A landmark of biography retains its appeal more than a century
after it’s subject’s death George Eliot: A Biography. By Gordon
Haight. Penguin, 616 pp., varied prices, paperback. By Janice
Harayda “What Middlemarch is to the English novel this biography
is to George Eliot,” a critic for the New York Times wrote when
this book appeared in 1968. Just as Middlemarch showed more of
English life than any novel that had preceded it, this biography
showed more of George Eliot than book that had come before it.
Scholars have never stopped building on the work Gordon Haight
did for this book, which you can still find easily in libraries
and elsewhere. A few weeks ago, the critic Simon Baker wrote in
the British Spectator www.spectator.co.uk that the hallmarks of
great biographies include “elegance, quality of analysis,
attention to detail, balance, and worthiness of subject.”
Haight’s book has those virtues and another: It has a subject
whose character and moral courage remain inspiring more than a
century after her d