George Eliot

Kathryn Hughes, a university lecturer on nineteenth-century English literature and history, has written a thoroughly modern biography of a writer whose phenomenal popularity in her lifetime is fascinating, seen from the vantage of our own culture of celebrity. As emotionally needy and erratic as she was intellectually strong-minded, George Eliot was not at all modern. The impact of her fame and her scandalous lifelong liaison with the married writer George Lewes upon her personality and her work makes illuminating reading. Nadia May's performance is, as usual, impeccable. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine