Includes bibliographical references (pages 269-288) and index.

"Believe no one's representations about me, " George Eliot wrote a friend during the most painful scandal of her life; "for there is not a single person who is in a position to make a true representation." In a book that embodies a new approach to literary biography, Rosemarie Bodenheimer demonstrates how Eliot's letters and fiction together represent the real life of Mary Ann Evans, the complex and deeply appealing woman beneath the male pseudonym. Bodenheimer brings to light new dimensions of her subject, such as the story - never fully told before - of Eliot's relationships with her stepsons and with young people who sought her help when she was a celebrated writer. To the common image of George Eliot as a Victorian woman who could find intellectual authority only by writing as a man, Bodenheimer offers an alternative. She sees Eliot as an imaginatively resourceful woman reworking her life through a strenuous process of self-representation. Reading Eliot's letters alongside her novels, stories, and poems, Bodenheimer defines the personal paradoxes that helped to shape Eliot's fictional characters and narrative style. Bodenheimer revisits pivotal episodes in Mary Ann Evans's life and career, including the "Holy War" through which she asserted her youthful religious skepticism; her decision to elope with the married writer George Henry Lewes; and her marriage with John Cross after Lewes's death. Bodenheimer also discusses the rumor campaign that led to the discovery that "George Eliot" was a woman, and she traces the trajectory of Eliot's impassioned conflict between her ambition and her womanhood." --,Dust Jacket.

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