March 21, 2016
Smith's heavy-handed novel imagines the life of the writer George Eliot at age 60, reflecting back to her disastrous Venetian honeymoon with an abusive younger husband. Eliot was born Marian Evans to a rural farm family that encouraged her education after it was decided that her plain looks wouldn't secure her a husband. She becomes interested early on in writing and religion. She falls in with a bohemian, polyamorous crowd and gets her heart broken a few times before meeting George Lewes, the married man who would become the great love of her life. Eliot helms a magazine before running away to Germany with Lewes and returning to America to write the succession of novels that earned her fame and fortune. Lewes begins an avuncular relationship with the very handsome Johnnie Cross, who is 20 years the couple's junior. Following Lewes's death, Cross inexplicably proposes to Eliot, citing his promise to Lewes to care for her. While Cross is for the most part doting and kind, the honeymoon finds him behaving strangely and viciously. Smith's writing is chock-full of exposition and often clunky: "ââI love himâand his sons.' She smiled, saying the names aloud, âCharley, Thornie, Bertie.'â" Smith (The Illusionist) establishes that Eliot is insecure and painfully aware of how social class and looks can pigeonhole her, but it seems unbelievable that her reaction to Cross's mistreatment would be to worry that her looks and age drove him to it. The book is unsatisfying in that it tells rather than shows, and generalizes instead of teasing out the little details that would have made this book more than an overwrought CliffsNotes version of Eliot's life.
March 1, 2016
An appealing fictionalized biography of the revered British novelist George Eliot imagines the inner impulses and passions hidden under a cloak of 19th-century propriety. Voted the greatest British novel of all time in a poll of international book critics in 2015, Middlemarch was the crowning achievement of the Victorian writer whose real name was Marian Evans but who took the pen name of George Eliot to dodge gender assumptions. A sensitive child with a loving father, a faded mother, and several siblings, Evans grew up lonely, blessed with a notable intelligence but few physical charms. Her intellect drew her to the world of writers and freethinkers, and she found work editing a literary review but yearned constantly for companionship, "someone of her own." Her lovers, though, were married men, including the love of her life, George Lewes, with whom she spent more than two happy decades, evolving from a figure of scandal to an international literary success. Smith (The Illusionists, 1997, etc.) narrates Evans' life story in long flashbacks from the "present," in which Eliot/Evans is 60 and on a honeymoon in Venice after Lewes' death. This first actual marriage is to family friend Johnnie Cross, "a pure clean youth, a work of art" more than 20 years younger than her, a man who, his behavior in Italy suggests, is either gay, having a nervous breakdown, or both. While Smith's portrait of the author is nicely detailed, effectively locating her in time, place, and society, its focus on Eliot's "need for love, for tenderness, a longing to be held" detracts from a sense of what made her writing so exceptional. The impression created is of an unusual but often emotionally needy woman who happened also to write supremely successful, uneclipsed works of fiction. An intelligent, delicate, but not quite rounded portrait of genius.
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May 15, 2016
George Eliot (nee Marian Evans), whose Middlemarch is considered by many to be the best novel ever written, is the subject of this new title from Smith (The Illusionist). Though fiction, it reads much like biography. Smith takes as her point of departure the Venice honeymoon of the renowned writer, who was 60 years old at the time of her marriage to John Walter Cross, 20 years her junior. Evans apparently desired no physical relationship, and Cross proposed: "We can be...lovers in our hearts and minds, but not the other way." The author recounts the disastrous honeymoon--Cross has a breakdown and jumps from a balcony into a canal--with numerous flashbacks to her subject's earlier life, including her happy "marriage" to George Lewes (he and Evans never married but lived together as husband and wife). Smith movingly portrays Evans's intellectual and emotional growth as a woman far ahead of her time and draws on significant events in her life to trace the origin and development of her major writings. VERDICT Smith has admirably fleshed out her subject, and her take should be welcomed by anyone interested in the life of this great writer--and in historical fiction generally.--Edward Cone, New York
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from April 15, 2016
Smith's vivid exploration of the mind of author George Eliot, given name Marian Evans, and her late-in-life marriage to John Walter Cross raises the bar for historical fiction. Yes, Smith credits the works of Eliot herself and a score of other sources for background information, but such research can only go so far. With that extensive investigation as a springboard, she nosedives into Eliot's nineteenth-century life just as the 60-year-old Marian and 40-year-old John begin their honeymoon. What brought the spinster to this wedding? And what about the mysterious and moody but dashingly handsome Johnnie, as Marian calls him? It is an unconventional honeymoon, to say the least, with bride and groom in separate bedrooms. But when the hotel clerk mistakenly refers to Johnnie as Marian's son, it is he, not she, who takes fierce offense. Despite the fact that John makes Marian feel sheltered and adored, frequently bending over backward to do so, she nevertheless wonders exactly how to characterize their relationship. Not sexualthat she had with her lover George Henry Lewesnor familial; their love seems beyond even her gift for words. Eliot fans will certainly inhale every page, but any historical-fiction readers will thoroughly relish Smith's tale of a remarkable woman and an unlikely Victorian love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)