This volume makes available for the first time the entire surviving journals and diaries of the great Victorian novelist, George Eliot, 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 private woman, Marian Evans. The edition includes a chronology, introduction, headnotes to each diary, and an annotated index supplying valuable contextual and explanatory information.