Claudia FitzHerbert

What can we learn of George Eliot through her heroines?

Eliot guarded her privacy closely, but her novels explore themes of sacrifice and restraint, and her heroines are studies in the impossibility of having it all

Frederic William Burton’s portrait of George Eliot (1865) captures her melancholy and earnestness. [Alamy] 
issue 25 March 2023
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  • The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life

    Clare Carlisle

    Allen Lane, pp. 368, £25

‘I have… found someone to take care of me in the world,’ Marian Evans wrote to her brother in 1857, three years after setting up house with George Henry Lewes. Professing herself ‘well acquainted with his mind and character’, she requested that the modest income from her father’s legacy should in future be paid into her husband’s bank account.

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