Scenes of Clerical Life

ISBN-13: 9780140436389 / Angielski / Miękka / 2005 / 416 str.

George Eliot

Opis

'Many men write well and tell a story well, but few possess the art of giving individuality to their characters so happily and easily as you ...'

Wrote the publisher John Blackwood in February 1857 to a shy and ambitious new author, whom he had not yet met, George Eliot. Shielded by this pseudonymn, Mary Ann Evans made her fictional debut when Scenes of Clerical Life appeared in Blackwood's Magazine the same year. These are Eliot's earliest studies of what became enduring themes: the impact of religious controversy and social change in provincial life, and the power of love to transform the lives of individual men and women. In 'The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton', Amos learns only after her death the value of Milly's selfless love; 'Mr Gilfil's Love Story' tells of a clergyman's life-long devotion to the memory of Caterina, destroyed by her passion for another lover; in 'Janet's Repentance', the life of the alchoholic Janet Dempster is decisively changed by the attractiveness of Rev. Tryan, an evangelical preacher.

Adam Bede was soon to appear and bring George Eliot great fame and fortune. In the meantime the Scenes won acclaim from a discerning readership including Charles Dickens: 'I hope you will excuse my writing to you to express my admiration ... The exquisite truth and delicacy, both of the humour and the pathos of those stories, I have never seen the like of.'

O autorze

Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880) is one of English literature's greatest and most influential novelists. Her novels, under the name of George Eliot include 'Adam Bede', 'Silas Marner','The Mill on the Floss', 'Middlemarch' and 'Daniel Deronda'. Jennifer Gribble was educated at the universities of Melbourne and Oxford. She is at present Associate Professor of English at the University of Sydney. Her publications include 'The Lady of Shalott in the Victorian Novel' and 'Christina Stead'.