The works assembled here introduce George Eliot's incisive views on religion, art, and science, and the nature and purpose of fiction. Essays show her rejecting her earlier religious beliefs, questioning conventional ideas about female virtues and marriage, and setting out theories of idealism and realism that she developed further in her famous novels. Also included are selections from Eliot's translations of works by Strauss and Feuerbach, excerpts from her poems, and reviews of writers such as Wollstonecraft, Goethe, and Browning. Wonderfully rich in imagery and observations, these pieces reveal the intellectual development of this most rewarding of writers.

• Available again—the first paperback collection of Eliot's nonfiction
• Introduction by A.S. Byatt discusses Eliot's literary place in Victorian London and the views expounded in these writings

George Eliot's last, most ambitious novel, Daniel Deronda aroused scandal when it first appeared in 1876. What begins as a passionate love story takes a surprising turn into the hidden world of the early Zionist movement in Victorian England.

The story opens memorably at a roulette table, where we first meet the young and idealistic Daniel Deronda and the enchanting Gwendolen Harleth?whom many critics consider to be George Eliot's finest creation. Although the two are immediately drawn to one another, Gwendolen?outwardly alluring and vivacious, inwardly complex and unsettled?is forced by circumstance into an oppressive marriage with the harsh aristocratic Henleigh Grandcourt.

Deeply unhappy, she turns for friendship to Daniel, only to discover his involvement with Mirah Lapidoth, a talented young Jewish woman. Torn between his devotion to Gwendolen and his passion for Mirah and the plight of her people, Daniel is forced to look at his own mysterious past and find out who he really is?and who he wants to become.

Earl L. Dachslager is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Houston and an adjunct professor in the University's Distant Education Program. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland. He reviews books regularly for the Houston Chronicle.

Adam Bede is a hardy young carpenter who cares for his aging mother. His one weakness is the woman he loves blindly: the trifling town beauty, Hetty Sorrel, whose only delights are her baubles-and the delusion that the careless Captain Donnithorne may ask for her hand. Betrayed by their innocence, both Adam and Hetty allow their foolish hearts to trap them in a triangle of seduction, murder, and retribution.

'People are almost always better than their neighbours think they are'

George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'.

It was George Eliot's ambition to create a world and portray a whole community—tradespeople, middle classes, country gentry—in the rising fictional provincial town of Middlemarch, circa 1830. Vast and crowded, rich in narrative irony and
suspense, Middlemarch is richer still in character and in its sense of how individual destinies are shaped by and shape the community.