Books by George Eliot

This is the first publication of the complete surviving journals of the great Victorian novelist. A new George Eliot text, and the closest she came to autobiography, it reveals both professional writer and private woman. Chronology, introduction, headnotes to each diary, and annotated index supply valuable contextual and explanatory information.

Although her previous work tends toward tragedy and a focus on fallen women, George Eliot (1819-80) reached a turning point in her career with Silas Marner (1861). This uplifting novel charts the life of the cataleptic outcast Silas as he finds meaning and tranquillity in raising an adopted daughter.

The story of weaver Silas Marner, wrongly cast out of his religious community, who finds a reason for living when, one winter night, a little girl wanders into his cottage out of the snow.'Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.'Set in the agricultural town of Raveloe in the English countryside, Silas Marner is a tragic figure. Exiled from a religious community because of a wrongful accusation of theft, he works from day to day as a weaver, saving his money and living a lonely life as a recluse.It is only when his money is stolen and a small orphan girl, Eppie appears in his life that Silas's fortunes begin to change and he truly begins to learn what it means to regain his faith in life.

First published in 1885, this three-part 'autobiography' was assembled by John Cross from the letters and journals of his late wife, George Eliot. Though suppressing much in the desire to render an unconventional life 'respectable', the work remains an important initial insight into Eliot's personal and private life.

From A to Z, the Penguin Drop Caps series collects 26 unique hardcovers-featuring cover art by type superstar Jessica Hische It all begins with a letter. Fall in love with Penguin Drop Caps, a new series of twenty-six collectible and gift-worthy hardcover editions, each with a type cover showcasing a gorgeously illustrated letter of the alphabet by superstar type designer Jessica Hische, whose work has appeared everywhere from Tiffany & Co. to Wes Anderson's film Moonrise Kingdom to Penguin's own bestsellers Committed and Rules of Civility. A collaboration between Jessica Hische and Penguin Art Director Paul Buckley, the series design encompasses foil-stamped paper-over-board cases in a rainbow-hued spectrum across all twenty-six book spines and a decorative stain on all three paper edges. Penguin Drop Caps debuts with an "A" for Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, a "B" for Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and a "C" for Willa Cather's My Ántonia, and continues with more classics from Penguin. E is for Eliot. Considered one the masterpieces of realist fiction, George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of modern changes. The proposed Reform Bill promises political change; the building of railroads alters both the physical and cultural landscape; new scientific approaches to medicine incite public division; and scandal lurks behind respectability. The quiet drama of ordinary lives and flawed choices are played out in the complexly portrayed central characters of the novel-the idealistic Dorothea Brooke; the ambitious Dr. Lydgate; the spendthrift Fred Vincy; and the steadfast Mary Garth. The appearance of two outsiders further disrupts the town's equilibrium-Will Ladislaw, the spirited nephew of Dorothea's husband, the Rev. Edward Casaubon, and the sinister John Raffles, who threatens to expose the hidden past of one of the town's elite. Middlemarch displays George Eliot's clear-eyed yet humane understanding of characters caught up in the mysterious unfolding of self-knowledge.

The Clarendon Edition, with its newly established text, its detailed account of the novel's composition, and extensive commentary on George Eliot's sources, confirms Romola as one of Eliot's greatest achievements.

Discover George Eliot's powerful tragedy about the struggle between head and heart. **As Heard on BBC Radio 4** Maggie and Tom Tulliver are both wilful, passionate children, and their relationship has always been tempestuous.

The Lifted Veil (1859) is now one of the most widely read and critically discussed of Eliot's works.

Word count 16,065 Bestseller

Dorothea is bright, beautiful and rebellious. Lydgate is the ambitious new doctor in town. Both of them long to make a positive difference in the world. But their stories do not proceed as expected and both they, and the other inhabitants of Middlemarch, must struggle to reconcile themselves to their fates and find their places in the world.

Word count 16,065 Bestseller

Scenes of Clerical Life consists of three short novellas in which the lives of ordinary men and women in a provincial Midlands town are portrayed with tender sympathy and understanding. Eliot brought a new level of literary realism to her tales of Amos Barton, Mr Gilfil, and Janet Dempster in her first published work of fiction.

Carpenter Adam Bede is in love with the beautiful Hetty Sorrel, but unknown to him, he has a rival, in the local squire s son Arthur Donnithorne. Hetty is soon attracted by Arthur s seductive charm and they begin to meet in secret. The relationship is to have tragic consequences that reach far beyond the couple themselves, touching not just Adam Bede, but many others, not least, pious Methodist Preacher Dinah Morris. A tale of seduction, betrayal, love and deception, the plot of Adam Bede has the quality of an English folk song. Within the setting of Hayslope, a small, rural community, Eliot brilliantly creates a sense of earthy reality, making the landscape itself as vital a presence in the novel as that of her characters themselves.

One of George Eliot's most ambitious and imaginative novels, Romola is set in Renaissance Florence during the turbulent years following the expulsion of the powerful Medici family during which the zealous religious reformer Savonarola rose to control the city. At its heart is Romola, the devoted daughter of a blind scholar, married to the clever but ultimately treacherous Tito whose duplicity in both love and politics threatens to destroy everything she values, and she must break away to find her own path in life. Described by Eliot as 'written with my best blood', the story of Romola's intellectual and spiritual awakening is a compelling portrayal of a Utopian heroine, played out against a turbulent historical backdrop.

The best-known and most autobiographical of George Eliot's novels is now available as a Norton Critical Edition.

The Clarendon edition of Adam Bede (1859) offers a critical edition of the work that established George Eliot's reputation. Its extensive textual apparatus lists manuscript and first edition variants from the copy-text, which is the corrected eighth edition of 1861 - her last revision of the book.

Set in the English Midlands of farmers and village craftsmen at the turn of the eighteenth century, this book relates a story of seduction issuing in 'the inward suffering which is the worst form of Nemesis'.

Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, the clash between their expectations and her desires is painfully played out as she finds herself torn between her relationships with three very different men: her proud and stubborn brother, a close friend who is also the son of her family's worst enemy, and a charismatic but dangerous suitor. With its poignant portrayal of sibling relationships, The Mill on the Floss is considered George Eliot's most autobiographical novel; it is also one of her most powerful and moving.

A scholarly edition of Felix Holt, The Radical by George Eliot. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, published 1871-2, is set in the imaginary county of Loamshire during the years of unrest preceding the 1832 Reform Bill. With its complex plot, broad canvas and huge cast of characters, it has long been recognized as one of the few truly classic English novels.

Tells the story of the unjustly exiled Silas Marner - a handloom linen weaver of Raveloe in the agricultural heartland of England - and how he is restored to life by the unlikely means of the orphan child Eppie.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Middlemarch by George Eliot, read by Harriet Walter. She did not know then that it was Love who had come to her briefly as in a dream before awaking, with the hues of morning on his wings - that it was Love to whom she was sobbing her farewell as his image was banished by the blameless rigour of irresistible day George Eliots most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as one of the few English novels written for adult people.

As Daniel Deronda opens, Gwendolen Harleth is poised at the roulette-table, prepared to throw away her family fortune. She is observed by Daniel Deronda, a young man groomed in the finest tradition of the English upper-classes. And while Gwendolen loses everything and becomes trapped in an oppressive marriage, Deronda's fortunes take a different turn. After a dramatic encounter with the young Jewish woman Mirah, he becomes involved in a search for her lost family and finds himself drawn into ever-deeper sympathies with Jewish aspirations and identity. 'I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else', wrote George Eliot of her last and most ambitious novel, and in weaving her plot strands together she created a bold and richly textured picture of British society and the Jewish experience within it.

An analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate. This title includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.

Follows lives of the beautiful but spoiled Gwendolene Harleth and selfless yet alienated Daniel Deronda, as they search for personal and vocational fulfilment and sympathetic relationship. Set in the degenerate English aristocratic society of the 1860s, this book charts their search for meaningful lives against a background of imperialism.

As the headstrong Maggie Tulliver grows into womanhood, the deep love which she has for her brother Tom turns into conflict, because she cannot reconcile his bourgeois standards with her own lively intelligence. This story shows the ambiguity in which moral choice is subjected to the hypocrisy of the Victorian age.