Jane Austen and George Eliot

In October 1851, a chance meeting in a Piccadilly bookshop changed the course of literary history. For it was here that Mary Ann Evans, an unworldly young scholar, was introduced to the love of her life, the critic George Lewes. Encouraged and supported by Lewes, Evans became the queen of literary London under her pen name, George Eliot.

In nurturing Eliot's talent, Lewes drew inspiration from the works of an unfashionable author of the previous generation by the name of Jane Austen. On the face of it, Austen and Eliot had little in common. Jane Austen was a genteel spinster who spent her life in Hampshire, painting Regency domestic dramas with delicate irony and unfailing charm. George Eliot, meanwhile, was a radical intellectual who lived scandalously with a married man, travelled widely in Europe and documented with stirring realism the social upheavals of her age.

And yet, when George Eliot embarked on her career as an author in the late 1850s, the works of Jane Austen were at her side, feeding her imagination. Separated by time, circumstance and temperament, the two writers nevertheless had a vital impetus in common: to prove the value of a woman's eye in a man's world.

Packed with quotes from letters, diaries and the nation's favourite novels, this lively history traces the surprising connections between two of our brightest literary stars and shows, for the first time, how each can be illuminated by the other's light.

Edward Whitley first became interested in the works of Jane Austen and George Eliot as an undergraduate at Oxford. His lifelong project has been to re-read and re-examine their novels in the context of each other. Edward's previous books include The Graduates, a collection of interviews which was a Private Eye Book of the Year, and Gerald Durrell's Army, a travelogue setting out the battle to save rare animals from extinction. This inspired him to launch the Whitley Awards, which fund wildlife conservation worldwide. In 2013, Edward was given the OBE for his work, and to mark the 30th anniversary of the Whitley Awards he was interviewed by Sir David Attenborough.