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Summary  |  Author  |  Book Reviews  |  Discussion Questions

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Hotel du Lac
Anita Brookner, 1984
Knopf Doubleday
184 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679759324

In Brief  
Winner, 1984 Booker Prize

In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Why love?" It tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a psudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to resore her to her senses.

But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive. (From the publisher.)

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About the Author 

• Birth—July 16, 1928
• Where—Herne Hill (outside London), UK
• Education—B.A., Kings College; Ph.D. Courtauld Institute of 
  Art (London)
• Awards—Booker Prize, 1984
• Currently—lives in the UK

Anita Brookner is the author of twenty beautifully crafted novels, including Falling Slowly, Undue Influence, and Hotel du Lac, which won the Booker Prize. An international authority on eighteenth-century painting, she became the first female Slade Professor at Cambride University. She lives in London.

More
Anita Brookner is an English novelist and art historian. Her father, Newson Bruckner, was a Polish immigrant, and her mother, Maude Schiska, was a singer whose father had emigrated from Poland and founded a tobacco factory. Maude changed the family's surname to Brookner owing to anti-German sentiment in England. Anita Brookner had a lonely childhood, although her grandmother and uncle lived with the family, and her parents, secular Jews, opened their house to Jewish refugees escaping Nazi persecution during the 1930s and World War II. Brookner, an only child, has never married and took care of her parents as they aged.

Brookner was educated at James Allen's Girls' School. She received a BA in History from King's College London in 1949, and a doctorate in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1953. In 1967 she became the first woman to hold the Slade professorship at Cambridge University. She was promoted to Reader at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1977, where she worked until her retirement in 1988. Brookner was made a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 1990. She is a Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge.

Brookner published her first novel, A Start In Life, in 1981 at the age of 53. Since then she has published approximately a novel every year; her fourth book, Hotel Du Lac, published in 1984, won the Booker Prize.

Brookner is highly regarded as a stylist. Her fiction, which has been heavily influenced by her own life experiences, explores themes of isolation, emotional loss and difficulties associated with 'fitting in' in English society. Her novels typically depict intellectual, middle-class women, who suffer isolation, emotional loss and disappointments in love. Many of Brookner's characters are the children of European immigrants who experience difficulties with fitting into English life; a number of characters appear to be of Jewish descent.
(From Wikipedia.)

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Critics Say . . . 
(Older works have few, in any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble customer reviews for helpful ones.)
 
One of Brookner’s earliest works, and some think her finest, this slender book contains some beautiful and very funny writing. Edith Hope, a romance novelist, who writes “under a more thrusting name” (oh, really, that is so good), finds herself exiled to a posh but sedate Swiss hotel.
A LitLovers LitPick (Aug. '07)

Brookner's most absorbing novel…wryly realistic…graceful and attractive.
Anne Tyler - The New York Times Book Review

The winner of the 1984 Booker Prize, this novel tells the story of Edith Hope, 40, unmarried and distraught over a failed love, who is persuaded by friends to go to the quiet, respectable Hotel du Lac in Switzerland. A writer of romantic fiction, Hope becomes enmeshed in the lives of the other guests. Noting that the delivery was perhaps more important than specific events, an earlier PW review called Brookner "insidiously observant, so soft of voice the reader must listen closely for the wry wit and sly humor. She is poignantly moving."
Publishers Weekly

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Book Club Discussion Questions 

1. Edith describes her own personality as "rather dim and trusting" [p. 9]. Do the events of the book bear her assessment out, or does her character prove to be darker and more subversive than she herself might care to admit? Is her willingness to be commandeered by Mrs. Pusey, Monica, or Penelope an indication of passivity, or does it represent a need in its own right?

2. What the Hotel du Lac offers, Edith says, is "a mild form of sanctuary" [p. 14], but she later refers to it as an "institution" [p. 106]. Which comparison is more accurate? Have the Englishwomen at the hotel been cast off, as Edith suggests, or are they seeking refuge?

3. Is Edith an "unreliable narrator"—that is, do we have to be wary of taking her narration and interpretation of events at face value? Are there areas of her life about which she is not willing to tell the truth, even in this intimate narrative? If so, is this apparent only when we look at her letters to David? Can the letters be seen as an edited version of the "truthful" story given the reader, or is the narrative itself unreliable and evasive?

4. How much about David's character can be gleaned from Brookner's narrative? Why is a man of David's type so attractive to Edith? Is his very inaccessibility part of the attraction? What sort of marriage do David and his wife share?

5. Edith's friends accuse her of being a romantic. Do you find this assessment to be accurate? Why has Edith chosen to be a writer of romance novels, and how does this choice affect her actions? How does the "romance" theme fit into Brookner's ending? Is Edith's return to David at the end of the novel a romantic or an anti-romantic gesture? Do you believe that once Edith returns to London, she will continue to produce the same type of fiction?

6. Edith tells Mr. Neville that she thinks about happiness "all the time" [p. 94]. She also sketches out for him her own idea of happiness. Does Mr. Neville, in spite of his failure to win her over to his way of thinking, nonetheless influence her in making her adjust her ideas of happiness in the direction of his own? Is the ideal of "happiness" as central to her life after her encounter with him as it was before? Has her definition of it changed?

7. In her dealings with Monica and with Iris and Jennifer Pusey, Edith adopts the stance of an ironic observer who sees all the grotesque elements of the people around her. Do you believe these people to be as grotesque and ridiculous as Edith describes them, or are we perhaps seeing them through Edith's own distorting lens? If so, why does Edith feel the need to distance people and make them less human? Does Edith intentionally attach herself to people such as Penelope—apparently her best friend but whom she also deeply scorns—who make her feel superior? How much real insight do you think Edith has into Penelope's character? Does Edith tend to "make up" characters not only in her fiction but in her own life? What about Geoffrey Long? Are we, as readers, ever accorded a glimpse of Geoffrey as a real person who feels pain or love? Why does Edith feel compelled to mock him?

8. How has Edith's unhappy childhood contributed toward making her who she is as an adult? It is clear that her mother has warped her feelings. In what way has Edith accepted the definitions of sex, femininity, and motherhood offered by her mother? Is her dislike of other women a legacy from her mother, or is it due to real duplicity and competitiveness in the women of her acquaintance? Is the apparently strong bond between Iris and Jennifer finally attractive to Edith, or does she find it fearsome and devouring?

9. "To Penelope, men were conquests, attributes, but they were also enemies.... She considered men to be a contemptible sex" [pp. 57-58]. Penelope and Edith's other women friends in London play a conventional sexual game with very firm though unwritten "rules." What are those rules and in what way has Edith transgressed them? Is Edith doomed to remain an emotional outsider unless she conforms to these rules?

10. One technique that Brookner utilizes expertly is that of making the landscape and the weather mirror the central character's feelings. How is this technique employed in Hotel du Lac? Is the landscape, including the hotel itself, a blank slate on which Edith imposes her own emotions, or does its peculiar character actually impose itself upon Edith's own mind?

11. Edith spends much space in her letters to David describing people's clothing. What does this emphasis say about Edith's relationship with David? Edith believes that her "brief" for David is "to amuse, to divert, to relax" [p. 114]. What does this tell us about David and about Edith herself? Why does Edith feel unable to mail her letters to David? Why, knowing that she will not mail them, does she feel compelled to write them? How does the letter announcing her engagement to Neville differ from the earlier ones in tone and content? In her telegram to David at the end of the novel, why does Edith change the words "coming home" to "returning" [p. 184]?

12. Edith's friends tell her that she looks like Virginia Woolf, and this resemblance has colored her own view of herself. What does Virginia Woolf represent to Edith? Why is this resemblance flattering to her? What emotional limitations does it encourage her to give in to? What is the significance of Edith's pen name, Vanessa Wilde?

13. Though Edith seldom discusses sex even with herself, sex is at the novel's very core. How have Edith's sexual feelings molded her life? How do they lead to her final decision? What importance does sex have in Edith's relationships with Neville and with Geoffrey? How does the consciousness of sex affect her dealings with the women characters in the book?

14. The first few pages of Edith's narrative contain sidelong references to works by Yeats, Eliot, Shakespeare, and other authors. What does Brookner reveal about Edith's character by giving her this propensity?

15. Edith readily admits to preferring men to women, but as the novel progresses, we see the beginnings of a more inclusive, sophisticated attitude, a willingness to include women in her emotional world, even to offer them her friendship. How does this manifest itself in the text?

16. What does Edith's final decision to go back to David signify? Do you believe that it constitutes triumph, defeat, or resignation for Edith? In rejecting Neville, what interpretation of herself does she reject? What longed-for things does she give up? You might want to refer to another of Anita Brookner's recent novels, Lewis Percy, which handles a similar situation; the novels of Barbara Pym are also of interest in examining such questions.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Olive Kitteridge 
Elizabeth Strout, 2008
Random House
286 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812971835

Summary 
Winner, 2009 Pulitizer Prize

At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large.

But she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.

As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life–sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition–its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—January 6, 1956
• Where—Portland, Maine, USA
• Education—B.A., Bates College; J.D. and Certificate of Gerontology, Syracuse University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, and in Maine.

Elizabeth Strout is an American writer of fiction. She was born in Portland, Maine, and raised in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire. Her father was a science professor, and her mother taught high school.

After graduating from Bates College, Strout spent a year in Oxford, England, followed by studies at law school for another year. In 1982 she graduated with honors, and received both a law degree from the Syracuse University College of Law and a Certificate of Gerontology from the Syracuse School of Social Work. That year her first story was published in New Letters magazine.

Strout moved to New York City, and continued to write stories that were published in literary magazines, as well as in Redbook and Seventeen. It took her six or seven years to write Amy and Isabelle, which when published was shortlisted for the 2000 Orange Prize and nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. The novel was made into a television movie starring Elisabeth Shue and produced by Oprah Winfrey's studio, Harpo Films.

During the fall semsester of 2007, Strout was a NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) professor at Colgate University, where she taught creative writing at both the introductory and advanced level. She was also on the faculty of the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In 2009 Strout was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Olive Kitteridge (2008), a collection of connected short stories about a woman and her immediate family and friends on the coast of Maine. In 2010, Italian booksellers voted Olive Kitteridge and Strout as the winner of the Premio Bancarella award in the medieval Piazza della Repubblica in Pontremoli, Italy. Her new book, The Burgess Boys, was published in 2013.

Strout is married to former Maine Attorney General James Tierney, who currently serves as the Director of the National State Attorney General Program at Columbia Law School. She divides her time between New York and Maine. (From Wikipedia.)

Extras
From a 2006 Barnes & Noble interview:

• My first job was when I was about 12, cleaning houses in the afternoons for different elderly women in town. I hated it. I would be so bored scrubbing at some kitchen tile, that my mind would finally float all over the place, to the beach, to a friend's house...all this happened in my mind as I scrubbed those tiles, so it was certainly good for my imagination. But I did hate it."

• Without a doubt my mother was an inspiration for my writing. This is true in many ways, but mostly because she is a wonderful storyteller, without even knowing it. I would listen, as a child, when some friend of hers came to visit, and they would gossip about the different people they knew. My mother had the most fascinating stories about people's families, murderers, mental illnesses, babies abandoned, and she delivered it all in a matter-of-fact way that was terribly compelling. It made me believe that there was nothing more interesting than the lives of people, their real hidden lives, and this of course can lead one down the path of becoming a fiction writer.

• Later, in college, one of my favorite things was to go into town and sit at the counter at Woolworth's (so tragic to have them gone!) and listen to people talking; the waitresses and the customers — I loved it. I still love to eavesdrop, but mostly I like the idea of being around people who are right in the middle of their lives, revealing certain details to each other — leaving the rest for me to make up.

• I love theater. I love sitting in an audience and having the actors right there, playing out what it means to be a human being. There is something about the actual relationship that is going on between the audience and the actors that I just love. I love seeing the sets and costumes, the decisions that have been made about the staging...it's a place for the eye and the ear to be fully involved. I have always loved theater."

• I also like cell phones. What I mean by that is I hear many people complain about cell phones; they can't go anywhere without hearing someone on a cell phone, etc. But I love that chance to hear half a conversation, even if the person is just saying, ‘Hi honey, I'll be home in ten minutes, do you want me to bring some milk?' And I'm also grateful to have a cell phone, just to know it's there if I need it when I'm out and about. So I'm a cell phone fan.

• I don't especially like to travel, not the way many people do. I know many people that love to go to far-off and different places, and I've never been like that. I seem to get homesick as quickly as a child. I may like being in some new place for a few days, but then I want to go home and return to my routine and my familiar corner stores. I am a real creature of habit, without a doubt.

• When asked what book most inluenced her life as a writer, she answered:

Perhaps the book that had the greatest influence on my career as a writer was The Journals of John Cheever. Of course many, many books had influenced me before I read that, but there was something about the honesty found in Cheever's journals that gave me courage as a writer. And his ability to turn a phrase, to describe in a breath the beauty of a rainstorm or the fog rising off the river... all this arrived in my life as a writer at a time when I seemed ready to absorb his examples of what a sentence can do when written with the integrity of emotion and felicity of language. 

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Book Reviews 
Strout's previous novels, Abide with Me and Amy and Isabelle, were also set in New England and explored similar themes: family dynamics, small-town gossip, grief. Those books were good; this one is better. It manages to combine the sustained, messy investigation of the novel with the flashing insight of the short story. By its very structure, sliding in and out of different tales and different perspectives, it illuminates both what people understand about others and what they understand about themselves.
Louisa Thomas - New York Times

There are glimmers of warmth, of human connection, in even the darkest of these stories. Strout's benevolence toward her characters forms a slender bridge between heartbreak and hope, a dimly glimpsed path through minefields of despair. The stifled sorrows she writes of here are as real as our own, and as tenderly, compassionately understood.
Molly Gloss - Washington Post

Funny, wicked and remorseful, Mrs. Kitteridge is a compelling life force, a red-blooded original. When she’s not onstage, we look forward to her return. The book is a page-turner because of her.
San Francisco Chronicle

Perceptive, deeply empathetic . . . Olive is the axis around which these thirteen complex, relentlessly human narratives spin themselves into Elizabeth Strout’s unforgettable novel in stories.
O, The Oprah Magazine

The whitecaps in the harbor, some familiar piano chords, the doughnut a man brings to his wife after visiting his lover—Strout animates the ordinary with an astonishing force. These linked stories introduce the inhabitants of Crosby, Maine, where the pull of domestic tragedy is stronger for rarely being spoken of. Angela doesn’t mention the bruises she’s noticed on her mother’s arm at the nursing home; Marlene learns of her husband’s infidelity only after his funeral; Kevin plans to shoot himself, like his mother before him. And there in every story, like a tree that’s been blackened by lightning but still leafs in the spring, stands Olive Kitteridge, a retired math teacher who loves her tulips, bullies her husband, and barks at anyone foolish enough to irritate her. You loathe this woman at the book’s beginning; you long for her at its finish. Strout makes us experience not only the terrors of change but also the terrifying hope that change can bring: she plunges us into these churning waters and we come up gasping for air.
The New Yorker

(Starred review.) Thirteen linked tales from Strout present a heart-wrenching, penetrating portrait of ordinary coastal Mainers living lives of quiet grief intermingled with flashes of human connection.... [T]he collection is easy to read and impossible to forget. Its literary craft and emotional power will surprise readers unfamiliar with Strout.
Publishers Weekly

Strout tracks Olive Kitteridge's adult life through 13 linked stories.... Even when Olive is kept in the background of some of the tales, her influence is apparent. Readers will have to decide for themselves whether it's worth the ride to the last few pages to witness Olive's slide into something resembling insight. —Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Though loneliness and loss haunt these pages, Strout also supplies gentle humor and a nourishing dose of hope. —Mary Ellen Quinn
Booklist

The abrasive, vulnerable title character sometimes stands center stage, sometimes plays a supporting role in these 13 sharply observed dramas of small-town life from Strout... Strout's sensitive insights and luminous prose affirm life's pleasures.... A perfectly balanced portrait of the human condition, encompassing plenty of anger, cruelty and loss without ever losing sight of the equally powerful presences of tenderness, shared pursuits and lifelong loyalty.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
1. Do you sympathize with Olive Kitteridge as a character?

2. Have you ever met anyone like Olive Kitteridge, and if so, what similarities do you see between that person and Olive?

3. How would you say Olive changed as a person during the course of the book?

4. Discuss the theme of suicide. Which characters are most affected (or fascinated) by the idea of killing themselves?

5. What freedoms do the residents of Crosby, Maine, experience in contrast with those who flee the town for bigger “ponds” (California, New York)? Does anyone feel trapped in Crosby, and if so, who? What outlets for escape are available to them?

6. Why does Henry tolerate Olive as much as he does, catering to her, agreeing with her, staying even-keeled when she rants and raves? Is there anyone that you tolerate despite their sometimes overbearing behavior? If so, why?

7. How does Kevin (in “Incoming Tide”) typify a child craving his father’s approval? Are his behaviors and mannerisms any way like those of Christopher Kitteridge? Do you think Olive reminds Kevin more of his mother or of his father?

8. In “A Little Burst,” why do you think Olive is so keen on having a positive relationship with Suzanne, whom she obviously dislikes? How is this a reflection of how she treats other people in town?

9. Does it seem fitting to you that Olive would not respond while others ridiculed her body and her choice of clothing at Christopher and Suzanne’s wedding?

10. How do you think Olive perceives boundaries and possessiveness, especially in regard to relationships?

11. Elizabeth Strout writes, “The appetites of the body were private battles” (“Starving,” page 89). In what ways is this true? Are there “appetites” that could be described as battles waged in public? Which ones, and why?

12. Why does Nina elicit such a strong reaction from Olive in “Starving”? What does Olive notice that moves her to tears in public? Why did witnessing this scene turn Harmon away from Bonnie?

13. In “A Different Road,” Strout writes about Olive and Henry: “No, they would never get over that night because they had said things that altered how they saw each other” (p. 124). What is it that Olive and Henry say to each other while being held hostage in the hospital bathroom that has this effect? Have you experienced a moment like this in one of your close relationships?

14. In “Tulips” and in “Basket of Trips,” Olive visits people in difficult circumstances (Henry in the convalescent home, and Marlene Bonney at her husband’s funeral) in hopes that “in the presence of someone else’s sorrow, a tiny crack of light would somehow come through her own dark encasement” (p. 172). In what ways do the tragedies of others shine light on Olive’s trials with Christopher’s departure and Henry’s illness? How do those experiences change Olive’s interactions with others? Is she more compassionate or more indifferent? Is she more approachable or more guarded? Is she more hopeful or more pessimistic?

15. In “Ship in a Bottle,” Julie is jilted by her fiancé, Bruce, on her wedding day. Julie’s mother, Anita, furious at Bruce’s betrayal, shoots at him soon after. Julie quotes Olive Kitteridge as having told her seventh-grade class, “Don’t be scared of your hunger. If you’re scared of your hunger, you’ll just be one more ninny like everyone else” (p. 195). What do you think Olive means by this phrase? How does Olive’s life reflect this idea? Who is afraid of his or her hunger in these stories?

16. In “Security,” do you get the impression that Olive likes Ann, Christopher’s new wife? Why does she excuse Ann’s smoking and drinking while pregnant with Christopher’s first child (and Henry’s first grandchild)? Why does she seem so accepting initially, and what makes her less so as the story goes on?

17. Was Christopher justified in his fight with Olive in “Security”? Did he kick her out, or did she voluntarily leave? Do you think he and Ann are cruel to Olive?

18. Do you think Olive is really oblivious to how others see her– especially Christopher? Do you think she found Christopher’s accusations in “Security” shocking or just unexpected?

19. What’s happened to Rebecca at the end of “Criminal”? Where do you think she goes, and why do you think she feels compelled to go? Do you think she’s satisfied with her life with David? What do you think are the reasons she can’t hold down a job?

20. What elements of Olive’s personality are revealed in her relationship with Jack Kennison in “River”? How does their interaction reflect changes in her perspective on her son? On the way she treated Henry? On the way she sees the world?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Middlemarch
George Eliot, 187-72
~800 pp. (varies by publisher)


Summary
Often called the greatest nineteenth-century British novelist, George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) created in Middlemarch a vast panorama of life in a provincial Midlands town.

At the story’s center stands the intellectual and idealistic Dorothea Brooke—a character who in many ways resembles Eliot herself. But the very qualities that set Dorothea apart from the materialistic, mean-spirited society around her also lead her into a disastrous marriage with a man she mistakes for her soul mate. In a parallel story, young doctor Tertius Lydgate, who is equally idealistic, falls in love with the pretty but vain and superficial Rosamund Vincy, whom he marries to his ruin.

Eliot surrounds her main figures with a gallery of characters drawn from every social class, from laborers and shopkeepers to the rising middle class to members of the wealthy, landed gentry. Together they form an extraordinarily rich and precisely detailed portrait of English provincial life in the 1830s.

But Dorothea’s and Lydgate’s struggles to retain their moral integrity in the midst of temptation and tragedy remind us that their world is very much like our own. Strikingly modern in its painful ironies and psychological insight, Middlemarch was pivotal in the shaping of twentieth-century literary realism. (From the Barnes & Noble edition.)

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Author Bio
• Aka—Mary Anne Evans
• Birth—November 22, 1819
• Where—Warwickshire, England, UK
• Death—December 22, 1880
• Where—London, England
• Education—private girls' schools from ages 5-16

Mary Anne Evans, better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era.

She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), Relix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and well known for their realism and psychological insight.

She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works were taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years.

Early life
Mary Anne Evans was the third child of Robert Evans (1773–1849) and Christiana Evans (nee Pearson), the daughter of a local farmer, (1788–1836). When born, Mary Anne, sometimes shortened to Marian, had two teenage siblings, a half-brother, Robert (1802–64), and sister, Fanny (1805–82), from her father's previous marriage to Harriet Poynton (?1780–1809).

Her father was the manager of the Arbury Hall Estate for the Newdigate family in Warwickshire, and Mary Anne was born on the estate at South Farm. In early 1820 the family moved to a house named Griff, between Nuneaton and Bedworth. Her full siblings were Christiana, known as Chrissey (1814–59), Isaac (1816–1890), and twin brothers who survived a few days in March 1821.

The young Evans was obviously intelligent and a voracious reader. Because of Evans' lack of physical beauty and thus slim chance of marriage, and because of her intelligence, her father invested in an education not often afforded females. From ages five to nine, she boarded with her sister Chrissey at Miss Latham's school in Attleborough; from ages nine to thirteen, at Mrs. Wallington's school in Nuneaton; and from ages thirteen to sixteen, at Miss Franklin's school in Coventry. At Mrs. Wallington's school, she was taught by the evangelical Maria Lewis—to whom her earliest surviving letters are addressed. In the religious atmosphere of the Miss Franklin's school, Evans was exposed to a quiet, disciplined belief opposed to evangelicalism.

After age sixteen, Eliot had little formal education. Thanks to her father's important role on the estate, she was allowed access to the library of Arbury Hall, which greatly aided her self-education and breadth of learning. Her classical education left its mark; Christopher Stray has observed that "George Eliot's novels draw heavily on Greek literature (only one of her books can be printed correctly without the use of a Greek typeface), and her themes are often influenced by Greek tragedy." Her frequent visits to the estate also allowed her to contrast the wealth in which the local landowner lived with the lives of the often much poorer people on the estate, and different lives lived in parallel would reappear in many of her works. The other important early influence in her life was religion. She was brought up within a narrow low church Anglican family, but at that time the Midlands was an area with a growing number of religious dissenters.

Move to Coventry
In 1836 her mother died and Evans (then 16) returned home to act as housekeeper, but she continued correspondence with her tutor Maria Lewis. When she was 21, her brother Isaac married and took over the family home, so Evans and her father moved to Foleshill near Coventry. The closeness to Coventry society brought new influences, most notably those of Charles and Cara Bray. Charles Bray had become rich as a ribbon manufacturer and had used his wealth in building schools and other philanthropic causes.

Evans, who had been struggling with religious doubts for some time, became intimate friends with the progressive, free-thinking Brays, whose home was a haven for people who held and debated radical views. The people whom the young woman met at the Brays' house included Robert Owen, Herbert Spencer, Harriet Martineau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Through this society, Evans was introduced to more liberal theologies, and writers such as David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, who cast doubt on the literal veracity of Biblical stories. In fact, her first major literary work was translating into English Strauss' Life of Jesus (1846), which she completed after it had been begun by another member of the Rosehill circle. A road in Coventry, George Eliot Road, has been named after her in Foleshill.

When Evans lost her religious faith, her father threatened to throw her out, although that did not happen. Instead, she respectably attended church for years and continued to keep house for him until his death in 1849, when she was 30. Five days after her father's funeral, she travelled to Switzerland with the Brays. She decided to stay in Geneva alone, living first on the lake at Plongeon (near the present United Nations buildings) and then at the Rue de Chanoines (now the Rue de la Pelisserie) with François and Juliet d’Albert Durade on the second floor ("one feels in a downy nest high up in a good old tree"). Her stay is recorded by a plaque on the building. She read avidly and took long walks amongst a natural environment that inspired her greatly. François painted a portrait of her.

Move to London
On her return to England the following year (1850), she moved to London with the intent of becoming a writer and calling herself Marian Evans. She stayed at the house of John Chapman, the radical publisher whom she had met at Rosehill and who had printed her translation. Chapman had recently bought the campaigning, left-wing journal Westminster Review, and Evans became its assistant editor in 1851. Although Chapman was the named editor, it was Evans who did much of the work in running the journal, contributing many essays and reviews, from the January, 1852 number until the dissolution of her arrangement with Chapman in the first half of 1854.

Women writers were not uncommon at the time, but Evans's role at the head of a literary enterprise was. The mere sight of an unmarried young woman mixing with the predominantly male society of London at that time was unusual, even scandalous to some. Although clearly strong-minded, she was frequently sensitive, depressed, and crippled by self-doubt. She was considered to have an ill-favoured appearance, and she formed a number of embarrassing, unreciprocated emotional attachments, including that to her employer, the married Chapman, and Herbert Spencer.

Relationship with George Lewes
The philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes met Evans in 1851, and by 1854 they had decided to live together. Lewes was married to Agnes Jervis, but they had agreed to have an open marriage, and in addition to the three children they had together, Agnes had also had several children by other men. Since Lewes was named on the birth certificate as the father of one of these children despite knowing this to be false, and was therefore considered complicit in adultery, he was not able to divorce Agnes.

In July 1854 Lewes and Evans travelled to Weimar and Berlin together for the purpose of research. Before going to Germany, Evans continued her interest in theological work with a translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, and while abroad she wrote essays and worked on her translation of Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, which she completed in 1856, but which was not published in her life-time.

The trip to Germany also served as a honeymoon as Evans and Lewes now considered themselves married, with Evans calling herself Marian Evans Lewes, and referring to Lewes as her husband. It was not unusual for men and women in Victorian society to have affairs; Charles Bray, John Chapman, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels and Wilkie Collins all had affairs, though more discreetly than Lewes and Evans. What was scandalous was the Leweses' open admission of the relationship.

First publication
George Eliot lived at 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London, the house where she died in December 1880. While continuing to contribute pieces to the Westminster Review, Evans had resolved to become a novelist, and she set out a manifesto for herself in one of her last essays for the Westminster Review, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" (1856). The essay criticised the trivial and ridiculous plots of contemporary fiction by women.

In other essays she praised the realism of novels written in Europe at the time, and an emphasis placed on realistic storytelling would become clear throughout her subsequent fiction. She also adopted a new nom-de-plume, the one for which she would become best known: George Eliot. This masculine name was chosen partly in order to distance herself from the lady writers of silly novels, but it also quietly hid the tricky subject of her marital status.

In 1858 (when she was 39) "Amos Barton," the first of the Scenes of Clerical Life, was published in Blackwood's Magazine and, along with the other Scenes, was well received. Her first complete novel, published in 1859, was Adam Bede and was an instant success, but it prompted an intense interest in who this new author might be. Scenes of Clerical Life was widely believed to have been written by a country parson or perhaps the wife of a parson. With the release of the incredibly popular Adam Bede, speculation increased markedly, and there was even a pretender to the authorship, one Joseph Liggins. In the end, the real George Eliot stepped forward: Marian Evans Lewes admitted she was the author.

The revelations about Eliot's private life surprised and shocked many of her admiring readers, but this apparently did not affect her popularity as a novelist. Eliot's relationship with Lewes afforded her the encouragement and stability she so badly needed to write fiction, and to ease her self-doubt, but it would be some time before they were accepted into polite society. Acceptance was finally confirmed in 1877, when they were introduced to Princess Louise, the daughter of Queen Victoria, who was an avid reader of George Eliot's novels.

After the popularity of Adam Bede, she continued to write popular novels for the next fifteen years. Within a year of completing Adam Bede, she finished The Mill on the Floss in 1860.

Middlemarch was originally published in installments between 1871 and 1872. The novel presents the stories of a number of denizens of a small English town and is notable for its deep psychological insight and sophisticated character portraits.

Her last novel was Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, whereafter she and Lewes moved to Witley, Surrey; but by this time Lewes's health was failing and he died two years later on 30 November 1878. Eliot spent the next two years editing Lewes's final work Life and Mind for publication, and she found solace with John Walter Cross, an American banker whose mother had recently died.

Marriage to John Cross and death
On 16 May 1880 George Eliot courted controversy once more by marrying a man twenty years younger than herself, and again changing her name, this time to Mary Anne Cross. The legal marriage at least pleased her brother Isaac, who sent his congratulations after breaking off relations with his sister when she had begun to live with Lewes. John Cross was a rather unstable character, and apparently jumped or fell from their hotel balcony into the Grand Canal in Venice during their honeymoon. Cross survived and they returned to England. The couple moved to a new house in Chelsea but Eliot fell ill with a throat infection. This, coupled with the kidney disease she had been afflicted with for the past few years, led to her death on 22 December 1880 at the age of 61.

Eliot was not buried in Westminster Abbey because of her denial of the Christian faith and her "irregular" though monogamous life with Lewes. She was interred in Highgate Cemetery (East), Highgate, London in the area reserved for religious dissenters or agnostics, next to George Henry Lewes; Karl Marx's memorial is nearby. In 1980, on the centenary of her death, a memorial stone was established for her in the Poets’ Corner.

Several key buildings in her birthplace of Nuneaton are named after her or titles of her novels. For example George Eliot Hospital, George Eliot Community School and Middlemarch Junior School. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
(Classic works have few if any mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon or Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

This is one of the great works in English literature.... For starters there is the plot, rich and highly complex. Its multiple strands weave together some 20 or so characters, all of whom live in the fictional town of Middlemarch. Their separate lives impinge on one another in unforeseen ways. They fall in love, marry, and fall out of love; pursue dreams, fail and succeed. Read more ...
LitLovers LitPick (Oct. '07)

One of the few English novels written for grown-up people.
Virginia Woolf

The most profound, wise and absorbing of English novels … and, above all, truthful and forgiving about human behaviour.
Hermione Lee

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Middlemarch:

1. Marriage is a central concern in the novel. Does it portray marriage as a source of happiness in life? Or does it suggest that personal happiness comes from some other source?

2. Compare the various couplings with one another: Dorothea's failed marriage with that of her sister. Or the Lydgate and the Garth marriages. In what way do they suggest differing approaches to marriage? Does Elliot offer a model union?

3. Dorothea at one point says of marriage...

I mean, marriage drinks up all of our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear—but it murders our marriage—and then the marriage stays with us like a murder—and everything else is gone. 

What is she suggesting about romantic love and marriage? Is there any truth in her remark, or is this simply the rambling of a distraught woman?

4. How does the novel portray Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate as the heroes in this work? In what ways do they differ from the others in the cultural milieu of Middlemarch? What drives each of them? Are they similar?

5. Others in the novel also serve as models for virtue: members of the Garth family and Camden Farebrother, for instance? In what way can they be seen as secondary heroes of Middlemarch? Any others?

6. Does Rosamond elicit sympathy from you? She is vain, of course, but might her upbringing be somewhat responsible for her faults? In what way does she represent the prevalent societal norms?

7. The narrator is a very funny and wry satirist. Dorothea, for example, is passionate about horseback riding yet eager to renounce it, because in sacrificing her pleasure, she will prove her devotion to Christianity. What or who else do you find humorous in the novel? And what is she satirizing?

8. What do you think of Camden Farebrother, especially his gambling? Is it wrong? What makes him successful at gambling, as compared to Fred Vincy?

9. What about Mary Garth's refusal to burn the second will after Featherstone's death. What would you have done?

10. Talk about how social conventions, based on money and class, affect the behavior and relationships in this novel. In what way does this novel challenge those conventions? What does the novel champion...and what does it condemn?

11. What symbolic (as well as literal) role does the portrait of Ladislaw's grandmother play in the novel? Why does Dorothea offer it to Ladislaw as a parting gift...why does he refuse the offer...and what does his refusal suggest?

12. What do the main characters learn by the novel's end? Do either Dorothea or Lydgate get the life they deserve?

13. What roles do Raffles and Nicholas Bulstrode play? Look at Raffles as representing the past...as well as chance or coincidence.

14. Middlemarch, the town, is almost a character in itself. In what sense does Elliot use the idea of community? Does she portray it as antithetical to human freedom—in that it judges, restricts, or interferes in its inhabitants lives? Or is it presented as a positive force—in that it offers moral guidance, friendship, and solace?

15. View clips of the excellent 1994 BBC miniseries and compare to the book.

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Serpent's Tale (Mistress of the Art of Death Series #2)
Ariana Franklin, 2008
Penguin Group USA
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425225745

Summary
When King Henry II's mistress is found poisoned, suspicion falls on his estranged queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

The king orders Adelia Aguilar, expert in the science of death, to investigate-and hopefully stave off civil war. A reluctant Adelia finds herself once again in the company of Rowley Picot, the new Bishop of St. Albans...and her baby's father. Their discoveries into the crime are shocking—and omens of greater danger to come. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Real Name—Diane Norman
• Birth—August 25, 1933
• Where—London, England, UK
• Death—January 27, 2011
• Where—England
• Awards—BBC and Crime Writers' Assn.

Ariana Franklin was born in London just before World War II. During the war, she and her parents lived with her father's uncle, a minister in Winston Churchill's wartime cabinet. In London, Ariana had a privileged life, with a nanny, a maid and a chauffeur. But eventually her mother got tired of the constant air raids, so they went to live with Ariana's maternal grandparents in the seaside town of Torquay in Devonshire, leaving her father behind—permanently, as it turned out.

After her parent's divorce, Ariana and her mother had very little money and lived in a tiny apartment over a shop. It was very different from their days London, but in retrospect, Ariana was glad to have seen both sides of life.

To earn money, she left school at fifteen. Ariana had a great love of journalism-perhaps the only thing inherited from her father, a correspondent for the Times—so she looked for work in that field. By the age of seventeen she was back in London, working on a local paper in its East End, where she was spotted by a national newspaper. At twenty, she became the youngest reporter then in Fleet Street. Sadly, on her 21st birthday, Ariana was covering a murder on the South coast and missed her party entirely. "But, it's my birthday," she protested to her news editor when he told her to cover the murder. "Many happy returns," he said, "and now get down to Southampton."

Ariana found that she loved a reporter's life: accompanying the Queen on a visit to Paris, invading Wales, dressed for combat, her face blacked, on an exercise with Royal Marine Commandos under fire from live ammunition.

Marriage to a fellow journalist, Barry Norman, and Fleet Street didn't mix—he was always flying into the country as she flew out of it. So, not wanting another divorce in the family, Ariana gave up her newspaper career and instead settled down in the country, giving birth to two daughters within fourteen months of each other.

With a child on either hip, she continued to write. Anything. Magazine articles, biographies, ghost stories. Most of all, history, especially women's history. How did we get here? Why didn't we get here sooner?

She became a specialist on the early Middle Ages, its justice, its climate, dress, food, habits, and crime. In fact, her first book, which dealt with the coming of the Common Law and the jury system under that great English kings, Henry II, received plaudits from university professors of history and won a BBC award for its accuracy and depiction of the twelfth century. Accuracy is important, Ariana believes. If a reader's paying you the compliment of buying your book, you've got to get it right.

So there she was, happily writing historical novels to good reviews and charting women's fight for equality through the ages. She had just dealt with the French Revolution and was wondering what the hell to do next when literary agent Helen Heller came into her life with an irresistible offer, "Why not write an historical thriller?"

Now, if Ariana's a sucker for anything, it's for Raymond Chandler's dictum: "When in doubt, have a man come in with a gun." But this time, the man with a gun needed to be a woman. So it was back to the twelfth century for Ariana—no guns, but lots of crossbows, and poison and daggers, and, believe it or not, a school of medicine in Salerno where women could train as doctors and where autopsy was permitted.

Thus Adelia, the 12th century female pathologist, was born to take up her role as "Mistress of the Art of Death" fighting medieval crime and speaking for victims who otherwise would have been forgotten. Sounds exciting? It is. It's a thriller. It's also, because Ariana Franklin's writing it, accurate, fascinating. And don't forget fun.  (From the author's website.)

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Book Reviews
This excellent adventure delivers high drama and lively scholarship from its heroine's feminist perspective.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times


A deliciously dark and effective concoction of historical fiction, suspense, romance, adventure and forensics.
Miami Herald


Franklin reintroduces the second coming of Adelia Aguilar, a character who first appeared in Mistress of the Art of Death. Kate Reading captures her brilliantly through a wonderful and eerie reading. She has a voice made for narration; steady and firm in her pitch-perfect delivery, she draws upon the foggy atmosphere created by Franklin and sets the tone vividly with her classical British accent. Reading has such a firm understanding of the story that each word becomes as crucial as the last, creating a dramatic entertainment for the listener. Her characters, including the evil Queen Eleanor, a distressed King Henry II and of course Aguilar herself, are all well-rounded, with Reading perfecting a variety of gritty dialects to fit accordingly. Reading has a knack for this genre of story; with an inherent ability to captivate her audience from start to finish.
Publishers Weekly


Medieval forensic specialist Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar returns to action in the second installment in Franklin's historical series (Mistress of the Art of Death, 2007). The proto-feminist "doctor of death" has come a long way. As this enjoyable romp opens, Adelia has settled into life in the fens of East Anglia, practicing medicine and trying to raise her daughter. Her peace is disrupted by the arrival of a messenger with a royal mandate. King Henry II's favorite mistress, Rosamund, has been murdered, presumably with poisonous mushrooms, and his estranged wife, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, is the chief suspect-Eleanor recently escaped from Henry's clutches and is known to be both wildly jealous and also brewing rebellion. Before civil war can once again tear the country apart, Henry needs Adelia to uncover the truth about Rosamund's death. At first unwilling, but keen on avoiding war, she takes on the challenge and in the process uncovers yet another murder and numerous other foul acts, as well as some unexpected information about decaying human flesh. The careful clinician of the first book has become a passionate woman and worried mother, exoticism and novelty traded for a greater range of emotion. A warm, promising continuation of the series.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
1. In what ways has the character of Adelia changed since the events of Mistress of the Art of Death? How do her experiences in the earlier novel inform her actions in The Serpent's Tale?

2. Were you familiar with the legend of Henry and Eleanor before reading this book? How does Ms. Franklin's portrayal of them compare to others you have read or seen? Did you learn anything about them that surprised you?

3. Sister Havis remarks that the icehouse at Godstow Abbey was built "long before [the abbey's] foundation," quite possibly by the Romans. How do details such as these enrich the storytelling? What other details does the author employ to create a sense of time, place, and history in the novel?

4. Some people's names in the novel are pointedly descriptive, such as the ill-humoured mercenary named Cross. What other character names seem intentionally selected in this way? How does this technique assist or enhance the storytelling?

5. Much as a modern woman might, Adelia rejects many of the commonly held beliefs of medieval England, such as the inferiority of women and the existence of witchcraft. Are there also ways in which Adelia's thinking seems a product of its time? How do you think she would fare in the modern world?

6. In explaining his pious attitude towards his vows, Picot tells Adelia that a bishop is "...a keeper of other people's souls. His own, yours... Adelia, it matters. I thought it would not, but it does." Do you think Adelia is obligated to respect his beliefs? Would you consider it "immoral" if she tried to change his mind?

7. Mother Edyve sees the rise of "courtly love"—what we would today understand as romance —as a step towards raising the status of women. Adelia sees it as "a pleasant hypocrisy... Love, honor, respect. When are they ever extended to everyday women?" From today's perspective, whose view do you think has proven more accurate?

8. How has Adelia's role as a mother changed her view of the world? Do you think she would have been as personally invested in the fate of a character like Emma Bloat before the birth of her daughter? Overall, is motherhood an advantage or disadvantage for Adelia?
(Questions from the author's website.)

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