George Eliot : family history

Any understanding of George Eliot's mature art must begin with an appreciation of the rich, difficult family dynamic out of which it was forged.

Her contemporaries, including her second cousin, her husband and her closest friend from her early womanhood, understood this, and went into print with their own accounts of the process by which George Eliot's early recollections of her family, neighbours and the Warwickshire landscape became the basis not just for her fiction but also for her philosophic conservatism.

The past, and memory of that past, was the cornerstone on which Eliot believed any chance of social or political progress must securely rest.

This set, the fifth collection in the Family History series, brings together valuable sources, including manuscript material from letters and diaries, which give insights into these crucial influences.

A new introduction places the material in its literary and historical context.