The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction - Hardcover

"Here we have the first full-scale study of George Eliot's correspondence.... Both the fictive nature of the letters and the autobiographical reality of fiction are well discussed in this very welcome book." * Choice * "The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans is a critical book in which Eliot's letters and novels become one unit.... Bodenheimer talks about very unusual topics." * Lingua Franca * "An attentive reader of this book will never read George Eliot in the same way again." * George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies * "A richly compelling portrait of nineteenth-century British writer George Eliot.... Rather than arranging her material in standard chronological fashion, Bodenheimer has elected to present her analysis via a series of critical issues that affected both the social and literary styles of George Eliot throughout the course of her life. A fascinating hybrid of literary criticism and biography." * Booklist * "Alert to the carefully deployed, multiple masks that Mary Ann Evans chose to wear, but also capable of writing with genuine feeling of Eliot's actual and fictional labors of choice, Bodenheimer has managed to write that seemingly impossible thing, postmodern biography that a humanist can admire." * Boston Book Review *

Bodenheimer defines the personal paradoxes that helped to shape Eliot's fictional characters and narrative style. Bodenheimer revisits pivotal episodes in Mary Ann Evans's life and career, including the "Holy War" through which she asserted her youthful religious skepticism; her decision to elope with the married writer George Henry Lewes; and her marriage with John Cross after Lewes's death. Bodenheimer also discusses the rumor campaign that led to the discovery that "George Eliot" was a woman, and she traces the trajectory of Eliot's impassioned conflict between her ambition and her womanhood.