
George Eliot
The Last Victorian
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Narrated by:
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Nadia May
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By:
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Kathryn Hughes
About this listen
Kathryn Hughes has wrought a balanced, sympathetic, and intensely engaging biography, the first to grapple equally with the personal dramas that shaped Eliot's psyche and with her broader social and intellectual milieu. A lively portrait emerges of a woman and writer by turns ambitious and insecure, cerebral and earthy, provocative and conservative - contradictions which not only express the spirit of Eliot's time, but speak eloquently to our own.
©1998 Kathryn Hughes (P)2000 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Romola
- By: George Eliot
- Narrated by: Lucy Scott
- Length: 22 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Set in the turbulent years following the death of Lorenzo de' Medici, George Eliot's fourth novel, Romola, moves the stage from the English countryside of the 19th century to an Italy four centuries before her time. It tells the tale of a young Florentine woman, Romola de' Bardi, and her coming of age through her troubled marriage to the suave and self-absorbed Greek Tito. Slowly Tito's true character begins to unfurl, and his lies and treachery push Romola toward a more spiritual path, where she transcends into a majestic, Madonna-like role.
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Listened to it 4 times in a row
- By Theodoc on 12-14-21
By: George Eliot
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The Mill on the Floss
- By: George Eliot
- Narrated by: Fiona Shaw
- Length: 20 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Mill on the Floss is one of the great works of English literature. It is perhaps the most autobiographical of all Eliot's novels. The relationship between its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, and her brother, Tom, closely resembles that of George Eliot and her own brother, Isaac. The subject of sibling affection was clearly a deeply poignant one for George Eliot - she also wrote a series of beautiful and evocative sonnets entitled 'Brother and Sister'.
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Fiona Shaw makes George Eliot endurable
- By Starr on 04-21-16
By: George Eliot
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My Name Is Barbra
- By: Barbra Streisand
- Narrated by: Barbra Streisand
- Length: 48 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Barbra Streisand is by any account a living legend, a woman who in a career spanning six decades has excelled in every area of entertainment. She is among the handful of EGOT winners (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) and has one of the greatest and most recognizable voices in the history of popular music. She has been nominated for a Grammy 46 times, and with Yentl she became the first woman to write, produce, direct, and star in a major motion picture. In My Name Is Barbra, she tells her own story about her life and extraordinary career.
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BARBRA IS LIKE BUTTAH!
- By JoeGato57 on 11-08-23
By: Barbra Streisand
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Scenes of Clerical Life
- By: George Eliot
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- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, through vignettes of his life, portrays a character who is hard to like and easy to ridicule. Many people do ridicule as well as slander and despise him, until his suffering shocks them into fellowship and sympathy.
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The first work...from a very old soul
- By Theodoc on 04-07-21
By: George Eliot
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Charlotte Brontë
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Charlotte Brontë's life contained all the drama and tragedy of the great Gothic novels it inspired. Like Jane Eyre, she was raised motherless on remote Yorkshire moors and sent away to a brutally strict boarding school at a young age. Charlotte grew up and watched helplessly as, one by one, her five beloved siblings sickened and died; by the end of her short life, she was the only child of the Brontë clan remaining.
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Clear-Eyed Bio of Literature's Most Elusive Figure
- By wally on 09-02-16
By: Claire Harman
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The Forgotten Locket
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Tara Richards was just a girl when she lost her mother. Years later, when Tara receives a letter from a London solicitor, its contents shake her to the core. Someone has left her a key to a safe deposit box. In the box lies an object that will change everything Tara thought she knew and lead her on a journey to deepest Spain in search of the answers that have haunted her for 40 years. Violet Skye regrets her decision to travel abroad leaving her young daughter behind. As the sun dips below the mountains, she reminds herself she is doing this for their future.
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Excellent character development
- By Mary Doyle on 01-14-20
By: Kathryn Hughes
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Romola
- By: George Eliot
- Narrated by: Lucy Scott
- Length: 22 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Set in the turbulent years following the death of Lorenzo de' Medici, George Eliot's fourth novel, Romola, moves the stage from the English countryside of the 19th century to an Italy four centuries before her time. It tells the tale of a young Florentine woman, Romola de' Bardi, and her coming of age through her troubled marriage to the suave and self-absorbed Greek Tito. Slowly Tito's true character begins to unfurl, and his lies and treachery push Romola toward a more spiritual path, where she transcends into a majestic, Madonna-like role.
-
-
Listened to it 4 times in a row
- By Theodoc on 12-14-21
By: George Eliot
-
The Mill on the Floss
- By: George Eliot
- Narrated by: Fiona Shaw
- Length: 20 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Mill on the Floss is one of the great works of English literature. It is perhaps the most autobiographical of all Eliot's novels. The relationship between its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, and her brother, Tom, closely resembles that of George Eliot and her own brother, Isaac. The subject of sibling affection was clearly a deeply poignant one for George Eliot - she also wrote a series of beautiful and evocative sonnets entitled 'Brother and Sister'.
-
-
Fiona Shaw makes George Eliot endurable
- By Starr on 04-21-16
By: George Eliot
-
My Name Is Barbra
- By: Barbra Streisand
- Narrated by: Barbra Streisand
- Length: 48 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Barbra Streisand is by any account a living legend, a woman who in a career spanning six decades has excelled in every area of entertainment. She is among the handful of EGOT winners (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) and has one of the greatest and most recognizable voices in the history of popular music. She has been nominated for a Grammy 46 times, and with Yentl she became the first woman to write, produce, direct, and star in a major motion picture. In My Name Is Barbra, she tells her own story about her life and extraordinary career.
-
-
BARBRA IS LIKE BUTTAH!
- By JoeGato57 on 11-08-23
By: Barbra Streisand
-
Scenes of Clerical Life
- By: George Eliot
- Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, through vignettes of his life, portrays a character who is hard to like and easy to ridicule. Many people do ridicule as well as slander and despise him, until his suffering shocks them into fellowship and sympathy.
-
-
The first work...from a very old soul
- By Theodoc on 04-07-21
By: George Eliot
-
Charlotte Brontë
- A Fiery Heart
- By: Claire Harman
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 16 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Charlotte Brontë's life contained all the drama and tragedy of the great Gothic novels it inspired. Like Jane Eyre, she was raised motherless on remote Yorkshire moors and sent away to a brutally strict boarding school at a young age. Charlotte grew up and watched helplessly as, one by one, her five beloved siblings sickened and died; by the end of her short life, she was the only child of the Brontë clan remaining.
-
-
Clear-Eyed Bio of Literature's Most Elusive Figure
- By wally on 09-02-16
By: Claire Harman
-
The Forgotten Locket
- By: Kathryn Hughes
- Narrated by: Rachel Atkins
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tara Richards was just a girl when she lost her mother. Years later, when Tara receives a letter from a London solicitor, its contents shake her to the core. Someone has left her a key to a safe deposit box. In the box lies an object that will change everything Tara thought she knew and lead her on a journey to deepest Spain in search of the answers that have haunted her for 40 years. Violet Skye regrets her decision to travel abroad leaving her young daughter behind. As the sun dips below the mountains, she reminds herself she is doing this for their future.
-
-
Excellent character development
- By Mary Doyle on 01-14-20
By: Kathryn Hughes
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Jane Austen: A Life from Beginning to End
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- Length: 1 hr and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jane Austen wrote that in her novels she painted the world on a “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory,” working “with so fine a brush.” Her well-known books, such as Pride and Prejudice and Emma, display the power of this approach; her observations about human nature have proven so accurate and entertaining that her books continue to be beloved 200 years after they were written.
By: Hourly History
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Adam Bede
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- Length: 20 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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George Eliot's first full-length novel Adam Bede is a profound rendering of 19th century English pastoral life. This timeless story of seduction and betrayal follows the virtuous carpenter Adam Bede, whose world is soon disrupted when the all-too-beautiful Hetty betrays him for another villager. Her actions precipitate a turmoil of tragic events that shake the very foundations of their serene rural community.
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Great narration
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By: George Eliot
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Edith Wharton
- By: Hermione Lee
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
With profound empathy and insight, Hermione Lee brilliantly interweaves Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age. In its revelation of both the woman and the writer, Edith Wharton is a landmark biography.
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Gardens Over Great Novels
- By Aaron Elliott on 04-26-07
By: Hermione Lee
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Middlemarch
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- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 35 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Dorothea Brooke is an ardent idealist who represses her vivacity and intelligence for the cold, theological pedant Casaubon. One man understands her true nature: the artist Will Ladislaw. But how can love triumph against her sense of duty and Casaubon’s mean spirit? Meanwhile, in the little world of Middlemarch, the broader world is mirrored: the world of politics, social change, and reforms, as well as betrayal, greed, blackmail, ambition, and disappointment.
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Best Audible book ever
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By: George Eliot
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Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
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- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Across two parallel narratives, Murakami draws listeners into a mind-bending universe in which Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. What emerges is a novel that is at once hilariously funny and a deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind.
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Highly recommend
- By Amazon Customer on 07-23-18
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Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are unquestionably two of the greatest epic masterpieces in Western literature. Though more than 2,700 years old, their stories of brave heroics, capricious gods, and towering human emotions are vividly timeless. The Iliad can justly be called the world’s greatest war epic. The terrible and long-drawn-out siege of Troy remains one of the classic campaigns. The Odyssey chronicles the many trials and adventures Odysseus must pass through on his long journey home from the Trojan wars to his beloved wife.
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Oddball Translation
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By: Homer, and others
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Shakespeare
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William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.
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Too Little, Too Short
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The Enlightenment
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- Unabridged
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This magisterial history - sure to become the definitive work on the subject - recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness.
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The quickest 40 hour audio book I’ve listen to
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Twilight of Democracy
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Performance
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From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy. In this captivating essay, she contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else.
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Modern Dictators & President who wants to be them
- By AJ on 07-23-20
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A Mystery of Mysteries
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- By: Mark Dawidziak
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- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Mystery and horror. Poe, who remains one of the most iconic of American writers, died under haunting circumstances that reflect the two literary genres he took to new heights. Over the years, there has been a staggering amount of speculation about the cause of death, from rabies and syphilis to suicide, alcoholism, and even murder. But many of these theories are formed on the basis of the caricature we have come to associate with Poe: the gloomy-eyed grandfather of Goth, hunched over a writing desk with a raven perched on one shoulder, drunkenly scribbling his chilling masterpieces.
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Jumps Around too much
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One of Jane Austen's most popular novels. Arrogant, self-willed, and egotistical, Emma is her most unusual heroine.
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Wonderful listen
- By A. Bloom on 08-07-08
By: Jane Austen
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Silas Marner
- By: George Eliot
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- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Here is a tale straight from the fireside. We are compelled to follow the humble and mysterious figure of the linen weaver Silas Marner, on his journey from solitude and exile to the warmth and joy of family life. His path is a strange one; when he loses his hoard of hard-earned coins all seems to be lost, but in place of the golden guineas come the golden curls of a child - and from desolate misery comes triumphant joy.
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Too busy to read Middlemarch?
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By: George Eliot
Critic reviews
"[Hughes] brings a sense of close familiarity with this private, inward woman....a refreshingly intimate portrait."( Kirkus Reviews)
"This work is intelligent, adept, and full of insight. Nadia May's narration is clear and precise; a welcome addition to public libraries." ( Library Journal)
What listeners say about George Eliot
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- rrs2
- 04-05-25
Quality of the reading and the writing is a fitting tribute to the great lady of letters.
Whatever sardonic, ironic, metaphoric intent by the author was expertly expressed and executed by the reader. As fine as Julia Stephenson’s rendering of ‘Middlemarch’, et al. Giving the right voice to one still living, may be at least as difficult, and certainly more dangerous, than to one long departed.
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- Grant
- 01-31-23
Rather rough on her subject.
in her determination not to canonize George Eliot as a Saint, Hughes swings a bit too far the other way. still, well-written and well-performed.
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- D-RO
- 10-06-22
insightful and fascinating
Although good emough to stand on it own, im glad I read this biography after reading most of Eliots novels. The analysis in this book really added depth of my understanding of the novels.
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-17-22
A Life Worthy of its Subject
Beautifully written & read w/ grace, penetration, & balance. If Eliot's work has touched & instructed you, so will this telling of the life which created it.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Roe
- 10-07-16
petty.
depressing that this is the only Eliot biography on audible. This writer isn't fleshing out Eliot's human side; she's imputing motives at every turn without giving references, and giving every act and word the last charitable imaginable interpretation. This is scarcely more nuanced than calling her a saint and leaving it there.
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- Kathleen McKinney
- 05-29-12
Wonderful narrator but that's all...
I was attracted by "The Last Victorian" in the title, and the narrator, Nadia May, who is matchless; I love anything she narrates as a rule. However, this is the first book I ever purchased from Audible that I couldn't finish. Maybe the fact that I am not a fan of George Eliot is a factor, but honestly, this is one of the most boring books ever. Ms. May narrates with her usual skill, but this is like making bricks without straw. It goes on far too long & I think I gave up just b/4 the midway point. Ms. Eliot did have some love affairs but even then, this is dull in the retelling. If you can't sleep, put this one on and I would almost bet it will send you off to dreamland in a trice.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Steve Dukes
- 08-22-23
Don’t pass this way…
The negativity and fearfulness of the author reminded me of an opposing attorney in a protracted custody case. It’s important to show the worst side of the other party, using whatever means necessary.
That’s sad, too, because the book is so well researched.
I take pride in my ability to process the abstruse and tolerate the literarily unconscionable, but after 25% of this…I could not stomach anymore.
Read Eliot’s 7 novels and first collection of short stories. That would be more healthful…
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