Publisher's Synopsis
George Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans) was thirty-eight when she wrote her first book, Scenes of Clerical Life. A few years earlier she had come to London and met the journalist George Lewes who gave her the love and encouragement she needed for the full development of her talent. All her novels were written during her life of 'deep wedded happiness' with Lewes, her last book, Daniel Deronda, was published just two years before Lewes's death. Her genius was immediately recognized by the leading writers of the day, including Dickens and Thackeray. Today she is acknowledged to be one of the great English novelists whose penetrating understanding of character and analysis of motive have had a great influence on the development of the modern novel. Lettice Cooper was a distinguished novelist and critic with a special interest in the English and European novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the American novel and short st
