Prodigiously learned, alive to the massive social changes of her time, defiant of many Victorian orthodoxies, George Eliot is at once chronicler and analyst, novelist of nostalgia and monumental thinker. In her novel Middlemarch she writes of 'that tempting range of relevancies called the universe'. This volume identifies a range of 'relevancies' that form the various contexts - of her time, and of our own - pertinent to understanding and in the fullest sense appreciating George Eliot. The dimensions of her achievement are illuminated by essays on particular facets of the many contexts - historical, intellectual, political, social, cultural - that inform her work.
In this collection of essays, scholars reveal the biographical, critical, cultural, and historical context crucial for understanding Mary Wollstonecraft's oeuvre. Chapters on British radicalism and conservatism, French philosophes and English Dissenters, constitutional law and domestic law, sentimental literature, eighteenth-century periodicals and more elucidate Wollstonecraft's social and political thought, historical writings, moral tales for children, and novels. [Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759-1797, English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights.]