Written in the 1860s, its tall, dreamy, red-haired heroine would not be out of place in a pre-Raphaelite painting. Romola, set in Renaissance Florence, is Eliot’s challenging middle work. The one to drop into dinner party conversation The real Dempster, she said, “was far more disgusting than mine the real Janet, alas!, had a far sadder end than mine.” It was based on real life, she told her publisher when he asked her to “soften” the story – and she refused to change it. This brilliant novella showcases Eliot’s dramatic flair, philosophical sensibility and deep emotional intelligence. It’s all a far cry from Jane Austen’s drawing rooms. One night she is thrown out of her house and shivers barefoot on the doorstep in a skimpy nightie, drunkenly wishing herself dead.
Like her mature novels, this is a dark marriage drama: its heroine, Janet Dempster, is abused by her violent husband and descends into an alcoholic spiral of shame and despair. In the third story, Janet’s Repentance, Eliot really hits her stride. They were originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine, then collected in a book titled Scenes of Clerical Life.
George Eliot’s first works of fiction were a series of three stories, all starring hapless provincial vicars. Be warned, this novel is a tragedy – it is also “The one that will make you cry” – but poor Maggie’s dreadful aunts are among Eliot’s funniest creations. As in Middlemarch, comedy ensues when high ideals and all-too-human pettiness collide. While Maggie Tulliver longs for wider horizons, her dim-witted mother obsesses about her linen cupboard, her prized silver sugar tongs and her sister’s expensive new hat. The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot’s second and most autobiographical novel, features a passionate, intelligent young heroine stuck in small-town Middle England. Photograph: Wordsworth Classics The one to make you laugh out loud
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