San Antonio College Library

"The Paston Letters represent the though and activities of a typical English quire's family in the fifteenth century. They were not people of any particular genius, but ordinary well-to-do-folk. They found, as did most of their neighbours, that if they wished to hold, or still more to increase what possessions they had, it was necessary to fight vigorously with every weapon law, use, experience or cunning could devise. Hence, a study of their many-sided...

"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....