The Works Of George Eliot

The works collected in this volume provide an illuminating introduction to George Eliot's incisive views on religion, art and science, and the nature and purpose of fiction. Essays such as 'Evangelical Teaching' show her rejecting her earlier religious beliefs, while 'Woman in France' questions conventional ideas about female virtues and marriage, and 'Notes on Form in Art' sets out theories of idealism and realism that she developed further in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. It also includes selections from Eliot's translations of works by Strauss and Feuerbach that challenged many ideas about Christianity; excerpts from her poems; and reviews of writers such as Wollstonecraft, Goethe and Browning. Wonderfully rich in imagery and observations, these pieces reveal the intellectual development of this most challenging and rewarding of writers.

The great Victorian novelist's complete surviving journals - first publication of new George Eliot text.

George Eliot's Religious Imagination addresses the much-discussed question of Eliot’s relation to Christianity in the wake of the sociocultural revolution triggered by the spread of theories of evolution. The standard view is that the author of Middlemarch and Silas Marner “lost her faith” at this time of religious crisis. Orr argues for a more nuanced understanding of the continuity of Eliot’s work, as one not shattered by science, but shaped by its influence. Orr’s wide-ranging and fascinating analysis situates George Eliot in the fertile intellectual landscape of the nineteenth century, among thinkers as diverse as Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, and Søren Kierkegaard. She also argues for a connection between George Eliot and the twentieth-century evolutionary Christian thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Her analysis draws on the work of contemporary philosopher Richard Kearney as well as writers on mysticism, particularly Karl Rahner. The book takes an original look at questions many believe settled, encouraging readers to revisit George Eliot’s work. Orr illuminates the creative tension that still exists between science and religion, a tension made fruitful through the exercise of the imagination. Through close readings of Eliot's writings, Orr demonstrates how deeply the novelist's religious imagination continued to operate in her fiction and poetry.

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.

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.