About this item
Based on the life of George Eliot, famed author of Middlemarch, this captivating account of Eliot's passions and tribulations explores the nature of love in its many guises Dinitia Smith's spellbinding novel recounts George Eliot's honeymoon in Venice in June 1880 following her marriage to a handsome young man twenty years her junior. When she agreed to marry John Walter Cross, Eliot was recovering from the death of George Henry Lewes, her beloved companion of twenty-six years. Eliot was bereft: left at the age of sixty to contemplate profound questions about her physical decline, her fading appeal, and the prospect of loneliness. In her youth, Mary Ann Evans - who would later be known as George Eliot - was a country girl, considered too plain to marry, so she educated herself in order to secure a livelihood. In an era when female novelists were objects of wonder, she became the most famous writer of her day - with a male nom de plume. The Honeymoon explores different kinds of love, and of the possibilities of redemption and happiness even in an imperfect union. Smith integrates historical truth with her own rich rendition of Eliot's inner voice, crafting a page-turner that is as intelligent as it is gripping.
About the Author
Dinitia Smith is the author of four novels, and was for eleven years a reporter at the New York Times covering the arts. Her most recent novel, "The Honeymoon," is about the 19th. century author, George Eliot, and her late-life marriage to a handsome young man twenty years her junior which nearly ended in tragedy. Smith, who had peripatetic childhood in England and America, has always been fascinated with discovering different worlds in her novels. Her first novel, "The Hard Rain," was about radical activists in the 1970's. Her second, "Remember This," was a semi-autobiographical account of her growing up. Smith's third novel, "The Illusionist," is an exploration of transgenderism. It tells the story of what happens when a handsome young man arrives in a small town, young girls fall in love with him, and then it is discovered that "he" is really a "she."
