In a landmark essay, Virginia Woolf rescued George Eliot from almost four decades of indifference and scorn when she wrote of the "searching power and reflective richness" of Eliot's fiction. Novels such as Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss reflect Eliot's complex and sometimes contradictory ideas about society, the artist, the role of women, and the interplay of science and religion. In this book, Tim Dolin examines Eliot's life and work and the social and intellectual contexts in which they developed. Part of the Authors in Context series, George Eliot is a lively, accessible, and critically topical account of Eliot's novels in relation to the age in which she lived, and in modern contexts such as film and television. It is the ideal companion volume to Eliot's novels. The book combines biography, history, and critical thinking to illuminate Eliot's writing. Dolin's writing is fresh and original, and he is particularly good at explaining Eliot's complex philosophical ideas and the philosophy that informs her novels in a clear and straightforward fashion. The final chapter looks at recent TV adaptations of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda to show how modern contexts inform our reading and interpretation.
