In Love with George Eliot
Overview
A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR
What every lover of George Eliot’s work wants: a new novel made from her life and mind
Marian Evans is a scandalous figure, living in sin with a married man, George Henry Lewes. She has shocked polite society. In secret, though, she has begun writing fiction under the pseudonym George Eliot. As Adam Bede’s fame grows, curiosity rises. Gradually it becomes apparent that the moral genius Eliot is none other than the disgraced woman.
Now celebrity begins. The world falls in love with her. She is the wise and great writer, sent to guide people through the increasingly secular, rudderless century. Public opinion shifts. Her scandals, forgiven. But this idyll is not secure and cannot last. When Lewes dies, Evans finds herself in danger of shocking the world all over again.
Meanwhile, in another century, two women compete to arrive at an interpretation of Eliot as writer and as woman …
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Rights held
- Paperback
- 198mm x 129mm
- 400 pages
- 9781950354269
- AUD$26.99
- 6 October 2020
- World English Language
Categories
Praise
‘At the beginning of her career, the words of her fiction became a kind of smoke screen for Marian Evans, whose journey from anonymous obscurity to worldwide fame under her masculine pen name is delicately charted in Kathy O’Shaughnessy’s debut novel, In Love with George Eliot. Working back and forth between the present-day world of fractious Eliot scholars and the 19th-century world of their emotionally fragile subject, O’Shaughnessy concentrates on the private ambitions and uncertainties of her characters, drawing on Eliot’s letters for inspiration.’
‘The Eliot strand predominates as if Eliot herself was dictating like a whispering ghost.’
About the Author
Kathy O’Shaughnessy has reviewed books for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times, Financial Times, Independent, The Observer, TLS, New Statesman, The Spectator, and others. She has worked as Deputy Editor on the Literary Review, Arts & Books Editor of Vogue, Literary Editor of The European, and Deputy Editor of The Telegraph Arts & Books. Her stories have been published in Faber’s First Fictions, and she edited and introduced Drago Stambuk’s poems, Incompatible Animals.
