George Eliot Audiobooks

Middlemarch: Victorian realism at its most patient and most psychologically exact

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.3/5 average

9 listener ratings

Who is George Eliot?

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819 to 1880), an English novelist, poet, journalist and translator, and one of the towering writers of the Victorian era. Across seven novels – from Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss through Silas Marner to Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda – she perfected a fiction of realism and psychological insight, rooted in a deep sense of place and the detailed textures of the English countryside.

Her private life scandalised the era that lionised her books. For over two decades she lived openly with George Henry Lewes, a married man, calling him her husband; eighteen months after his death she married her long-standing friend John Cross, a much younger man, and took the name Mary Ann Cross. The gap between the unconventional life and the morally serious fiction has fascinated readers ever since.

George Eliot in audiobooks

Our catalogue carries Middlemarch, and recommendations do not come much higher: Virginia Woolf judged it one of the few English novels written for grown-up people, while Martin Amis and Julian Barnes have called it the greatest novel in the English language. Large claims, and the book keeps earning them.

In audio, Eliot is a revelation for anyone who found her daunting on the page. The psychological precision and dry, humane irony are made for narration, and the length becomes a luxury rather than an obstacle – weeks of commutes inside a fully imagined world. For UK listeners there is the particular pleasure of hearing Victorian England rendered by a writer whose sense of place ran down to the last hedgerow.