THE HONEYMOON

Based on the life of George Eliot, famed author of Middlemarch, this captivating account of Eliot's passions and tribulations explores the nature of love in its many guises.

This spellbinding novel recounts George Eliot's honeymoon in Venice during June of 1880 following her marriage to a handsome young man twenty years her junior. When she agreed to marry John Walter Cross, Eliot was recovering from the death of George Henry Lewes, her beloved companion of twenty-six years who she considered her "husband" even though they were never legally married. All of her life she was driven by a need to love, and be loved, and she had found both those things with Lewes. When Lewes died, Eliot, bereft, was left at the age of sixty, contemplating the meaning of her existence without him, and was plagued by profound questions about the decline of her body, her sexuality, and of course, her own mortality. Born Mary Ann Evans, before assuming the pen name George Elliot, she was an extremely plain young woman, a country girl, considered unmarriageable. Forced to educate herself in order to secure her livelihood, Elliot would go on to became the most famous writer of her time. Overthrowing conventional religion and finding her own code of ethics, she was very much a woman both of, and ahead of, her time. In THE HONEYMOON, Smith beautifully integrates what is known about Eliot's life and explores, through Eliot's story, the notion of different kinds of love, sexual and platonic, of the possibilities of redemption and of happiness even in the midst of an imperfect union.

Dinitia Smith is the author of four novels, including The Illusionist, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her stories have appeared in numerous publications and she has won a number of awards for her writing, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Until recently, Smith was a cultural correspondent for The New York Times specializing in literature and the arts. She has taught at Columbia University, New York University, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and many other institutions.