G.H.Lewes: A Life - Tapa dura

"A lively biography of a minor but fascinating figure."--Virginia Quarterly Review "Not likely to be superseded unless some new material turns up....Important for Victorian scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduates."--Choice "Splendid....Nobody could have done it better than Ashton."--Sunday Times (London) "[A] splendid biography....What emerges from Ashton's work...[is] a familiar life made fresh and moving with new detail and proper emphasis....Rosemary Ashton has given us a witty, humane, and beautifully written book finished to the highest scholarly and critical standards. It is now the one indispensable work on its subject, and it is essential reading as well for anyone interested in George Eliot, in nineteenth-century English radicalism, or in the fine art to which biography can be brought."--Nineteenth-Century Prose "Ashton's book is a well-written, scholarly, undogmatic, sympathetic but not idolatrous study of Lewes. It deserves to be the definitive biography."--Nineteenth-Century Literature

G.H.Lewes was an unconventional Victorian. Though he is best remembered for the liaison with George Eliot - marriage in all but name - which occupied the last 25 years of his life, he was also a man and writer of varied interests and capacities. For the first time, Rosemary Ashton presents a full, scholarly account of his extraordinary life, based on extensive research and using previously unpublished material. She has made new discoveries about his origins, and illuminates his early life, about which very little has been known till now. Lewes was a journalist, novelist, playwright and actor, living in London's Bohemia and friendly with Dickens and Thackeray. He enjoyed an open marriage with Agnes Jervis, causing a scandal by condoning her relationship with his best friend Thornton Hunt. When he met Marian Evans in 1851, he was notorious as a radical, freethinker and free lover. Because of his endorsement of his wife's adultery and his registering of her four children by Hunt as his own, he was unable to divorce Agnes and marry Marian. Thus he was once more at the centre of a scandal when he set off with Marian for Weimar in 1854. Rosemary Ashton throws fresh light on the details of Lewes' elopement with Marian Evans; on his important "Life of Goethe", written in Germany; on her emergence with his encouragement as George Eliot, her success and their eventual acceptance in society; on Lewes's scientific work and support for Darwin; and on the happiness and tragedies of their family life together.