This volume makes available for the first time the entire surviving journals and diaries of the great Victorian novelist, George Eliot, and constitutes a new text by her--the closest she came to autobiography. The journals span her life from 1854, when she entered into a common-law union with George Henry Lewes, to her death in 1880, revealing the professional writer George Eliot as well as the remarkable private woman, Marian Evans. The edition includes a chronology, introduction, headnotes to each diary, and an annotated index supplying valuable contextual and explanatory information.
Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside. Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.