George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England. She was the third child of Robert Evans (1773–1849) and Christiana Evans (née Pearson, 1788–1836), the daughter of a local mill-owner. Mary Ann's name was sometimes shortened to Marian.[5] Her full siblings were Christiana, known as Chrissey (1814–59), Isaac (1816–1890), and twin brothers who died a few days after birth in March 1821. She also had a half-brother, Robert (1802–64), and half-sister, Fanny (1805–82), from her father's previous marriage to Harriet Poynton (?1780–1809). Her father Robert Evans, of Welsh ancestry, was the manager of the Arbury Hall Estate for the Newdigate family in Warwickshire, and Mary Ann was born on the estate at South Farm. In early 1820 the family moved to a house named Griff House, between Nuneaton and Bedworth.[6]

The young Evans was a voracious reader and obviously intelligent. Because she was not considered physically beautiful, Evans was not thought to have much chance of marriage, and this, coupled with her intelligence, led her father to invest in an education not often afforded women.[7] From ages five to nine, she boarded with her sister Chrissey at Miss Latham's school in Attleborough, from ages nine to thirteen at Mrs. Wallington's school in Nuneaton, and from ages thirteen to sixteen at Miss Franklin's school in Coventry. At Mrs. Wallington's school, she was taught by the evangelical Maria Lewis — to whom her earliest surviving letters are addressed. In the religious atmosphere of the Misses Franklin's school, Evans was exposed to a quiet, disciplined belief opposed to evangelicalism.[8]

After age sixteen, Evans had little formal education.[9] Thanks to her father's important role on the estate, she was allowed access to the library of Arbury Hall, which greatly aided her self-education and breadth of learning. Her classical education left its mark; Christopher Stray has observed that "George Eliot's novels draw heavily on Greek literature (only one of her books can be printed correctly without the use of a Greek typeface), and her themes are often influenced by Greek tragedy".[10] Her frequent visits to the estate also allowed her to contrast the wealth in which the local landowner lived with the lives of the often much poorer people on the estate, and different lives lived in parallel would reappear in many of her works. The other important early influence in her life was religion. She was brought up within a low church Anglican family, but at that time the Midlands was an area with a growing number of religious dissenters.

In 1836 her mother died and Evans (then 16) returned home to act as housekeeper, but she continued correspondence with her tutor Maria Lewis. When she was 21, her brother Isaac married and took over the family home, so Evans and her father moved to Foleshill near Coventry. The closeness to Coventry society brought new influences, most notably those of Charles and Cara Bray. Charles Bray had become rich as a ribbon manufacturer and had used his wealth in the building of schools and in other philanthropic causes. Evans, who had been struggling with religious doubts for some time, became intimate friends with the radical, free-thinking Brays, whose "Rosehill" home was a haven for people who held and debated radical views. The people whom the young woman met at the Brays' house included Robert Owen, Herbert Spencer, Harriet Martineau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Through this society Evans was introduced to more liberal and agnostic theologies and to writers such as David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, who cast doubt on the literal truth of Biblical stories. In fact, her first major literary work was an English translation of Strauss's The Life of Jesus (1846), which she completed after it had been left incomplete by another member of the "Rosehill Circle"; later she translated Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1854). As a product of their friendship, Bray published some of Evans's earliest writing, such as reviews, in his newspaper the Coventry Herald and Observer.[11]

When Evans began to question her religious faith, her father threatened to throw her out of the house, but his threat was not carried out. Instead, she respectfully attended church and continued to keep house for him until his death in 1849, when she was 30. Five days after her father's funeral, she travelled to Switzerland with the Brays. She decided to stay on in Geneva alone, living first on the lake at Plongeon (near the present-day United Nations buildings) and then on the second floor of a house owned by her friends François and Juliet d'Albert Durade on the rue de Chanoines (now the rue de la Pelisserie). She commented happily that "one feels in a downy nest high up in a good old tree". Her stay is commemorated by a plaque on the building. While residing there, she read avidly and took long walks in the beautiful Swiss countryside, which was a great inspiration to her. François Durade painted her portrait there as well.[12]

On her return to England the following year (1850), she moved to London with the intent of becoming a writer, and she began referring to herself as Marian Evans.[13] She stayed at the house of John Chapman, the radical publisher whom she had met earlier at Rosehill and who had published her Strauss translation. Chapman had recently purchased the campaigning, left-wing journal The Westminster Review. Evans became its assistant editor in 1851 after joining just a year earlier. Evans' writings for the paper were comments on her views of society and the Victorian way of Thinking.[14] She was sympathetic to the lower classes and criticised organised religion throughout her articles and reviews and commented on contemporary ideas of the time.[15] Much of this was drawn from her own experiences and knowledge and she used this to critique other ideas and organisations. This led to her writing being viewed as authentic and wise but not too obviously opinionated. Evans’ also focused on the business side of the Review with attempts to change its layout and design.[16] Although Chapman was officially the editor, it was Evans who did most of the work of producing the journal, contributing many essays and reviews beginning with the January 1852 issue and continuing until the end of her employment at the Review in the first half of 1854.[17] Eliot sympathized with the 1848 Revolutions throughout continental Europe, and even hoped that the Italians would chase the "odious Austrians" out of Lombardy and that "decayed monarchs" would be pensioned off, although she believed a gradual reformist approach to social problems was best for England.[18][19]

Women writers were common at the time, but Evans's role as the female editor of a literary magazine was quite unusual. During this period, she formed a number of unreciprocated emotional attachments, including one with Chapman (who was married, but lived with both his wife and his mistress), and another with Herbert Spencer.

In 1850–51, Evans attended classes in mathematics at the Ladies College in Bedford Square, later known as Bedford College, London.[20]

Portrait of George Eliot by Samuel Laurence, c. 1860

The philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes (1817–78) met Evans in 1851, and by 1854 they had decided to live together. Lewes was already married to Agnes Jervis, although in an open marriage. In addition to the three children they had together, Agnes also had four children by Thornton Leigh Hunt.[21] In July 1854, Lewes and Evans travelled to Weimar and Berlin together for the purpose of research. Before going to Germany, Evans continued her theological work with a translation of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, and while abroad she wrote essays and worked on her translation of Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, which she completed in 1856, but which was not published in her lifetime.[22]

The trip to Germany also served as a honeymoon for Evans and Lewes, who subsequently considered themselves married. Evans began to refer to Lewes as her husband and to sign her name as Mary Ann Evans Lewes. Eventually, after Lewes' death, she legally changed her name to Mary Ann Evans Lewes.[23] It was not unusual for men in Victorian society to have adulterous affairs; Charles Bray, John Chapman, Friedrich Engels, and Wilkie Collins all had adulterous affairs, conducted with discretion. By contrast, Lewes and Evans declined to conceal their relationship, and it was this refusal which perhaps gave an additional edge to the reproaches of contemporary moralists.

While continuing to contribute pieces to the Westminster Review, Evans resolved to become a novelist, and set out a pertinent manifesto in one of her last essays for the Review, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists"[24] (1856). The essay criticised the trivial and ridiculous plots of contemporary fiction written by women. In other essays, she praised the realism of novels that were being written in Europe at the time, an emphasis on realistic storytelling confirmed in her own subsequent fiction. She also adopted a nom-de-plume, George Eliot; as she explained to her biographer J. W. Cross, George was Lewes's forename, and Eliot was "a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word" [25]

In 1857, when she was 37 years of age, "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton", the first of the three stories included in Scenes of Clerical Life, and the first work of "George Eliot", was published in Blackwood's Magazine.[26] The Scenes (published as a 2-volume book in 1858),[26] was well received, and was widely believed to have been written by a country parson, or perhaps the wife of a parson. Evans's first complete novel, published in 1859, was Adam Bede.[26] It was an instant success, and prompted yet more intense curiosity as to the author's identity: there was even a pretender to the authorship, one Joseph Liggins. This public interest subsequently led to Marian Evans Lewes's acknowledgment that it was she who stood behind the pseudonym George Eliot.

The revelations about Eliot's private life surprised and shocked many of her admiring readers, but this did not affect her popularity as a novelist. Her relationship with Lewes afforded her the encouragement and stability she needed to write fiction, but it would be some time before the couple were accepted into polite society. Acceptance was finally confirmed in 1877 when they were introduced to Princess Louise, the daughter of Queen Victoria. The queen herself was an avid reader of all of Eliot's novels and was so impressed with Adam Bede that she commissioned the artist Edward Henry Corbould to paint scenes from the book.[27]

Blue plaque, Holly Lodge, 31 Wimbledon Park Road, London

When the American Civil War broke out, Eliot expressed sympathy with the North, which was a minority stance among the English elite at the time.[18][19] In 1868 she supported Richard Congreve's protests against Britain's imperial policy toward Ireland and her view of the growing movement in support of Irish Home Rule was positive.[18][19]

She was influenced by the writings of John Stuart Mill and read all of his major works as they were published.[28] In Mill's Subjection of Women (1869) she judged the second chapter excoriating the laws which oppress married women "excellent."[19] She was supportive of Mill's parliamentary run, but believed that the electorate was unlikely to vote for a philosopher and was surprised when he won.[18] While Mill served in parliament, she expressed her agreement with Mill's efforts on behalf of female suffrage, being "inclined to hope for much good from the serious presentation of women's claims before Parliament."[29] In a letter to John Morley, she declared her support for plans "which held out reasonable promise of tending to establish as far as possible an equivalence of advantage for the two sexes, as to education and the possibilities of free development", and dismissed appeals to nature in explaining women's lower status.[29][19] In 1870, she responded enthusiastically to Lady Amberley's feminist lecture on the claims of women for education, occupations, equality in marriage, and child custody.[19]

After the success of Adam Bede, Eliot continued to write popular novels for the next fifteen years. Within a year of completing Adam Bede, she finished The Mill on the Floss, dedicating the manuscript: "To my beloved husband, George Henry Lewes, I give this MS. of my third book, written in the sixth year of our life together, at Holly Lodge, South Field, Wandsworth, and finished 21 March 1860." Silas Marner (1861) and Romola (1863) soon followed, and later Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) and her most acclaimed novel, Middlemarch (1871–1872).

Her last novel was Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, after which she and Lewes moved to Witley, Surrey. By this time Lewes's health was failing, and he died two years later, on 30 November 1878. Eliot spent the next two years editing Lewes's final work, Life and Mind, for publication, and found solace and companionship with John Walter Cross, a Scottish commission agent[30] 20 years her junior, whose mother had recently died.

Eliot's grave in Highgate Cemetery

On 16 May 1880 Eliot married John Walter Cross (1840–1924)[27] and again changed her name, this time to Mary Ann Cross. While the marriage courted some controversy due to the difference in ages, it pleased her brother Isaac, who had broken off relations with her when she had begun to live with Lewes, and now sent congratulations. While the couple were honeymooning in Venice, Cross, in a fit of depression, jumped from the hotel balcony into the Grand Canal. He survived, and the newlyweds returned to England. They moved to a new house in Chelsea, but Eliot fell ill with a throat infection. This, coupled with the kidney disease with which she had been afflicted for several years, led to her death on 22 December 1880 at the age of 61.[31][32]

Eliot was not buried in Westminster Abbey because of her denial of the Christian faith and her adulterous affair with Lewes. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery (East), Highgate, London, in the area reserved for societal outcasts, religious dissenters and agnostics, beside the love of her life, George Henry Lewes. The graves of Karl Marx and her friend Herbert Spencer are nearby.[33] In 1980, on the centenary of her death, a memorial stone was established for her in the Poets' Corner.

Several landmarks in her birthplace of Nuneaton are named in her honour. These include The George Eliot School, Middlemarch Junior School, George Eliot Hospital (formerly Nuneaton Emergency Hospital),[34] and George Eliot Road, in Foleshill, Coventry.

Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery, in Riversley Park, home of collection on writer George Eliot

A statue of Eliot is in Newdegate Street, Nuneaton, and Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery has a display of artifacts related to her.

• Adam Bede, 1859
• The Mill on the Floss, 1860
• Silas Marner, 1861
• Romola, 1863
• Felix Holt, the Radical, 1866
• Middlemarch, 1871–72
• Daniel Deronda, 1876

• In a London Drawingroom, 1865
• Two Lovers, 1866
• The Choir Invisible, 1867
• The Spanish Gypsy, 1868
• Agatha, 1869
• Brother and Sister, 1869
• How Lisa Loved the King, 1869
• Armgart, 1871
• Stradivarius, 1873
• The Legend of Jubal, 1874
• I Grant You Ample Leave, 1874
• Arion, 1874
• A Minor Prophet, 1874
• A College Breakfast Party, 1879
• The Death of Moses, 1879
• Count That Day Lost, 1887

• Digital facsimile of manuscript "Quarry for Middlemarch", MS Lowell 13, Houghton Library, Harvard University
• Translation of Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined) Volume 2 by David Strauss, 1846
• Translation of Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity) by Ludwig Feuerbach, 1854
• "Three Months in Weimar", 1855
• "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists", 1856
• "The Natural History of German Life", 1856
• Scenes of Clerical Life, 1857
  • The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton
  • Mr Gilfil's Love Story
  • Janet's Repentance
• The Lifted Veil, 1859
• Brother Jacob, 1864
• "The Influence of Rationalism", 1865
• Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 1879
• Review of John Ruskin's Modern Painters in Westminster Review, April 1856

• Ashton, Rosemary (1997). George Eliot: A Life. London: Penguin, 1997.
• Bloom, Harold. (1994). The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace.
• Cross, J. W. (ed.), (1885). George Eliot's life as related in her letters and journals, 3 vols. London: William Blackwood and Sons.
• Fleishman, Avrom (2010). George Eliot's Intellectual Life. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511691706. ISBN 9780511691706.
• Haight, Gordon S. (1968). George Eliot: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Henry, Nancy (2008). The Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511793233. ISBN 9780511793233.
• Karl, Frederick R. (1995). George Eliot: Voice of a Century. Norton
• Szirotny, June Skye (2015). George Eliot's Feminism. doi:10.1057/9781137406156. ISBN 978-1-349-48784-4.

• Beer, Gillian, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, ISBN 0-521-78392-5.
• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1979, ISBN 0-300-08458-7.
• Hughes, Kathryn, George Eliot: The Last Victorian, New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998, ISBN 0-374-16138-0.
• Pinney, Thomas, ed., Essays of George Eliot, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963, ISBN 0-231-02619-6.
• Rignall, John, ed., Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot, Oxford University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-19-860099-2
• Shuttleworth, Sally, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, ISBN 0-521-25786-7.
• Uglow, Jenny, George Eliot, London, Virago Press, 1988, ISBN 0-86068-400-8.

• Alley, Henry, The Quest for Anonymity: The Novels of George Eliot, University of Delaware Press, 1997.
• Beaty, Jerome, Middlemarch from Notebook to Novel: A Study of George Eliot's Creative Method, Champaign, Illinois, University of Illinois, 1960.
• Carroll, Alicia, Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot, Ohio University Press, 2003.
• Carroll, David, ed., George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971.
• Daiches, David, George Eliot: Middlemarch, London, Edward Arnold, 1963.
• Garrett, Peter K., The Victorian Multiplot Novel: Studies in Dialogical Form, New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1980.
• Graver, Suzanne, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form, Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 1984.
• Hardy, Barbara Nathan, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form. Oxford UP, 1967.
• Harvey, W J, The Art of George Eliot, London, Chatto & Windus, 1961.
• Leavis, F R, The Great Tradition, London, Chatto & Windus, 1948.

• Works by George Eliot at Project Gutenberg
• Works by George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by or about George Eliot at Internet Archive
• Works by George Eliot at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)