In Love with George Eliot - Hardcover

O’Shaughnessy, Kathy

3.61

442 ratings by Goodreads

9781912854042: In Love with George Eliot

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 191285404X ISBN 13: 9781912854042

Publisher: Scribe UK, 2019

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Who was the real George Eliot? In Love with George Eliot is a glorious debut novel which tells the compelling story of England's greatest woman novelist as you've never read it before.

Marian Evans is a scandalous figure, living in sin with a married man, George Henry Lewes. She has shocked polite society, and women rarely deign to visit her. In secret, though, she has begun writing fiction under the pseudonym George Eliot. As Adam Bede's fame grows, curiosity rises as to the identity of its mysterious writer. Gradually it becomes apparent that the moral genius Eliot is none other than the disgraced woman living with Lewes.

Now Evans' tremendous celebrity begins. The world falls in love with her. She is the wise and great writer, sent to guide people through the increasingly secular, rudderless century, and an icon to her progressive feminist peers -- with whom she is often in disagreement. Public opinion shifts. Her scandalous cohabitation is forgiven. But this idyll is not secure and cannot last. When Lewes dies, Evans finds herself in danger of shocking the world all over again.

Meanwhile, in another rudderless century, two women compete to arrive at an interpretation of Eliot as writer and as woman ...

Everyone who has thrilled at being shown the world anew by George Eliot will thrill again at her presence, complex and compelling, here.

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Review:

‘I devoured this, and it made me happy and excited. It reminded me of Toibin's The Master: its representations of the psychology of the characters, their shifting ground, variegated moods, seemed to work in something like the same way, and with the same fineness. It's really beautifully tender, subtle, imaginative, saturated authentically (to my mind anyway) in another time and thought-world.’

– Tessa Hadley, author of Late in the Day

‘In Love with George Eliot is a clever, unconventional approach to the great novelist's life; it is easy to imagine that Marian Evans herself would have approved of the playful thoughtfulness with which Kathy O’Shaughnessy brings the private person behind George Eliot’s public success alive.’

– Dr Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey: My Own Life

‘Classy, beautifully written and richly imagined ― a novel that opens a door onto the past.’

– Nicci Gerrard, author of The Twilight Hour

‘In Love with George Eliot is a feverishly intense and beautifully rendered first novel, especially in its detail and sensitivity, that brings to life the woman and the legend.’

– Marie Matteson, Readings

About the Author:

Kathy O'Shaughnessy has reviewed books for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times, Financial Times, Independent, The Observer, TLS, New Statesman, The Spectator, and others. Past jobs include Deputy Editor on the Literary Review, Arts & Books Editor of Vogue, Literary Editor of The European, and Deputy Editor of The Telegraph Arts & Books. Her stories have been published in Faber's First Fictions, and she edited and introduced Drago Stambuk's poems, Incompatible Animals.