The Journals of George Eliot publishes for the first time the entire text of the surviving journals of the great Victorian novelist, and constitutes a new text by her - the closest she came to autobiography. The journals span her life from 1854, when she entered into a common-law union with George Henry Lewes, to her death in 1880, revealing the professional writer George Eliot as well as the remarkable woman Marian Evans. Many aspects of her writing life are illuminated, such as the separation of 'George Eliot' - and the account of her work's public reception - from her 'private' self, at the time she began to write fiction. The journals present a George Eliot of many moods, not only the serious sybilline figure so admired in her later years. The edition's extensive apparatus includes a chronology, introduction, headnotes to each diary, and an annotated index supplying valuable contextual and explanatory information.