E-Books →Jane Austen and George Eliot

In nurturing Eliot's talent, Lewes drew inspiration from the works of an unfashionable author of the previous generation by the name of Jane Austen. On the face of it, Austen and Eliot had little in common. Jane Austen was a genteel spinster who spent her life in Hampshire, painting Regency domestic dramas with delicate irony and unfailing charm. George Eliot, meanwhile, was a radical intellectual who lived scandalously with a married man, travelled widely in Europe and documented with stirring realism the social upheavals of her age.
And yet, when George Eliot embarked on her career as an author in the late 1850s, the works of Jane Austen were at her side, feeding her imagination. Separated by time, circumstance and temperament, the two writers nevertheless had a vital impetus in to prove the value of a woman's eye in a man's world.
Packed with quotes from letters, diaries and the nation's favourite novels, this lively history traces the surprising connections between two of our brightest literary stars and shows, for the first time, how each can be illuminated by the other's light.