George Eliot - (Writers Lives) by Barbara Hardy (Paperback)

About the Book

Combining a biographical approach with close analysis of George Eliot's novels, Barbara Hardy introduces a new perspective on the life and works of one of Britain's greatest novelists

Book Synopsis

Not for publication: 'promises to present the distilled understanding and insight of Professor Hardy's lifetime engagement with George Eliot...strengths lie in the sensitive close reading that distinguishes Barbara Hardy's criticism and in the fascinating links and echoes between life and fiction that her comprehensive knowledge of the novelist's writing enables her to find...the proposed book would be accessible to a wide general readership and Barbara Hardy's established reputation would be a selling point in itself.' Readers report from John Rignall (Reader at University of Warwick and editor of The Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot) 'a genuinely interesting contribution to George Eliot scholarship by one of the leading postwar critics of Victorian fiction. The conception is bold and arresting... it reads excellently but its clarity is also vivid, effective and engaging. It wears its evident deep learning, and informed familiarity with Eliot's world, lightlyàIt manages to integrate three achievements: to give an animated sense of Eliot's personality as a woman, an intellectual, and a writer; it evokes successfully the milieu in which she lived and worked; and it offers genuine illumination in relation to the fiction.' Professor Rick Rylance, Deputy Head of English Department, University of Exeter (and former Chair of Council for College and University English) Review of Thomas Hardy by NATFHE: 'The community of critics and readers interested in Victorian studies can always expect Barbara Hardy to come up with an interesting perspective on texts we all thought had been read thoroughly into familiarityàThe beauty of this book is also that a whole range of people could read it, from A level students to Hardy specialists.'

Review Quotes

."..Hardy has been Eliot's critic for nearly half a century - indeed, the book is subtitled A critic's biography - yet she flouts convention, declaring her book an "anti-biography."..examples of how Eliot recast her relatives and friends as characters, [is] rendered here with tact and insight. What [this book] it arrives at is a glimpse of Eliot's consciousness. Hardy attains this not by distilling the novelist's ideas and narratives, but by delving into Eliot's mind, often through her rapt, uncompromised letters. Being George Eliot, it seems is a complicated and surprisingly extreme affair..." - Esther Schor, TLS, October 12, 2007

Primarily of interest as an accessible guide to readers and scholars who are relatively new to Eliot, Hardy's study offers a comprehensive, reliable and individual perspective on a major figure in nineteenth-century prose.--Sanford Lakoff

Reference to "A new biography of Victorian novelist George Eliot" and author's name. South Wales Evening Post (Swansea)

"A self-declared, 'rever[sal] of conventional critical biography' ... this book is an incisive and deeply absorbing meditation on the life and work of a woman with a preternatural sensitivity to the shaping effect of form." - Rhian Williams, British Association for Victorian Studies

"Barbara Hardy's earliest important essay on Eliot was published over a half a century ago ("Moment of Disenchantment in George Eliot's Novels," Review of English Studies 19, July 1954: 256-64). Her new George Eliot: A Critic's Biography is the first volume of Continuum's "Writer's Lives" series which prescribes a treatment of "life and works." This approach might be tedious, but not by Hardy. She can assume the case for Eliot's art has long been since made, a lion's share of it by Hardy herself (Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (1959), and in The Appropriate Form (1964)). Thus, her deliberately specifying title, "A Critic's Biography," certifies that the art and life intersections Hardy chooses are important ones to Eliot's art. Offered as an introduction to its subject (the intention of the Continuum series), it will serve more the pleasure of readers who no longer need an introduction to Eliot." - John R. Pfeiffer, George Eliot George Henry Lewes Studies, September 2008

"Hardy combines an examination of Eliot's life with an analysis of the author's works. The six chapters are concerned with Eliot's family life, her travels in England and abroad, the men she loved, her acquaintances and friends, her use of images evoking illness and death, and how certain objects, words, and metaphors are repeated throughout her novels and letters. There is also a useful outline of Eliot's life and writing at the beginning of the book. Hardy's insights will be especially useful for readers very familiar with most if not all of Eliot's fiction, as the critic goes from book to book in her pursuit of the connection between biography and the creation of the works. Recommended." - Morris Hounion, CUNY, for Library Journal, 2006

"We come away from this biography with a new, full sense of Eliot, or at least with a new sense of a possible Eliot, more intimately known...She writes with the authority of someone who knows all the texts intimately, who cares passionately both about those texts and about the life of a real woman who took the name George Eliot. This is a biography that only a major critic and scholar could have produced. One might argue about details or wrestle about method, but one cannot resist either the textual authority of its arguments or the fascinating and entirely embodied woman, George Eliot." George Levine, Victorian Studies, Autumn 2007

About the Author

Barbara Hardy is a poet, autobiographer and novelist, as well as a critic whose books include three on George Eliot and three on Dickens. She is Emeritus Professor at Birkbeck, University of London, Honorary Professor of the University of Wales, Swansea, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy.