This new biography of George Eliot is not just the story of her life. It gives an account of what it means to become a novelist, and to think like a novelist. Philip Davis enables you not only to see through George Eliot's eyes, but also feel what it is like to be seen by her, in the imaginative involvement of her readers with her characters.

Philip Davis is the author of The Victorians 1830-1880, volume 8 in the Oxford English Literary History Series, and a companion volume on Why Victorian Literature Still Matters. He has written on Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, the literary uses of memory from Wordsworth to Lawrence, and various books on reading. He is general editor of OUP's new paperback series, The Literary Agenda, on the role of literature in the world of the twenty-first century. His previous literary biography was a life of Bernard Malamud. Davis is editor of The Reader magazine, the written voice of the outreach organisation The Reader.

• Introduction


• 1: Family Likenesses, 1819-42


• 2: The Valley of Humiliation: The Single Woman, 1840-51


• 3: Three Translations


• 4: The Two Loves of 1852: 1. Herbert Spencer


• 5: The Two Loves of 1852: 2. George Henry Lewes


• 6: 'The first time' in the 'new era': Scenes of Clerical Life, 1856-7


• 7: Adam Bede: 'The Other Side of the Commonplace', 1857-9


• 8: The Mill on the Floss: 'My problems are purely psychical', 1859-60: Psychology and the Levels of Thought


• 9: 'Great Facts Have Struggled to Find a Voice': The Toll of the 1860s


• 10: Middlemarch: Realism and Thoughtworld, 1869-71


• 11: Daniel Deronda: The Great Transmitter and the Last Experiment, 1873-6


• Notes


• Select Bibliography


• Index