San Antonio College Library

"George Eliot's extraordinary life, which produced some of the nineteenth-century's finest fiction, is explored in Kathryn Hughes' new biography. The daughter of a self-made businessman of impeccable respectability, the middle-aged Eliot was cast into social exile when she began a scandalous liaison with the married writer and scientist George Henry Lewes. Only her burgeoning literary success allowed her to overcome society's disapproval and eventually...

A delightful and carefully documented critical biography of Austen, beginning with a glance at the facts, traditions, and attitudes which were part of the social fabric of her time.

Moving beyond the usual sketchy account of Austen's life--and away from the serene and untroubled image of Austen created, in large part, by her family after her death--Halperin reveals a robust, vigorous, and at times difficult woman with a large and diverse circle of family and acquaintances. He documents her troubled relationship with her hypochondriac mother, her frank dislike of a sister-in-law, and shed new light on the shadowy existence of...