Great Novels Of George Eliot

An extraordinary masterpiece written from personal experience, Middlemarch is a deep psychological observation of human nature that revolves around the issues of love, jealousy, and obligation. Eliot's feminist views are apparent through the novel: she stresses the fact that women should control their own lives.

The author, whose real name was Mary Ann Evans, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Her work was mostly set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.

Adam Bede was George Eliot's first full-length novel. Set in the English Midlands of farmers and village craftsmen at the turn of the eighteenth century, the book tells a story of seduction, and is also a pioneering record of a long lost rural world.Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate, illuminating the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.The Mill on the Floss is a masterpiece of ambiguity in which moral choice is subjected to the hypocrisy of the Victorian age. Maggie Tulliver's love for her brother Tom turns to conflict. His bourgeois standards contrasting with her own lively intelligence, and the result, is tragedy.Silas Marner tells the tender and moving story of the unjustly exiled linen weaver, Silas Marner of Raveloe in the agricultural heartland of England. It tells of how he is restored to life and his sadness ended by the unlikely means of the orphan child Eppie.

Rebecca Mead was a young woman in a coastal town of England when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs and then marriage and family, Rebecca Mead reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads the reader into the life that her favorite book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that perfectly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's novel and brings them into the world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an uncanny portrait of the ways in which Mead's life echoes that of the author herself, My Life in Middlemarch is a book for who wonders about the power of literature to shape our lives.

This audio compilation features four stories written by George Eliot, including 'Middlemarch', 'Mill on the Floss' and 'Adam Bede', all read by Hannah Gordon, and 'Silas Marner', read by Geraldine James.

Barbara Hardy's Novels of George Eliot is a classic study of Eliots's outstanding powers as a great formal artist. The book's continuing appeal is due not simply to the perceptiveness and freshness of its writing but to the fact that form is interpreted in the widest sense to include whatever is relevant to the novels as organised, articulated, imaginative wholes and also as the direct expression of George Eliot's profound analysis of the human condition.