this learned, adventurous new biographer has changed the landscape of George Eliot studies. (The George Eliot Review, 1 November 2012)
Clean prose and relatively minimal endnotes make the book accessible to undergraduates. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. (Choice, 1 October 2012)
Henry provides a useful reminder that that old-fashioned pejorative, adulteress, might have been applied to Eliot as well as to Agnes, and she provides a sensitive analysis of the novels in the light of that insight. (The New Yorker, 6 August 2012)
Driven neither by hero-worship or spite, Henry's "critical biography" demonstrates what treasure there is still to be found in even the most worked-over subjects. The trick is to ask the questions that everyone else assumed had been answered years ago. (The Guardian, 2 June 2012)
Such insights fill this book, which shows penetrating intelligence from first to last. Nancy Henry has managed, seamlessly but always with needed distinctions, to unite, in exacting interrelation and with edges sharp, George Eliots lived experience and imaginative experience. (George Eliot-G.H. Lewes Studies, 1 September 2012)
