Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot

Book excerpt: Beautifully illustrated with 30 integrated black-and-white pictures, here are over 500 A-Z entries on the life and work of George Eliot. Written by an international team of scholars, the Companion offers a wealth of biographical and historical information that illuminates Eliot's work. There are entries on all her novels (including plot synopses), stories, and important essays, plus coverage of poetry and translations, letters and journals, and notebooks and manuscripts. A long entry surveys her life, and shorter entries discuss her family, friends, and acquaintances, the places she lived and the countries she visited, and the writers, thinkers, artists, and composers whose work she knew. The volume also includes extensive cross-referencing and suggestions for further reading, a chronology, a bibliography, an alphabetical list of fictional characters, and maps of both fictional settings and the author's extensive travels. In sum, this is the first reference work to do justice to the extraordinary range and depth of George Eliot's intellectual life.