RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)As Clare Carlisle has shown, balancing breadth of knowledge with an empathetic close reading of her subject’s life and work, Eliot’s greatness – her continuing relevance – needs no special pleading.
Kathryn Hughes
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement\"Life-writing as a discipline owes much to family history, and Hughes’s main object is to lift our Victorian forebears off the page for us, particularly by reminding us that even the most highly placed or high-minded of them had solid presences – sometimes all too solid. Her dismissal of the prematurely aged Coleridge on her first page as a \'dollop of slop\' proves prophetic, not only of her sometimes startling style, but of her iconoclasm ... Hughes is a biographer we can trust, then – one who admits that the facts do not always fit, and who refuses to force them to by guesswork or invention.\
