Woman's Hour - 03/06/2009

With Jenni Murray. She was the author of 'Daniel Deronda', 'Silas Marner', 'The Mill on the Floss' and 'Middlemarch', among others. As a new biography of George Eliot appears, we read that Cherie Blair's favourite novel is Middlemarch and Sam Mendes is also set to direct a new film of the book. Eliot seems to speak to us as powerfully as she did in her own day and her heroines offer complex and sympathetic pictures that reveal her huge understanding of the lives of women. Her own life was extraordinary: dominated by her hugely successful career but also by her relationship with George Lewes, the man she loved but could not marry. Jenni is joined by the author of the new biography, Brenda Maddox, historian and biographer Kathryn Hughes, the academic Ruth Livesey and the novelist Zoe Heller, to celebrate Eliot's life and works.