George Eliot, Voice of a Century: A Biography

The past 30 years have already given us a comprehensive, dispassionate biography of the great 19th-century novelist by Gordon Haight and a persuasive feminist rethinking by Ruby Redinger. Frederick Karl, notable for his thoughtful portraits of Kafka and Conrad, adds a valuable new perspective by depicting George Eliot as a writer whose life and work incarnated "the ambiguities, the anguish, and divisiveness of the Victorian era." This approach enables him to analyze her shortcomings as a woman and an artist without seeming personally hostile towards Eliot. Massive yet highly readable in the best Victorian tradition.