Overview

George Eliot pushed the boundaries of fiction and of Victorian society. She was an extraordinary woman whose unconventional life meant that she was judged harshly by family, friends, and strangers. Eliot wanted to draw attention to the feelings and motivations of ordinary people, so that we might feel more generous towards each other. But human beings are complex, and to capture that complexity Eliot drew on an astonishing range of philosophical, psychological, and scientific ideas. She hoped her work might do good, yet she was clear-eyed about the limits of both human sympathy and the novel. In this Very Short Introduction, Juliette Atkinson explores the ideas feeding Eliot's fiction and looks at the literary techniques--such as narrative voice, genre, imagery, structure, and syntax--that she used to embody them. These shape her recurrent themes: the stifling nature of gossip, the hardships experienced by commonplace individuals, the duty of practicing fellow-feeling and the difficulty of doing so. Atkinson argues that George Eliot was a social outcast who became a sage, through the creation of some of the most influential novels ever written in English.

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Juliette Atkinson is professor of English at University College London. Her books include Victorian Biography Reconsidered, French Novels and the Victorians, and editions of The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Jane Eyre for Oxford World's Classics. She is also the Victorian-Present editor for the Review of English Studies. Mary Jane Wells trained as an actor at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, working in theater in the UK and Europe for twelve years prior to her love affair with the US. Mary Jane's first few years of work in LA were as an actress and a story coach, creating the documentary Holy Hell with its director, Will Allen. Holy Hell was chosen as a Sundance Select documentary in 2016, nominated for Grand Jury prize and the Critics' Choice Documentary Award, picked up for a special with CNN and sold to Netflix and other platforms. As an actress she worked as a guest star on various new shows and some existing ones-e.g. HBO's The Newsroom, and regularly as a voice match for various profiled actresses. In 2014, she voice-matched Cate Blanchett for a year with Dreamworks on HTTYD2: her resulting duet with Gerard Butler was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. She subsequently went full-time into voice-over, narrating the British doc series My Childhood, which won a Scottish BAFTA, and her work across commercial, animation, and gaming won her SOVAS nominations for Best Romance Narrator and Outstanding Body of Voice Work. Mary Jane's national voice-over campaigns have included Puma, Eharmony, Sunny Finance, LinkedIn Talent Pipeline, and Jet 2. She has worked for NASA, the Obama Campaign, Microgenius, Bank of America, Dreamworks, HBO, Warner Brothers, NBC Universal, Starz, Fox, Claritas for Futurebrand, who branded the 2012 Olympics, Tech-crunch, Jaguar, the BBC, and the UN, and was the digital news anchor for The Chicago Tribune for a year. She currently plays Catriona Stripe on Monsters Inc. and plays in several large-scale video games yet to be released. Mary Jane turned more comprehensively to audiobooks in 2017 and has to date narrated over 150 audiobooks on Audible and beyond, winning eight Earphones Awards, three Audie Awards (two for historical romance), and an Audible Swoon Award as ""audience favorite."" She narrated the audiobooks known as the official inspiration for Downton Abbey, Below Stairs and Climbing the Stairs, and is known for her male and female voice acting, mainly in historical romance but also narrates in the YA, classics, mystery thriller, and fiction genres. Mary Jane wrote and performed her solo show, Heroine, in 2017 at Capital Theatres, Edinburgh. This true story about a living survivor of military sexual trauma became an unlikely hit, and its heavily anonymized protagonist, ""Danna Davis,"" was often secretly in the audience. On first outing, Heroine won the Olwen Wymark Award from the Writer's Guild with Nicky McCartney. After also winning a Made in Scotland Award for the best work nationally, Heroine was booked for a month at Assembly at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2018, and was shortlisted for the Situp Award and the Amnesty Award, won the Scottish Arts Trust Award, and sold the stage rights to five territories. Resultingly, Mary Jane was invited to debut Heroine in the US at The Kennedy Center in 2020 to standing ovations every night, after a sold-out Scottish tour to the Traverse Theatre and Perth Repertory Theatre. Congresswoman Jackie Speier spoke on Heroine's aftershow panel and went on to champion overdue but groundbreaking legal change for MST survivors twelve months later in the Senate. Mary Jane launched the audiobook, winning another Earphones Award in 2021 and an Audie Award for Best Original Work in 2022. Mary Jane is currently working with a first look deal producer for FOX 21 for its TV series, which is in active development. Mary Jane was assistant for the academic research on the breakthrough vocal technique of Dr. George with the artistic directors of The National Theatre Scotland led by Ros Steen, former Head of Voice at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, which was later published in association with the Centre for Voice in Performance, UK. Her next new solo show, The Good Girl, is a recent recipient of sponsorship in 2023. She partners with Author's Republic, Capital Theatres and The Kennedy Center from the very beginning-for what she hopes will be an irreverently hilarious new show and attending audio series for those who live with and care about dementia. It is her wildest dream to serve with storytelling.

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