Why George Eliot Still Inspires Writers
A biography captures a novelist’s greatness of spirit
Nothing lifts you out of a writing slump as reliably as reading a good biography of a great writer who kept working amid repeated setbacks. But which book and author will do the trick?
You’d ideally read about someone whose life and work were both exemplary — a tough pairing to find.
William Butler Yeats believed writers had to choose between perfection “of the life” or “of the work,” and literary history bears him out. Many authors’ lives were a shambles: a maw of drugs, alcohol, dissipation, and failed marriages, or despair that led to suicide.
Other writers have attracted biographers more interested in cashing in on their subjects’ fame than in shedding light on it. Their lives may have been inspiring, but the books about them aren’t.
A brilliant writer who found a worthy biographer
George Eliot was one of the lucky ones — a brilliant writer found a biographer worthy of her in a Yale University English professor. Gordon Haight’s masterly George Eliot: A Biography has stood for decades as a model of the form.
“What Middlemarch is to the English novel this biography is to George Eliot,” a critic for the…
