George Eliot and Her Women

George Eliot and Her Women explores George Eliot’s engagement with gender, her representation of female characters, and her attitudes towards women’s issues during her lifetime. Examining the construction of her female characters throughout her prose fiction and poetry, it argues that Eliot powerfully advocated for women in her creative works. George Eliot and Her Women argues that the Victorian writer George Eliot (1819 – 1880) was not only keenly aware of women’s issues but more deeply engaged with them than she has yet received credit for. Proposing that her work is still misread and misunderstood because of her unusual and complex relationship to gender and an inattention to the complexity of her female characters and their representation, the book examines Eliot’s construction and treatment of female characters throughout her prose fiction and her poetry to show that she was very much attuned to and supportive of women’s issues. Demonstrating that Eliot was unable to speak publicly on women’s issues because of her complicated private life, George Eliot and Her Women demonstrates that she nonetheless advocated for women’s rights, particularly access to education, through her fiction and poetry, using her creative works to inspire sympathy and promote awareness about women’s struggles in nineteenth-century Britain.