George Eliot’s Originals and Contemporaries: Essays in Victorian Literary History and Biography

The late Gordon S. Haight is best known as the authoritative biographer of George Eliot and editor of her correspondence. This book gathers fourteen of his most important shorter studies of the lives and works of Victorian authors and artists, among them George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, George Meredith, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and G. F. Watts. Six of the essays consider George Eliot’s fictional characters and their originals or real-life models. In these studies, Haight applies his biographical research to the novels and stories, often developing his interpretative arguments in greater detail than was possible in George Elliot: A Biography. Eight of the essays discuss eminent contemporaries of Eliot and Lewes. Several of these pieces, such as the studies of Tennyson, Browning, and male chastity in the nineteenth century, reveal new and unexpected facets of Haight’s indefatigable investigation of Victorian literary culture.