George Eliot (1819 - 1880) was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, an English novelist, poet, translator, journalist and editor. [1] She was among the leading writers of the Victorian era, and her seven novels — above all Middlemarch — are noted for their psychological depth, moral seriousness and detailed treatment of provincial English society. [2]
Early life
Mary Ann Evans was born on 22 November 1819 on an estate in Warwickshire near Nuneaton, where her father worked as a land agent. [1] She was sent away to school and read voraciously, with access to the library of the great house her father managed. An intensely devout evangelical in her youth, she abandoned orthodox Christian belief in her early twenties after contact with the freethinking circle of Charles and Cara Bray, a break that caused a lasting rift with her father.
Translation and journalism
Her first substantial published work was a translation of David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu, which applied historical criticism to the gospels, followed by a translation of Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity — the only book to appear under her own name. [3] These works shaped the ethical humanism that runs through her fiction: a rejection of dogma combined with an insistence on sympathy and duty.
She moved to London and lodged with the publisher John Chapman, becoming in practice the assistant editor of the Westminster Review, the leading radical quarterly, and writing essays of considerable force. There she met the critic and philosopher George Henry Lewes. Lewes was married and unable to obtain a divorce, and from 1854 the two lived openly together as husband and wife, a decision that brought social ostracism but a partnership she called the foundation of her working life. [1]
Novels
Encouraged by Lewes, she turned to fiction in her late thirties, publishing Scenes of Clerical Life in 1857 under the name George Eliot — a pseudonym chosen to secure serious critical attention and to keep her fiction apart from her journalism and her irregular domestic situation. [2] Adam Bede followed in 1859 and was an immediate success, its authorship the subject of public speculation until she acknowledged it.
The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner drew on the Midlands of her childhood; Romola, set in Renaissance Florence, and Felix Holt, the Radical extended her range into historical and political subjects. Between 1871 and 1872 she published Middlemarch in eight parts, a study of a provincial town on the eve of the 1832 Reform Act that interweaves the frustrated ambitions of Dorothea Brooke and the physician Tertius Lydgate with a wide survey of local society. [3] Her last novel, Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, was unusual among Victorian works in its sympathetic treatment of Jewish life and of early Zionist thought.
Later life and legacy
Lewes died in 1878. In May 1880 Eliot married John Walter Cross, a friend and financial adviser twenty years her junior; she died in London on 22 December that year. [1] Denied burial in Westminster Abbey because of her religious views and unmarried partnership, she was interred at Highgate Cemetery beside Lewes; a memorial stone was placed in Poets' Corner a century later.
Her standing rose steadily through the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf described Middlemarch as one of the few English novels written for grown-up people, and it appears at or near the top of most surveys of the English novel. [2]
