Many literary masterpieces are long and wordy, But reading them can bring surprising benefits, beyond sheer pleasure. Here’s how to tackle the classics.
Articles on George Eliot
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George Eliot saw literature as uniquely capable of extending our sympathies, but her work engaged deeply with scientific questions too.
School can turn classic books into a chore. Rereading Eliot or Austen or Shakespeare as we grow older, we can see how we have grown as imaginative, moral beings.
In George Eliot’s masterpiece of 19th century realism, characters are confronted with the limits of their individual capacities and visions.
Books that will bring the beauty of Derbyshire’s rolling hills alive.
By the standards of the day, Ulysses was extremely sexually explicit.
This beautiful and sophisticated work is one of the best-loved, most enduring pieces in piano repertoire.
From Emile Brontë’s West York Moors to the mining town where DW Lawrence set Sons and Lovers, there is much literary heritage to be discovered all over the UK.
There are reasons many female writers chose to publish under male pseudonyms. Republishing their books under their female names denies them agency.
The Women’s Prize for Fiction has just published 25 literary works by female authors with their real names for the first time. Could we do the same for Miles Franklin and Henry Handel Richardson here?
Moral prudishness pushed Thomas Hardy and George Eliot to develop more creative and thoughtful writing practices.
And every one of them has a happy ending.
Henry James called her a ‘great, horse-faced bluestocking’. On the 200th anniversary of her birth, we celebrate George Eliot, a literary trailblazer with an endless appetite for ideas, living in a patriarchal time.
Born the same year as Queen Victoria, Eliot faced similar life choices to many young women today
From Tolstoy to Mark Twain, the most famous writers owe many words of thanks to their long-suffering wives.
Like it or not, the literary canon is part of the cultural capital of the West. Universities that choose not to teach it – or refuse to critically engage with it – are actually disempowering students.
Top contributors
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Professor in Politics and Journalism, University of Notre Dame Australia
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Associate Professor, Literature, Western Civilisation Program, Australian Catholic University
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PhD Candidate, Literary Heritage, Nottingham Trent University
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Doctoral Researcher in department of English Literature, Loughborough University
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Lecturer, English Literature (Specialist in Victorian Literature and Alcohol), University of Bristol
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Associate Professor Piano Division, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney
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Professor of Literary Studies, UNSW
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PhD Candidate in English Literature, University of Reading
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Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London
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Lecturer, The University of Western Australia
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Professor of Modern Literature, University of East Anglia