Biteback publishes literary history exploring the connection between Jane Austen and George Eliot

Biteback is publishing a new literary history, written by Edward Whitley, which explores the connection between Jane Austen and George Eliot.

Olivia Beattie, editorial director at Biteback, has acquired UK Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) to Jane Austen and George Eliot: The Lady and the Radical from Mark Lucas at the Soho Agency. It will be published in March 2025, to coincide with Jane Austen’s 250th birthday in December 2025. 

"In October 1851, a chance meeting in a bookshop in Piccadilly changed the course of literary history," the publisher said. 

"For it was here that Mary Ann Evans, an unworldly young scholar from the Midlands, was first introduced to the love of her life, the married critic and philosopher George Lewes. Encouraged and supported by Lewes, Mary Ann Evans went on to become the queen of literary London, famous under her pen name, George Eliot." 

The publisher added: "In nurturing George Eliot’s talent, Lewes drew inspiration from the works of his own favourite writer, an unfashionable author of the previous generation by the name of Jane Austen. On the face of it, Austen and Eliot had little in common. Jane Austen was a genteel spinster who spent her whole life in Hampshire, painting Regency-period domestic dramas with delicate irony and unfailing charm. George Eliot, meanwhile, was a radical intellectual who lived scandalously with a married man, travelled widely in Europe and sought to document, with stirring realism, the social upheavals of her age. 

"And yet, when George Eliot embarked on her career as an author in the late 1850s, the works of Jane Austen were at her side and feeding her imagination. Separated by time, circumstance and temperament, the two writers nevertheless had a vital impetus in common: to prove the value of a woman’s eye in a man’s world."

Featuring quotes from letters, diaries and the nation’s favourite novels, Jane Austen and George Eliot: The Lady and the Radical  "traces the surprising connections between two of the brightest stars of Britain’s literary firmament and, for the first time, shows how each can be illuminated by the other’s light", Biteback said. It will be published in March 2025, to coincide with Jane Austen’s 250th birthday in December 2025. 

Beattie said: "A long-time Austen fan, I’ve always been faintly ashamed not to have read more George Eliot—until Edward’s lively, accessible and fascinating slice of literary history dropped into my lap. Edward’s passion for his subjects is infectious, and I hope his insight into their worlds will inspire other Austen devotees to stretch along the bookshelf and take a chance on Eliot."