George Eliot: Whole Soul

George Eliot, a young Christian poet, became a renowned realist novelist whose commitment to religious freethinking made her iconoclastic. She wrote about the pervasiveness of human suffering, the tension between ethical obligations and personal well-being, the impetus, and the need for religion in life. Ilana Blumberg's book explores Eliot's spiritual life, revealing a writer who devoted her career to imagining a wide religious sensibility that could inform personal and social life.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 14 March 2024
Publisher: Oxford University Press

The girl who would later become George Eliot embarked on her professional writing journey with a poem bidding farewell to all books except the Bible. How did a young Christian poet transform into the renowned realist novelist whose unwavering commitment to religious freethinking made her so iconoclastic that she could not be buried in Westminster Abbey? Today, she is memorialized there through a stone laid in the Poets Corner in 1980. George Eliot wrote herself and her fellow Victorians through turbulent decades of moral and historical doubt in religious orthodoxy, alongside the unwavering need to articulate a compelling modern faith in its place. Unafraid to confront the most challenging existential questions of her time, George Eliot crafted immensely popular novels that grappled with problems whose grip has barely lessened in the last 150 years: the pervasive nature of human suffering and the injustice of its measures; the tension between fulfilling our ethical obligations to others and pursuing our own well-being; the impetus to act virtuously in this world without any guarantee of reward, and the need to make some religion in life, something beyond our own immediate, fluctuating desires. In this groundbreaking new account of George Eliot's spiritual life, George Eliot: Whole Soul, Ilana Blumberg unveils to us a writer who did not simply lose her faith once and for all on her way to becoming an adult but devoted the entirety of her career to imagining a wide religious sensibility that could inform personal and social life. As we delve into Eliot's letters, essays, translations, poetry, and novels, we encounter here a writer whose extraordinary art and intellect offer us companionship, even today, in our search for modern meaning.

Weight: 376g
Dimension: 137 x 203 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780192845092