Janet's Repentance George Eliot Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist. She was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Her novels, largely set in provincial England, are well known for their realism and psychological perspicacity. Her first major literary work was the translation of David Strauss' Life of Jesus (1846). In 1857 The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, the first of the Scenes of Clerical Life, was published in Blackwood's Magazine and, along with the other Scenes, was well received. Her first complete novel, published in 1859, was Adam Bede and was an instant success. Eliot's most famous work, Middlemarch, was a turning point in the history of the novel. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.

But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last census are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano.

A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch--and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories. Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.

The works collected in this volume provide an illuminating introduction to George Eliot's incisive views on religion, art and science, and the nature and purpose of fiction. Essays such as 'Evangelical Teaching' show her rejecting her earlier religious beliefs, while 'Woman in France' questions conventional ideas about female virtues and marriage, and 'Notes on Form in Art' sets out theories of idealism and realism that she developed further in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. It also includes selections from Eliot's translations of works by Strauss and Feuerbach that challenged many ideas about Christianity; excerpts from her poems; and reviews of writers such as Wollstonecraft, Goethe and Browning. Wonderfully rich in imagery and observations, these pieces reveal the intellectual development of this most challenging and rewarding of writers.

You'll hear it in news coverage of the Church scandals - Clerical Culture" - but what does it mean? In Clerical Culture: Contradiction and Transformation Michael L. Papesh provides an understanding for today's clerical system and present circumstances. Papesh describes the origin and contemporary formation of the clerical culture as well as eleven major contradictions in which today's clerical culture is trapped. To transcend these crises, Papesh calls for a spiritual approach to cultural transformation (both clerical and popular) through leadership: in holiness, in love, and in justice. Written in an engaging style and complete with raw data and appendices, Clerical Culture provides the knowledge needed to understand today's Church crisis. Chapters in Part One, Focusing the Issues are: *A Personal Story, - *The Problem, - *How the Clerical Culture Came to Be, - *The Clerical Culture: Set for the Ages, - and *Theological Underpinnings. - Chapters in Part Two, The Contradictions are: *Priestly Formation, - *Priest Accountability, - *A Priest's Personal Support System, - and *Living a Contradictory Life. - Chapters in Part Three, Considerations Toward Transformation are: *Cultural Transformation, - *Being Leaders in Holiness, - *Being Leaders in Love, - *Being Leaders in Justice, - and *The Spirit and the Bride Say 'Come'. - Also includes *Appendix 1: Cleveland Priests' Hopes and Concerns Based on Three Areas of Challenge, - *Appendix 2: Cleveland Priests' Large-Group Discussion Task Force Charges, - *Appendix 3: Summary: The Basic Plan for Ongoing Formation of Priests, - *Appendix 4: The Organizational Life Cycle: Change Grid, - and a Bibliography. Michael L. Papesh is Pastor of Our Lady of Peace Parish in St.Paul, Minnesota. "

The first popular biography of a pioneering feminist thinker and writer of medieval Paris. The daughter of a court intellectual, Christine de Pizan dwelled within the cultural heart of late-medieval Paris. In the face of personal tragedy, she learned the tools of the book trade, writing more than forty works that included poetry, historical and political treatises, and defenses of women. In this new biography—the first written for a general audience—Charlotte Cooper-Davis discusses the life and work of this pioneering female thinker and writer. She shows how Christine de Pizan’s inspiration came from the world around her, situates her as an entrepreneur within the context of her times and place, and finally examines her influence on the most avant-garde of feminist artists, through whom she is slowly making a return into mainstream popular culture.