George Eliot has always challenged her readers. Prodigiously learned, alive to the massive social changes of her time, defiant of many Victorian orthodoxies, she is at once chronicler and analyst, novelist of nostalgia and monumental thinker. In her great novel Middlemarch she writes of 'that tempting range of relevancies called the universe'. This volume identifies a range of 'relevancies' that form the various contexts of her time, and of our own pertinent to understanding and in the fullest sense appreciating George Eliot. The dimensions of her achievement are illuminated by cogent essays...

This volume makes available for the first time the entire surviving journals and diaries of the great Victorian novelist, George Eliot, and constitutes a new text by her--the closest she came to autobiography. The journals span her life from 1854, when she entered into a common-law union with George Henry Lewes, to her death in 1880, revealing the professional writer George Eliot as well as the remarkable private woman, Marian Evans. The edition includes a chronology, introduction, headnotes to each diary, and an annotated index supplying valuable contextual and explanatory information.

Developmental psychology is concerned with the scientific understanding of age related changes in experience and behaviour, not only in children but throughout the lifespan. The task is to discover, describe, and explain how development occurs, from its earliest origins, into childhood, adulthood, and old age. To understand human development requires one not only to make contact with human nature but also to consider the diverse effects of culture on the developing child. Development is as much a process of acquiring culture as it is of biological growth.

'This is a beautifully written account of the most important ways in which developmental psychologists go about their business, illustrated with carefully chosen articles which are carefully described in order to make the designs, methodologies, analysis and interpretation of the results readily accessible to a non-expert readership. This will become the preferred textbook for those who want an up-to-date, interesting and accessible introduction to developmental psychology research' - Alan Slater, University of Exeter A wide range of techniques is used to investigate children's development....

George Eliot's literary achievement is explored through essays on its historical, intellectual, political and social contexts.