Brendon Books: Edward Whitley

In October 1851, a chance meeting in a bookshop in Piccadilly changed the course of literary history. For it was here that Mary Ann Evans, an unworldly young scholar from the Midlands, was first introduced to the love of her life, the critic and philosopher George Lewes. Encouraged and supported by Lewes, Evans went on to become the queen of literary London under her pen name, George Eliot. In nurturing Eliot’s talent, Lewes drew inspiration from the works of his own favourite writer, an unfashionable author of the previous generation by the name of Jane Austen. On the face of it, Austen and Eliot had little in common. Jane Austen was a genteel spinster who spent her whole life in Hampshire,
painting Regency-period domestic dramas with delicate irony and unfailing charm. George Eliot, meanwhile, was a radical intellectual who lived scandalously with a married man, travelled widely in Europe and sought to document with stirring realism the social upheavals of her age.

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

Packed with quotes from letters, diaries and the nation’s favourite novels, Jane Austen and George Eliot: The Lady and the Radical traces the surprising connections between two of the brightest stars of the literary firmament and, for the first time, shows how each can be illuminated by the other’s light. 
December 2025 is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth.