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Article: George Eliot: A Life.
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- November 23, 1996
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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GEORGE ELIOT: A LIFE. By Rosemary Ashton. Hamish Hamilton; 480 pages; [Pounds] 25
LAST year there appeared arguably the worst biography of the decade: Frederick Karl's life of George Eliot. Rosemary Ashton's new book is one of the best, and it too concerns the great Victorian novelist whose "Mill on the Floss" is about to follow "Middlemarch" into television serialisation on the BBC.
George Eliot's was the kind of life biographers relish, and distort. The first to attempt it was her husband, John Cross, whose book appeared in 1885, five years after her death. They had been married for less than a year-with Eliot's decision to wed motivated, almost certainly, ...