A journalist, novelist, playwright, and actor, Lewes was an unconventional Victorian, friend of Dickens, Thackeray, and Darwin, and author of Life of Goethe. A radical, freethinking Bohemian, he enjoyed an open marriage with Agnes Jervis, causing a scandal by condoning her relationship with his best friend. The first section of the book discovers new facets of Lewes's early life. The middle section discusses his elopement with Marian Evans while the...