Rosemary Ashton

Here she boarded uncomfortably with publisher John Chapman (who was not yet thirty). She had an intense relationship with him, his wife Susanna (who was older than her husband, and supplemented the family income by...

Rosemary Ashton , biographer of GE , says there is no evidence whether or how much GE regretted the childlessness which she chose because of law and social prejudice. After Lewes told his three sons...

The critical tide did not turn (despite some acute criticism from Virginia Woolf , who called Middlemarchthe magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up...

Ashton discerns here the influence of Jane Austen , but she deals with a wider social range and, unlike her predecessor, hints at dialect in the speech of her rustic characters. But perhaps the...

As she began to form intellectual friendships, her letters became a record of her critical and literary mind. Biographer Rosemary Ashton traces her fictional side to a letter she addressed to Charles Bray in October...