Biography Essay

The most learned and respected novelist of the late Victorian period, George Eliot suffered a decline in reputation after her death and into the early twentieth century because the biography stitched together by her widower, John Walter Cross, left out the most interesting parts of her life. "It is not a Life at all," said William Gladstone. "It is a Reticence in three volumes." Although her contemporaries Anthony Trollope and Henry James saw her as the first psychological realist in the English tradition, readers of George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (1885) saw her as the sibyl of a dying age. A revival of interest in George Eliot's novels began on the centenary of her birth, with an essay in the Times Literary Supplement by Virginia Woolf, and crystallized with the publication of F. R. Leavis's The Great Tradition in 1949. Since then she...