Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907. First Thus. Large Paper Edition limited to 750 of which this is 183. Finely bound in half crushed morocco over marbled boards with gilt to spines. Top edges brightly gilt. Remaining edges deckled. In all a beautiful and pleasing illustrated set of George Eliot's works, which helped define the novel as a genre and brought women's experiences and inner lives into public dialogue.

"No writer, not even Milton, is so dense and ample in his range of intellectual reference as George Eliot" (Myers). Defying gender expectations, Mary Ann Evans, writing under the pseudonym George Eliot, became famous for being a prolific writer who shaped the modern novel. Works like The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda, and Middlemarch not only proved Eliot's intellectual dexterity by weaving together cultural references from religion, art, politics, and economics to comment on communities in flux; they also placed in context the rich interior lives of women, and the often agonizing experiences of women torn between social duty and the pursuit of self knowledge. "The language in which George Eliot expresses the basic commitment of literary realism--the recording of many lives intersecting in the medium of historical circumstance" made her a crucial figure for the genre's development, and for presenting a vision of society where the margins are ever evolving (Coovadia). Here, in 25 lovely large-paper volumes, her works are drawn together in one place, with illustrations of key locations and figures bound in throughout. Fine (Item #3141)