Novelist, born at Arbury Farm, Astley, Warwickshire, C England, UK. She took charge of the family household when her mother died (1836), and was educated in private schools and by tutors. After the death of her father (1849) she travelled in Europe, then settled in London, and began to write for the Westminster Review. She became assistant editor, and the centre of a literary circle, one of whose members was G H Lewes, with whom she lived until his death. Her first story appeared in 1857. Her major novels were Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (18712), and Daniel Deronda (1876). After Lewes's death, she married an old friend, John Cross, in 1880, but died soon after.
Mary Anne Evans|
George Eliot at 30 by François D'Albert Durade |
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| Pseudonym(s): | George Eliot |
|---|---|
| Born: |
22 November 1819 |
| Died: |
22 December 1880 |
| Occupation(s): | Novelist |
George Eliot is the pen name of Mary Anne Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880), who was an English novelist.
She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure that her works were taken seriously. Female authors published freely under their own names, but Eliot wanted to ensure that she was not seen as merely a writer of romances.
Biography
Mary Anne Evans was the third child of Robert and Christiana Evans (née Pearson).
The young Mary Anne was obviously intelligent, and due to her father's important role on the estate, she was allowed access to the library of Arbury Hall, which greatly aided her education and breadth of learning. Christopher Stray has observed that "George Eliot's novels draw heavily on Greek literature (only one of her books can be printed without the use of a Greek font), and her themes are often influenced by Greek tragedy" (Classics Transformed, p. Her frequent visits 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.
In 1836 her mother died and Mary Anne returned home to act as housekeeper, but she continued her education with a private tutor and advice from Maria Lewis.
Before her father's death, she travelled to Switzerland with the Brays, and on her return moved to London with the intent of becoming a writer and calling herself Marian Evans.
Women writers were not uncommon at the time, but Marian's role at the head of a literary enterprise was. Even the sight of an unmarried young woman mixing with the predominately male society of London at that time was unusual, even scandalous to some.
The philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes met Marian Evans in 1851, and by 1854 they had decided to live together. Before going to Germany, Marian continued her interest in theological work with a translation of Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity and while abroad she wrote essays and worked upon her translation of Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, which she would never complete.
The trip to Germany also doubled as a honeymoon as they were now effectively married with Marian now calling herself Marian Evans Lewes. On their return to England, they lived apart from the literary society of London, both shunning and being shunned in equal measure. While continuing to contribute pieces to the Westminster Review, Marian had resolved to become a novelist, and she set out a manifesto for herself in one of her last essays for the Review: Silly Novels by Lady Novelists. In other essays she praised the realism of novels written in Europe at the time, and an emphasis on realistic story-telling would be clear throughout her subsequent fiction. She also adopted a new nom de plume, the one for which she would become best known: George Eliot. This masculine name was partly to distance herself from the lady writers of silly novels, but it also quietly hid the tricky subject of her marital status. Her first complete novel, published in 1859, was Adam Bede and was an instant success, but it prompted an intense interest in who this new author was. In the end, the real George Eliot stepped forward: Marian Evans Lewes admitted she was the author. The revelations about Eliot's private life surprised and shocked many of her admiring readers, but it apparently did not affect her popularity as a novelist. Eliot's relationship with Lewes gave her the encouragement and stability she needed to write fiction and ease her self-doubts, but it would take time before they were accepted into polite society. Acceptance was finally confirmed in 1877, when they were introduced to Princess Louise, the daughter of Queen Victoria, who was a reader of George Eliot's novels.
After the popularity of Adam Bede, she continued to write popular novels for the next fifteen years. Her last novel was Daniel Deronda in 1876, after which she and Lewes moved to Witley Surrey, but by this time Lewes' health was failing and he died two years later on 30 November 1878. Eliot spent the next two years editing Lewes' final work Life and Mind for publication, and she found solace with John Walter Cross an American banker whose mother had recently died.
On 6 May 1880 George Eliot courted controversy once more by marrying a man twenty years younger than herself, and again changing her name, this time to Mary Ann Cross. The couple moved to a new house in Chelsea but Eliot fell ill with a throat infection.
She is buried in Highgate Cemetery (East), Highgate, London in the area reserved for religious dissenters, next to George Henry Lewes.
Literary assessment
Eliot's most famous work, Middlemarch, is a turning point in the history of the novel. Making masterful use of a counterpointed plot, Eliot presents the stories of a number of denizens of a small English town on the eve of the Reform Bill of 1832.
Throughout her career, Eliot wrote with a politically astute pen. From Adam Bede to The Mill on the Floss and the frequently-read Silas Marner, Eliot presented the cases of social outsiders and small-town persecution. Felix Holt, the Radical and The Legend of Jubal were overtly political novels, and political crisis is at the heart of Middlemarch. Eliot did not, however, confine herself to her bucolic roots. Romola, an historical novel set in late 15th century Florence and touching on the lives of several real persons such as the priest Girolamo Savonarola, displays her wider reading and interests. In The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot made a foray into verse, creating a work whose initial popularity has not endured.
The religious elements in her fiction also owe much to her upbringing, with the experiences of Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss sharing many similarities with the young Mary Anne Evans' own development. By the time of Daniel Deronda, Eliot's sales were falling off, and she faded from public view to some degree. most notably by Virginia Woolf, who called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people". The various film and television adaptations of Eliot's books have re-introduced her to the wider-reading public.
As an author, Eliot was not only very successful in sales, but she was, and remains, one of the most widely praised for her style and clarity of thought. Eliot's sentence structures are clear, patient, and well balanced, and she mixes plain statement and unsettling irony with rare poise.
Works
Novels
Adam Bede, 1859 The Mill on the Floss, 1860 Silas Marner, 1861 Romola, 1863 Felix Holt, the Radical, 1866 Middlemarch, 1871-72 Daniel Deronda, 1876Other works
Scenes Of Clerical Life, 1858 Amos Barton Mr Gilfil's Love Story Janet's Repentance The Lifted Veil, 1859 Brother Jacob, 1864 Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 1879Poetry
Poems by George Eliot include:
The Spanish Gypsy (a dramatic poem) 1868 Agatha, 1869 Armgart, 1871 Stradivarius, 1873 The Legend of Jubal, 1874 Arion, 1874 A Minor Prophet, 1874 A College Breakfast Party, 1879 The Death of Moses, 1879
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