This classic novel takes place in Lantern Yard, a slum street in an unnamed city in Northern England, during the early 19th century. There, Silas Marner, a weaver and a member of a small Calvinist congregation, is falsely accused of stealing the congregation's funds while watching over their very ill deacon. Two pieces of evidence are against Silas: his possession of a pocket knife and the bag that formerly contained the money. Although there is also...

The Mill on the Floss is a novel by George Eliot (the pen name of author Mary Ann Evans), published in 1860. The novel was originally published in three parts. It was very successful and was adapted into a film as early as 1937. It was Eliot's second novel and one of her most successful of all time. The novel tells the story of Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom as they grow from children to young adults in the small rural town of St. Ogg's, England....

Originally published in 1859, "Adam Bede" is the first novel by George Eliot, which was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. Eliot was one of the leading British writers of the Victorian era, as well as a noted journalist, poet, and translator. "Adam Bede" concerns a small, tight-knit, and fictional rural community called Hayslope and the romantic drama that develops between four of its young residents: the title character Adam, a young carpenter, the...

Romola is a brilliant young woman who unknowingly falls in love with a handsome stranger whose true nature is fueled by greed, status and ego. Over the course of the novel, she uncovers his many transgressions and secret dealings. A handsome stranger called Tito Melema arrives in Florence and is immediately smitten by Romola, the daughter of a local scholar. The two eventually marry as Tito gains access to various social circles. He becomes an influential...

"A startling new portrait of George Eliot, the beloved novelist and a rare philosophical mind who explored the complexities of marriage"-- In her mid-thirties, Marian Evans transformed herself into George Eliot and published her debut novel. Her life partner, George Lewes, was already married. Their relationship scandalized her contemporaries, yet she grew immeasurably within it. Carlisle shows how, through the immense ambition and dark marriage...

"A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch-- and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories."--From publisher description. "Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford,...

Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf: they all wrote dazzling books that forever changed the way we see history. In "Outsiders", award-winning biographer Lyndall Gordon shows how these five novelists shared more than talent. In a time when a woman's reputation was her security, each of these women lost hers. They were unconstrained by convention, writing against the grain of their contemporaries, prophetically...

I took off my wedding ring for the last time -- a gold band with half a line of "Morning Song" by Sylvia Plath etched inside -- and for weeks afterwards, my thumb would involuntarily reach across my palm for the warm bright circle that had gone. I didn't fling the ring into the long grass, like women do in the movies, but a feeling began bubbling up nevertheless, from my stomach to my throat: it could fling my arms out. I was free ... A few years...