Woah, I am the first person to rate or review this on Goodreads! How am I to know whether my opinion is accurate without dozens of aggregated ratings to back me up?

Anyway - completely terrific biography! Short, because it was largely a refutation of earlier biographies of her, but it was really interesting to read about wacky life among Victorian radicals in the mid-nineteenth century.

What is lacking is a really insightful reading of her novels in the light of this biography - because her novels are in many ways novels of contradictions, not just moral texts written against a radical life (I'm mostly thinking of Mill on the Floss.) However the book does its job and I'd imagine a lot of interesting stuff was written in response. ( )