George Eliot's PUBLISHED WRITING
The Archive provides free access to everything George Eliot published--fiction, poetry, translations, and nonfiction. We prioritize Blackwood's "Cabinet Edition," the standard final versions of Eliot's collected works published during her lifetime. We also include the original publications for comparison research. These searchable and downloadable complete texts require no registration, just a request that you credit the George Eliot Archive as your source.
READ MORE...
EARLY WRITINGS ABOUT GEORGE ELIOT
READ MORE...
INTERACTIVE PROJECTS and TOOLS
Our major born-digital project, the George Eliot Text Explorer (2023-25), is the first machine-readable, open-access version of Eliot's complete published works. By converting PDF documents into TEI-encoded XML files, we created a foundation for advanced text analysis tools, including the AI Analysis of Eliot's fiction (Chen & Rilett, 2023) and the Text Explorer application (Cui, Sun, and Rilett, 2023), which enables instant keyword and phrase searches. A major upgrade by Dr. Yue Cui and Libo Sun now offers clearer search results with easier navigation between matches, an interactive word frequency chart, a refined reading interface for any screen size, and updated integration with Voyant Tools, an open-source text visualization platform.
READ MORE...
George Eliot's CORRESPONDENCE and JOURNALS
The Archive is committed to providing open access to all of George Eliot's writing, both her published works and her private materials. The Complete Digital Edition of George Eliot's Letters (2026) is a freely searchable collection of 3,987 letters and private writings spanning forty-five years of correspondence. Users can sort and search by date, sender, recipient, and signature, and download letters individually. Search George Eliot's Letters, a custom tool created by Dr. Yue Cui, searches all fields at once, including the full letter text, and Visualizing George Eliot's Letters offers another way into the correspondence.
We also maintain two earlier collections as separate searchable resources, the 894 letters published by John Cross in 1885 and the letters to Elma Stuart, edited by her son Roland Stuart in 1909. Though superseded by the Complete Edition, these collections retain value for specialized search and for research into their own editorial histories.
Visitors can also search full-text transcriptions of Eliot's Journals and Notebooks. Users may read and copy excerpts that match their search terms, but complete texts cannot be downloaded, in keeping with copyright compliance.
READ MORE...
George Eliot IMAGE GALLERY
Our George Eliot Image Gallery includes the fist complete collection of the portraits of George Eliot created during her lifetime. These include preliminary sketches, final portraits, an authentic photograph and one that was overpainted and sold as authentic. We have also created the first collection of illustrations from her works, gathered over many years from rare editions. The Archive team researched each image's metadata, identifying the illustrators who often went uncredited in early editions. They also wrote alt-text descriptions to improve accessibility for those who rely on screen readers, and context descriptions to help readers identify the scene’s location and significance.
The Archive's quotations by George Eliot cards pair her words with images and graphic design. Download, share, post, or print them freely, with attribution to the creators
READ MORE...
GEORGE ELIOT SCHOLARS
The Archive’s sister site, George Eliot Scholars is a digital commons where contributors publish their essays, articles, lectures, conference presentations, and other work on Eliot they wish to share to our non-commercial open access public repository. For the George Eliot Scholars website, we are also collecting peer-reviewed, open-access journal articles to share with the Scholars community.
VISIT SITE
GEORGE ELIOT REVIEW ONLINE (Journal)
The Archive’s other sister site, the George Eliot Review Online, makes all issues of the George Eliot Review from its inception in 1970 accessible on the internet for the first time. This open-access digital project, launched in December 2017, has been made possible in partnership with the journal’s UK publishers, the George Eliot Fellowship.
VISIT SITE
GEORGE ELIOT ARCHIVE PROJECT TEAM
The George Eliot Archive, George Eliot Scholars digital commons and George Eliot Review Online, have been developed by Dr. Beverley Park Rilett and her small but mighty team of research assistants at Auburn University in Alabama (and previously, from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln) along with dozens of expert consultants and contributors. Please check back frequently for updates and improvements as we continue to create resources for studying George Eliot.
READ MORE...
Thank you for visiting!