When George Eliot agreed (reluctantly, by all accounts) to have her portrait made in 1865, she surely never imagined that her face would be forever linked with her published works. Yet today when we ...

THE critic’s first duty in the presnce of an author’s collective works is to seek out some key to his method, some utterance of his literary convictions, some indication of his ruling theory. The ...

“A marriage is so hideously private,” the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote in 1978. “Whoever illicitly draws back that curtain may well be stricken, and in some way that he can least ...

THE writer of these pages has observed that the first question usually asked in relation to Mr. Cross’s long-expected biography is whether the reader has not been disappointed in it. The inquirer is ...

Bullett, Gerald. George Eliot: Her Life and Books. London: Collins, 1947. Cross, John Walter. George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals. 3 vols ...