Prodigiously learned, alive to the massive social changes of her time, defiant of many Victorian orthodoxies, George Eliot has always challenged her readers. She is at once chronicler and analyst, novelist of nostalgia and monumental thinker. In her great novel Middlemarch she writes of 'that tempting range of relevancies called the universe'. This volume identifies a range of 'relevancies' that inform both her fictional and her non-fictional writings. The range and scale of her achievement are brought into focus by cogent essays on the many contexts - historical, intellectual, political, social, cultural - to her work. In addition there are discussions of her critical history and legacy, as well as of the material conditions of production and distribution of her novels and her journalism. The volume enables fuller understanding and appreciation, from a twenty-first-century standpoint, of the life and work of one of the nineteenth century's major writers.

'Sprightly, witty and engaging.'

Source: The Times Literary Supplement

'… this book attempts to make 'George Eliot' less abstract by attesting to some of the 'wider relations' that establish co-ordinates on her life and work. The list of further reading and the detailed index highlight the judicious balance Harris strikes in terms of scholarship and also the criticism evident in this volume. The book is nicely designed and black-and-white illustrations accompany the text, and there is a fine image on the jacket … Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.'

W. Baker Source: Choice

'The entire work is a valuable review of what is known and has been said about Eliot.'

Constance M. Fulmer Source: Victorian Periodicals Review

'… this volume features helpful entries not only on George Eliot's life, career and critical fortunes, but also on the building blocks of her cultural and social class …'

Adela Pinch Source: SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900

'This determined, clever book offers an edifying reconsideration of Eliot’s life and legacy, and Harris deserves plaudits for her wise, kindhearted approach to her monumental subject.'

Darren J. N. Middleton Source: Religious Studies Review