Jane Austen and George Eliot: The Lady and The Radical

In October

1851, a chance meeting in a Piccadilly bookshop changed the course of literary

history. For it was here that Mary Ann Evans, an unworldly young scholar, was

introduced to the love of her life, the critic George Lewes. Encouraged and

supported by Lewes, Evans became the queen of literary London under her pen

name, 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 common: 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.