When George Eliot agreed (reluctantly, by all accounts) to have her portrait made in 1865, she surely never imagined that her face would be forever linked with her published works. Yet today when we ...

A new biography examines how the novelist chose to make her life, as well as her fiction and art, outside the conventions of the marriage plot. In an anonymously published essay, “Silly Novels by Lady ...

“A marriage is so hideously private,” the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote in 1978. “Whoever illicitly draws back that curtain may well be stricken, and in some way that he can least ...

“Literature bores me, especially great literature,” the narrator of one of John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” says. George Eliot sometimes bores me, especially the George Eliot draped in greatness. Think ...