A Brief Guide to the Life and Work of George Eliot

This Kindle edition, equivalent in length to a physical book of approximately 16 pages, describes the life and work of English novelist George Eliot (pen name of Marian Evans). Part I (“A Brief Summary of the Life of George Eliot”) was originally published in “World Book: Organized Knowledge in Story and Picture” (1919 edition); Part II (“The Novels of George Eliot”), which includes discussions of all seven of Eliot’s novels, originally appeared in 1910 in “Warner’s Synopsis of Books, Ancient and Modern.”

Sample passages:
(from Part I)
After studying for several years at two private schools for young ladies, Marian, at the age of seventeen, was called by the death of her mother to take entire charge of the household. In the midst of the cares and responsibilities of her new duties, however, she found time for a vast amount of miscellaneous reading. When she was twenty-one the family removed to the thriving manufacturing town of Coventry, where she formed a new circle of friends. Her most intimate associates were freethinkers in matters of religion, and under their influence she turned aside from her youthful convictions and became a freethinker herself. This was the beginning of a spiritual struggle that left her convinced that duty is the supreme law in life, an idea that finds expression in all of her novels.

(from Part II)
“Silas Marner” (1861), the story of a poor, dull-witted Methodist cloth-weaver, is ranked by many critics as the best of its author’s books. The plot is simple and the field of the action narrow, the strength of the book lying in its delineations of character among the common people; for George Eliot has been truly called as much the “faultless painter” of bourgeois manners as Thackeray of drawing-room society. Silas Marner is a handloom weaver, a good man, whose life has been wrecked by a false accusation of theft, which cannot be disproved. For years he lives a lonely life, with the sole companionship of his loom; and he is saved from his own despair by the chance finding of a little child. On this baby girl he lavishes the whole passion of his thwarted nature, and her filial affection makes him a kindly man again.

About the authors:
Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900) was an American author, editor, and lecturer. Other works include “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today” (co-authored with Mark Twain), “My Summer in a Garden,” and “As We Were Saying.” B. M. White was a staff editor of “World Book: Organized Knowledge in Story and Picture.”