Wasn't much interested in Elliot's work when I started this excellent biography and I am still not interested. But the insight into the social and economic background to her life is intriguing. And the author mentions money, how did these people make a living? Elliot was dependant on her father until he died, her brother resented this and pushed her to marry. She was left 90 pounds a year, not enough for more than genteel poverty. Her friend Barbara Bachicon had 300 pounds, enough for a life. ( )

An excellent biography of a fascinating author. Mary Ann Evans, or Marian Evans, or Marian Lewes, or Marian Evans Lewes Cross, or George Eliot: the profusion of names gives you a hint of how complicated her life was. In a time when divorce was difficult (if not impossible), she lived happily with a married man for decades. Her life is as complex as the characters in her novels, and this biography deals with the details without obscuring the big picture.

After reading it, I wish that I had know her, which is the ultimate proof that this biography works. ( )

The Last Victorian: Like all the best Biographers Kathryn Hughes brings George Eliot to life. The breadth of her research is impressive and her writing style is clear and highly readable. I feel as if I really got to know Marian Evans the woman, and the well-spring of George Eloit’s fiction. ( )

From Gordon Haight's scrupulous 1968 work George Eliot to Ruby Redinger's 1976 feminist rethinking George Eliot: The Emergent Self and beyond, the unconventional life and probing fiction of Victorian England's greatest female author has attracted the scrutiny of numerous biographers. British scholar Kathryn Hughes's pungent account distinguishes itself by highlighting Mary Ann Evans's turbulent emotions with as much acuity as she does the creative drive that eventually led one of London's most prominent editors and critics to reinvent herself as the novelist George Eliot. Cast out of respectable public life when she moved in with the married George Henry Lewes, Eliot found personal happiness with a man who understood her need for all-consuming love and artistic salvation. Lewes demonstrated his dedication to her by screening Eliot from outside criticism and inner doubts that could have prevented her from writing. Hughes's analysis of their relationship is as sympathetic yet candid as the rest of her narrative. She paints a vivid portrait of Victorian intellectual life and Eliot's provocative role within it as a writer who questioned conventional wisdom of all sorts, but whose heroines ultimately chose lives of modest usefulness within the existing society. As her biographer puts it in a typically well turned phrase, "Eliot's novels show people how they can deal with the pain of being a Victorian by remaining one." --Wendy Smith

Hughes's biography examines the remarkable life of Eliot (ne Mary Anne Evans, 1819-80), who wrote some of the 19th century's most outstanding literature. The book chronicles her complex life from childhood, showing her transformations as she matured and developed into adulthood. Eliot took care of her father, at age 17, after her mother's death and the marriage of her elder sister. She met George Lewes, a philosopher, scientist, and critic, and it changed her life; they shared a long-term relationship without the benefit of marriage. Lewes, who was several years her senior, loved, protected, and encouraged her and took care of her affairs. Upon his death in 1878, Eliot became a hermit and stopped writing. This work is intelligent, adept, and full of insight.