George Eliot's Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals. Vol. 2 (of 3)

1858. A woman in her late thirties reads reviews of her first published work. Charles Dickens himself has praised it. The world doesn't know her name - she signs only 'George Eliot.' This volume traces twelve months in the life of a writer who would become one of the greatest novelists in the English language, yet here she is, terrified and exhilarated, just beginning. Through her private journals and letters, we witness Eliot grappling with the implications of anonymous authorship. We see her relief and anxiety as critics like Dickens and J.A. Froude acclaim her work, her creative struggles, her daily existence. This is the woman behind Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss, thinking in private, before the world knew her name. For anyone who has been moved by her fiction, this volume offers something rarer: the raw, unguarded voice of Marian Evans becoming George Eliot.