Ronda! ... : ... a great place in Spain. It was loved by Ernest Hemingway (those fabulous cliffs are thought to have inspired the ending of For Whom the Bell Tolls) and it's the place from which Eliot's hero derives his surname ("Daniel of Ronda"). It really is a beautiful place. Everyone should ...
I am not, I must confess, terribly fond of Englishness. I suppose that being English I find it too familiar, and therefore unexciting. Or perhaps it is the case that my tough upbringing worked on me as a kind of aversion therapy, so that everything connected with my homeland strikes me as unappea...
It has been over two years since I read Middlemarch, a novel that propelled George Eliot to near the top of my list of favourite authors. With a keen wit and a deft pen, Eliot manages to lie bare the substance of rural English life in a way that allows her to comment on issues that matter to al...
If you’re looking to read your first George Eliot, don’t start with Romola. In 1866, Henry James called it Eliot’s greatest novel to date (and that means greater than The Mill on the Floss, which opinion is goofy). “It is decidedly the most important,” he wrote of the novel, “--not the most enter...