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.
This book brings shows the ways in which African women participated in economic, social and political spaces in Atlantic coast societies. the contributors examine the role of petty traders and enslaved women in communities from Sierra Leone to Benguela. They analyse how women in Africa used the opportunities offered by relationships with European men, Christianity and Atlantic commerce to negotiate their social and economic positions: consider the limitations which early colonialism sought to impose on women : the factors which fostered or restricted women's mobility: and women's economic power and its curtailment.