I love business, the class I have is fun, the teacher is funny as hell, but the book just stinks. However, there is a study guide that you can buy to go with the book, I strongly recommend that. Helped me study tremendously

Very well written, easy to understand and a great format. I learned alot.

Yes, the book has many additions to the text. I found them very useful and insightful, and they assisted in offering a connection between the text and the real world in most cases. I am taking correspondance courses, so this book is all I have, and I think it's great. The authors speak in a way that's easy to read and understand. I don't like reading much, but this book made it easy.

Hughes' life of Eliot is solid, comprehensive, and given its dazzling subject, remarkably tedious. The book provides an ample chronicle of Eliot's documented life without ever bringing Marian Evans or her marvelous writings to life.

Hughes is much better at piling on the details of Victorian intellectual life than working her way inside the creative processes that created Middlemarch, Adam Bede, and Daniel Deronda. The first half of the book, covering Evans' family life and difficult early adulthood, reads well, the impressive accumulation of research making up for lack of narrative.

But when Evans creates Eliot and the first of her fictions, the book should snap to life. It instead deflates, dutifully cranking out novel synopses and recounting scandals without ever getting at why Eliot's fiction was so beloved in her day, and remains so today.

A novelist of uncanny power and tremendous influence, Eliot deserves a biography at the level of Peter Ackroyd's spectacular life of Dickens. We're still waiting...

I thought Hughes did a good job capturing the historical context in which George Eliot lived and wrote, and gave a sense of Eliot's personality, particularly Eliot's transformation emotionally and intellectually. However, I was distracted by what seemed like the author's tendency to jump around chronologically in attempts to pull out themes and conclusions about Eliot; at times it felt like she lost track of what she had discussed or didn't.

George Eliot: The Last Victorian is an intimate biography of noted author Mary Ann Evans, who is perhaps better known by the pen name of George Eliot (1819-1880). Some of Ms. Evans' most famous works include the novels Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Adam Bede. This informative biography focuses quite closely on Evans' life, including her friendships with Dickens and Trollope, and the controversial scandal of her relationship to a married writer George Henry Lewes. Biographer Kathryn Hughes also scrutinizes the Victorian society that Mary Evans lived in and wrote so much about. Even Queen Victoria enjoyed books by George Eliot, but you don't need royal blood to enjoy this intriguing and meticulously presented biography.