also included are selections from Eliot’s translations of works by Strauss and Feuerbach, excerpts from her poems, and reviews of writers such as Wollstonecraft, Goethe, and Browning. Wonderfully rich in imagery and observations, these pieces reveal the intellectual development of this most rewarding of writers.

• Available again—the first paperback collection of Eliot's nonfiction
• Introduction by A.S. Byatt discusses Eliot's literary place in Victorian London and the views expounded in these writings

The works assembled here introduce George Eliot's incisive views on religion, art, and science, and the nature and purpose of fiction. Essays show her rejecting her earlier religious beliefs, questioning conventional ideas about female virtues and marriage, and setting out theories of idealism and realism that she developed further in her famous novels. Also included are selections from Eliot's translations of works by Strauss and Feuerbach, excerpts from her poems, and reviews of writers such as Wollstonecraft, Goethe, and Browning. Wonderfully rich in imagery and observations, these pieces reveal the intellectual development of this most rewarding of writers.

George Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans (1819—1880), began her literary career as a translator and later editor of the Westminster Review. In 1857, she published Scenes of Clerical Life, the first of eight novels she would publish under her pen name.
A. S. Byatt, novelist, short-story writer, and critic, is the author of many books, including Possession, winner of the Booker Prize.
Nicholas Warren was educated at the University of Leicester.