Books like George Eliot by Rosemary Ashton

Set in the 1830s Midlands, George Eliot’s Middlemarch intertwines village life, politics, and the struggles of its characters to explore social reform, gender roles, and community hypocrisy.

A coming‑of‑age tale set in 19th‑century England, following siblings Maggie and Tom Tulliver as they navigate love, family duty and society’s expectations at the eponymous mill.

Young carpenter Adam Bede, devoted to his aging mother, falls for the town beauty Hetty Sorrel, whose allure leads both into a dangerous triangle involving Captain Donnithorne.

Silas Marner follows a recluse weaver who withdraws to Raveloe after a wrongful accusation, finding redemption and a second chance at life through the love of an abandoned child.

George Eliot’s sole historical novel, Romola, follows a virtuous Florentine maid, Romola, who marries Tito Melema—a reckless Florentine—against her brother the priest’s counsel, offering a vivid portrait of 15th‑century Florentine society under the Medici.

George Eliot's 1865 Gothic tale of a telepathic narrator, Latimer, whose heightened perception leads to alienation and impending heart disease.

George Eliot’s final novel follows Daniel Deronda, a young English upper‑classman who, after a chance meeting with the Jewish woman Mirah, becomes embroiled in a search for her lost family and develops a deep sympathy for Jewish aspirations.

"Becoming Jane Austen shows how Jane Austen's own personal experiences resonated throughout her work, from her juvenilia to Sanditon. Two people, above all, affected her life and caught her imagination. The first was her flirtatious and exotic cousin, Eliza de Feullide, married to a French count who was later guillotined. The second was the young Irish lawyer, Tom Lefroy, with whom Jane fell in love and whom she hoped to marry. Jon Spence traces the deep emotional impact that her encounters with Eliza and Tom had on her, and shows how she worked this out in her life and in her work, including in her major novels." --Book Jacket.

An in‑depth study of Virginia Woolf’s literary contributions, drawn from her diaries, letters, and manuscripts.

A LITERATURE OF THEIR OWN quickly set the stage for the creative explosion of feminist literary studies that transformed the field in the 1980s. Launching a major new area for literary investigation, the book uncovered the long but neglected tradition of women writers and the development of their fiction from the 1800s onwards. It includes assessments of famous writers such as the Brontës, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Drabble and Doris Lessing, but also presents critical appraisals of Mary Braddon, Rhoda Broughton and Sarah Grand --- to name but a few of those prolific and successful Victorian novelists - --once household names, now largely forgotten.

"Iris Murdoch's life - like her books - was full of extraordinary passions and profound relationships with some of the most inspiring and influential thinkers, artists, writers and poets of her time. During the war she pondered Aldous Huxley's doctrine that, for a writer, 'it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters,' and she later wrote that the person who might help her better herself 'must not distinguish between me and my work'. She was sometimes portrayed as a bourgeois grandee living an unworldly, detached intellectual life, inventing a fantastical alternative world for compensation; but much that was thought to be romance in her work turns out to be reality. 'Real life is so much odder than any book,' she wrote to a friend, and her life was as exciting and improbable as her fiction. Her novels are not just stylised comedies of manners with artificial complications, but reflect passionately lived experience, albeit wonderfully transmuted. Peter Conradi's biography returns the reader to her best work, through a quest for the living flesh-and-blood creature: the Irishwoman, the Communist-bohemian, the Treasury civil servant, the worker in Austrian refugee-camps, the RCA lecturer during the 1960s, the lifelong devotee of friendship conducted at a distancce and by letter, and the Buddhist-Christian mystic. It balances the formative years before the creative confusion of youth gave way to a greater stability, with an account of her maturity."--BOOK JACKET.

An illustrated, scholarly guide that charts Agatha Christie’s life, works, and critical reception, enriched with rare photographs and updates on her publications, films, and TV adaptations.