The in-betweeny edition of Shiny New Books came out last week. I’ve written a review for it: Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance, by Patricia Duncker. Duncker has whisked George Eliot out of her biographies and set her down, first in Berlin and then in Venice, as Mrs Lewes, prized author of Middlemarch whose German publisher, Wolfgang Duncker, is desperate to secure translation rights to her latest work. He despatches his feckless younger brother, Max, to charm the great lady. What neither the Dunckers nor the others around Mrs Lewes realise is that she is brewing her next novel, Daniel Deronda, and requires raw material...
This is a novel that is simply great fun to read, even if you know nothing about Daniel Deronda. It’s also intensely interested in the play between myth, fiction and reality, most obviously in its clever inversion of the usual idea of novelists using ‘real’ people and situations in their work, for here Duncker has taken the fiction, Daniel Deronda, extracted characters and situations and made them ‘real’. You can read more here...
PS Am I the only person in the entire history of the universe not to think that George Eliot was ugly?
(Sepia postcard print of George Eliot (1858), by London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company, after Mayall; copied 1870s; from here)