Why do you think George Eliot hasn't really achieved the pop-cultural status (I think of it as the "finger-puppet treatment") of, say, Austen or Woolf? I know she has passionate fans, of course, but she's not the same kind of shorthand signifier. Is her work just too challenging? Is she, frankly, not glamorous… Read more

Henry James described Eliot as "magnificently ugly" - and certainly,Middlemarch is preoccupied with beauty. (Basically, she gives us beautiful, pretty, and plain protagonists.) Where would you say she comes down on the issue? Read more

Certain critics have intimated that Eliot didn't have a good understanding of female sexuality, which seems to me bizarre when Middlemarch is a novel seething with sex - and pretty openly! How would you respond to those criticisms? Read more

Perhaps fittingly — given her unconventional domestic situation —Eliot subverts the "marriage plot" and a lot of other 19th Century conventions in Middlemarch. But what did she think about semi-contemporary writers like Austen and the Brontës? Read more

Speaking of! You mention in the book that Eliot was known as "George Eliot" even after her identity was known. Was the revelation greeted with much surprise? Read more

You clearly identify strongly with many things about the novel - and in some ways, the author, too? A few similarities are almost uncanny. Can you talk a bit about that? Read more

Can you tell us a little about what, specifically, prompted you to undertake this project? It's an interesting blend of criticism and memoir; how did that evolve? Read more