George Eliot and Her Women

George Eliot and Her Women argues that the Victorian writer George Eliot (1819 1880) was not only keenly aware of womens issues but more deeply engaged with them than she has yet received credit for. Proposing that her work is still misread and misunderstood because of her unusual and complex relationship to gender and an inattention to the complexity of her female characters and their representation, the book examines Eliots construction and treatment of female characters throughout her prose fiction and her poetry to show that she was very much attuned to and supportive of womens issues. Demonstrating that Eliot was unable to speak publicly on womens issues because of her complicated private life, George Eliot and Her Women demonstrates that she nonetheless advocated for womens rights, particularly access to education, through her fiction and poetry, using her creative works to inspire sympathy and promote awareness about womens struggles in nineteenth-century Britain.