In October 1851, a chance meeting in a Piccadilly
bookshop changed the course of literary history. For it was here that Mary Ann
Evans, an unworldly young scholar from the Midlands, was first introduced to
the love of her life, the married critic and philosopher George Lewes.
Encouraged and supported by Lewes, Mary Ann Evans went on to become the queen
of literary London, famous under her pen name, George Eliot.



In nurturing George Eliot’s talent, Lewes
drew inspiration from the works of his own favourite writer, an unfashionable
author of the previous generation by the name of Jane Austen. On the face of it, Austen and Eliot had little in common. Austen was a
genteel spinster who spent her whole life painting regency-period domestic
dramas with delicate irony and unfailing charm. Eliot, meanwhile, was a radical
intellectual who lived scandalously with a married man, travelled widely in
Europe, and sought to document with stirring realism the social upheavals
of her age.



And yet, when George Eliot embarked on
her career as an author in the late 1850s, the works of Jane Austen were at her
side and feeding her imagination. Separated
by time, circumstance and temperament, the two writers nevertheless had a vital impetus in
common: to prove the value of a woman’s eye in a man’s world. 



Packed with quotes from letters, diaries
and the nation’s favourite novels, Jane
Austen and George Eliot: The Lady and the Radical is a lively, accessible and fascinating
history of two genius novelists, the world that shaped them, and the works they
left behind.