George Eliot

Set in a provincial Victorian neighborhood, the author explores the complex social relationship and the struggle to hold fast to personal tragedy in a materialistic environment.

"George Eliot's beloved masterpiece in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with a foreword by Rebecca Mead, author of the bestselling memoir My Life in Middlemarch A triumph of realist fiction, George Eliot's Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of sweeping change. The proposed Reform Bill, the new railroads, and scientific advances are threatening upheaval on every front. Against...

Originally published in 1859, "Adam Bede" is the first novel by George Eliot, which was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. Eliot was one of the leading British writers of the Victorian era, as well as a noted journalist, poet, and translator. "Adam Bede" concerns a small, tight-knit, and fictional rural community called Hayslope and the romantic drama that develops between four of its young residents: the title character Adam, a young carpenter, the...

Three novellas that brilliantly portray English country and clergy life at the turn of the nineteenth century from the author of Middlemarch. Initially appearing in Blackwood's Magazine, this trio of linked stories comprises George Eliot's first published work. Together they form a portrait of small-town life in Midlands, England, where changes are affecting both society at large and religious beliefs and institutions. In "The Sad Fortunes...

The Lifted Veil's sickly narrator, Latimer, believes himself to be cursed with the ability to see the future and sense the thoughts and feelings of those around him. Disgusted by what he sees in the minds of others, he accepts that he will lead an unobtrusive life, constantly overshadowed by his more vigorous elder brother. That is, until he meets and becomes fascinated with Bertha, his brother's beautiful and coquettish fiancée. The Lifted Veil...

Published in 1879, this is Eliot's last completed work, and perhaps her most underrated. It consists of a series of essays told by a nameless English bachelor. Though critics harshly judged the work as "ponderous and moralizing" when it was published, today's readers will recognize Eliot's keen intelligence, sharp wit, and intriguing insights in such essays as "A Too Deferential Man," "A Political Molecule," and "Only Temper."

George Eliot, a pseudonym for Mary Anne Evans, was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era, publishing seven major novels and several translations during her career. The Selected Works of George Eliot includes all seven of the author's novels: Adam Bede, The Lifted Veil, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda.

Excerpt: "Since the death of George Eliot much public curiosity has been excited by the repeated allusions to, and quotations from, her contributions to periodical literature, and a leading newspaper gives expression to a general wish when it says that "this series of striking essays ought to be collected and reprinted, both because of substantive worth and because of the light they throw on the author's literary canons and predilections." In fact,...

George Eliot's influential novel Middlemarch is, according to its subtitle, a "study of provincial life." At its center are the beautiful and inquisitive Dorothea Brooke and the ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate, who both have to abandon their idealist views when faced with the reality of daily life. In the novel, Eliot depicts small-town life in the 1830s with its class system, rivalries, and social restrictions in minute detail. She beautifully...