George Eliot in society : travels abroad and Sundays at the Priory / Kathleen McCormack.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McCormack, Kathleen, 1944-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Eliot, George, 1819-1880.

Eliot, George.

Novelists, English--19th century--Biography.

Novelists, English.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xiii, 178 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Columbus : Ohio State University Press, [2013]

Summary:

Sundays at the Priory, the salons that George Eliot and George Henry Lewes conducted throughout the winter seasons during their later years in the 1870s, have generally earned descriptions as at once scandalous and dull, with few women in attendance, and guests approaching the Sibyl one by one to express their almost pious devotion. But both the guest lists of the salons-which include significant numbers of women, a substantial gay and lesbian contingent, and a group of singers who performed repeatedly-together with the couple's frequent travels to European spas, where they encountered many of the guests likely to visit the Priory, revise the conclusion that George Eliot lived her entire life as an ostracized recluse. Instead, newly mined sources reveal George Eliot as a member of a large and elite, if slightly Bohemian, international social circle in which she moved as a literary celebrity and through which she stimulated her creative imagination as she composed her later poetry and fiction. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: the big "S"

Travels abroad : taking the waters

Months of Sundays

Between Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda : singers, lovers, and others

The salons, the spas, and Daniel Deronda

John Cross and the last spa.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 157-167) and index.

ISBN:

9780814212110

0814212115

9780814293133

0814293131

OCLC:

811777509