The girl who would become George Eliot began her professional writing life with a poem bidding farewell to all books but the Bible. How did a young Christian poet become the great realist novelist whose commitment to religious freethinking made her so iconoclastic that she could not be buried in in Westminster Abbey? Memorialized there today by a stone lain in the Poets' Corner in 1980, George Eliot wrote herself and her fellow Victorians through turbulent decades of moral and historical doubt in religious orthodoxy, alongside the unrelenting need to articulate a compelling modern faith in its place. Unafraid to confront the most difficult existential questions of her time, George Eliot wrote immensely popular novels that wrestled with problems whose hold has barely lessened in the last 150 years: the pervasiveness of human suffering and the injustice of its measures; the tension between fulfilling our ethical obligations to others and pursuing our own well-being; the impetus to act vi
Fifteen years into a successful career as a college professor, Ilana Blumberg encounters a crisis in the classroom that sends her back to the most basic questions about education and prompts a life-ch
Fifteen years into a successful career as a college professor, Ilana Blumberg encounters a crisis in the classroom that sends her back to the most basic questions about education and prompts a life-ch
Houses of Study is an eloquent memoir of a Jewish woman’s life and her efforts to reconcile the traditions of her faith with her belief in women’s equality and the pull of modern American living. Ilan
In Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels, Ilana Blumberg offers a major reconsideration of the central Victorian ethic of self-sacrifice, suggesting that much of what we have
