Alan Bell

Remembered Chiefly For His ‘Wife’s’ Novels

G H Lewes: A Life

By

Clarendon Press 369pp £25 order from our bookshop

Except for his long, devoted, but unmarried liaison with Marian Evans, ‘George Eliot’, George Henry Lewes is little known nowadays. Rosemary Ashton’s thorough and well-written new biography recalls him as a considerable figure in the world of Victorian letters, adding a good deal to what we know of him from biographies and editions of George Eliot. This is a considerable achievement when there are great chunks of his early life for which very little is known of his activities. Autobiographical clues – used with due caution – have had to be picked up from his fiction, and the world of the self-taught, ill-paid aspiring journalist and essayist is skilfully recaptured.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    • In this month's 'Silenced Voices', looks at the case of Azimjon Askarov, the journalist and human rights… ,
    Follow Us