The Home And Early Haunts Of Robert Louis Stevenson Book

Hard, if not impossible to rate a book like this; Blind is, I think, the only contemporary critic of Eliot I've really read so far, and in light of everything we now know about Eliot, the book seems redacted, soft-footed. No mention of the heartbreaking affair she had in her youth with John Chapman; nothing about her infatuation with Herbert Spencer. We only know of these liaisons because of correspondence unearthed over the years that Blind didn't have access to. Blind also soft pedals Eliot's split with her religion and father, and the scandalous details of her honeymoon in Venice are untouched.

But Blind weaves back and forth between Eliot's fiction and life, injecting observations and asides I found tremendously illuminating. It was much like getting the ear of an expert scholar, but one still rolling in enthusiasm over the material rather than lecturing at the podium. I'm already itching to get a look at her writings on the Romantics, her own "Ascent of Man."

Plus, did you know her brother tried to assassinate Otto Von Bismarck? Neither did I. Holy hell.