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Full Description
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, was
introduced to the love of her life, the critic George Lewes. Encouraged and
supported by Lewes, Evans became the queen of literary London under her pen
name, George Eliot.
In nurturing
Eliot's talent, Lewes drew inspiration from the works of 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. Jane Austen was a genteel spinster
who spent her life in Hampshire, painting Regency domestic dramas with delicate
irony and unfailing charm. George Eliot, meanwhile, was a radical intellectual
who lived scandalously with a married man, travelled widely in Europe and
documented 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, 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, this lively
history traces the surprising connections between two of our brightest literary
stars and shows, for the first time, how each can be illuminated by the other's
light.
