A Woman of Contradictions
by Ina Taylor
- 1 Members Following
Follow a topic to see new activity, such as homework help questions and answers, in your personal feed on the homepage.
At a glance:
- Author: Ina Taylor
- First Published: 1989
- Type of Work: Biography
- Time of Work: 1819-1880
- Setting: Nuneaton and Grift; Warwickshire, England; Coventry; London; and, briefly, Germany, Switzerland, and other parts of the Continent
- Characters: George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, John Walter Cross
- Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: Journalism or journalists, Sex or sexuality, Gender roles, Psychology or psychologists, Nineteenth century, Literature, Novelists, Morality or morals, Victorian era or Victorianism
- Locales: England, Germany, Switzerland
Ina Taylor’s concise, often acidulous study of George Eliot is full of unexpected delights for the reader. But the author fails to prove her central thesis: that Eliot—novelist, translatoi; editor, and intellectual—was “a woman of contradictions.” To be sure, Taylor views her subject in an unfamiliar, decidedly harsher light. Previous biographies—from John Walter Cross’s near-idolatrous arrangement of her letters and diaries in George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals (1881) to Gordon S. Haight’s classic George Eliot: A Biography (1968)—have...
(The entire page is 2450 words.)
Want to read the whole thing?
Subscribe now to read the rest of this article. Plus, get access to:
- 30,000+ literature study guides
- Critical essays on more than 30,000 works of literature from Salem on Literature (exclusive to eNotes)
- An unparalleled literary criticism section. 40,000 full-length or excerpted essays.
- Content from leading academic publishers, all easily citable with our "Cite this page" button.
- 100% satisfaction guarantee READ MORE
