Jane Austen and George Eliot

In October1851, a chance meeting in a Piccadilly bookshop changed the course of literaryhistory. For it was here that Mary Ann Evans, an unworldly young scholar, wasintroduced to the love of her life, the critic George Lewes. Encouraged andsupported by Lewes, Evans became the queen of literary London under her penname, George Eliot.

In nurturingEliot's talent, Lewes drew inspiration from the works of an unfashionableauthor of the previous generation by the name of Jane Austen. On the face ofit, Austen and Eliot had little in common. Jane Austen was a genteel spinsterwho spent her life in Hampshire, painting Regency domestic dramas with delicateirony and unfailing charm. George Eliot, meanwhile, was a radical intellectualwho lived scandalously with a married man, travelled widely in Europe anddocumented with stirring realism the social upheavals of her age.

And yet, whenGeorge Eliot embarked on her career as an author in the late 1850s, the worksof Jane Austen were at her side, feeding her imagination. Separated by time,circumstance and temperament, the two writers nevertheless had a vital impetusin common: to prove the value of a woman's eye in a man's world.

Packed withquotes from letters, diaries and the nation's favourite novels, this livelyhistory traces the surprising connections between two of our brightest literarystars and shows, for the first time, how each can be illuminated by the other'slight.

EdwardWhitley first became interested in the works of Jane Austen and George Eliot asan undergraduate at Oxford. His lifelong project has been to re-read andre-examine their novels in the context of each other. Edward's previous booksinclude The Graduates, a collection of interviews which was a PrivateEye Book of the Year, and Gerald Durrell's Army, a traveloguesetting out the battle to save rare animals from extinction. This inspired himto launch the Whitley Awards, which fund wildlife conservation worldwide. In2013, Edward was given the OBE for his work, and to mark the 30th anniversaryof the Whitley Awards he was interviewed by Sir David Attenborough.

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