What George Eliot Read: The George Eliot Archive ’s Reading Project and the Making of an Open-Access Digital Library

Abstract

This article describes the construction and scholarly rationale of George Eliot’s Reading, an open-access digital library of 923 texts that Eliot documented reading over her lifetime, launched in 2025 as a subproject of the George Eliot Archive. The premise is straightforward: gather the primary-source evidence that Eliot read a given work, locate a public-domain edition, and make both available together in a single searchable repository. The execution was considerably more involved. The authors offer a detailed account of the editorial principles, infrastructure decisions, and practical challenges that shaped the project, from documenting sometimes-uncertain evidence, sources, and attributions, to managing the technical problems that can arise when a carefully edited spreadsheet gets uploaded to a live database. The article also situates the project within the broader landscape of single-author digital archives and reading-history scholarship, assesses its limitations, and sketches the research and teaching possibilities it opens for Eliot studies and for Victorian intellectual history more broadly. Built without external funding and on a platform accessible to most, George Eliot’s Reading is described here as both a research resource and a replicable digital humanities project. The authors hope it will inspire similar projects for other nineteenth-century writers who deserve one.