Mid-Victorian society never forgave George Eliot for setting up home in 1854 with a rackety married man, the journalist and scientist GH Lewes. Late-Victorian society, by contrast, could not forgive her for choosing to wed in church when, following Lewes’s death in 1878, she walked up the aisle with a much younger and duller man called John Cross. On the question of marriage, George Eliot could never seem to get it right.
In this thrilling
