Everything about George Eliot totally explained
Mary Ann (Marian) Evans (
22 November 1819 –
22 December 1880), better known by her
pen name George Eliot, was an
English novelist. She was one of the leading writers of the
Victorian era. Her novels, largely set in provincial England, are well known for their
realism and psychological perspicacity.
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 wasn't seen as merely a writer of romances. An additional factor may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married
George Henry Lewes.
Biography
Mary Anne Evans was the third child of Robert Evans (1773-1849) and Christiana Evans (
née Pearson), the daughter of a local farmer, (1788-1836). When born, Mary Anne, sometimes shortened to Marian, had two teenage siblings, a half-brother, Robert (1802-1864), and sister, Fanny (1805-1882), from her father's previous marriage to Harriet Poynton (?1780-1809). Robert Evans was the manager of the
Arbury Hall Estate for the
Newdigate family in
Warwickshire, and Mary Anne was born on the estate at South Farm. In early 1820 the family moved to a house named Griff, part way between Nuneaton and
Coventry. Her full siblings were Christiana, known as Chrissey (1814-1859), Isaac (1816-1890), and twin brothers who survived a few days in March 1821.
The young Evans 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. 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 without the use of a Greek font), and her themes are often influenced by Greek tragedy". 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. The other important early influence in her life was religion. She was brought up within a narrow
low church Anglican family, but at that time the
Midlands was an area with many
religious dissenters, and those beliefs formed part of her education. She boarded at schools in
Attleborough, Nuneaton and Coventry. At the second she was taught by the
evangelical Maria Lewis—to whom her earliest surviving letters are addressed—and at the Coventry school she received instruction from
Baptist sisters.
In 1836 her mother died and Evans returned home to act as housekeeper, but she continued her education with a private tutor and advice from 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 building schools and other
philanthropic causes. He was a freethinker in religious matters, a progressive in politics, and his home, Rosehill, 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 theologies, many of which cast doubt on the supernatural elements of Biblical stories, and she stopped going to church. This caused a rift between herself and her family, with her father threatening to throw her out, although that didn't happen. Instead, she respectably attended church and continued to keep house for him until his death in
1849. Her first major literary work was the translation of
David Strauss'
Life of Jesus (
1846), which she completed after it had been begun by another member of the Rosehill circle.
Only five days after her father's funeral, she travelled to
Switzerland with the Brays. She decided to stay in Geneva alone and on her return in 1850, moved to
London with the intent of becoming a writer and calling herself Marian Evans. She stayed at the house of
John Chapman, the radical publisher whom she'd met at Rosehill and who had printed her translation. Chapman had recently bought the campaigning, left-wing journal
The Westminster Review, and Evans became its assistant editor in
1858. Although Chapman was the named editor, it was Evans who did much of the work in running the journal for the next three years, contributing many essays and reviews.
Women writers were not uncommon at the time, but Evans's role at the head of a literary enterprise was. The mere sight of an unmarried young woman mixing with the predominantly male society of London at that time was unusual, even scandalous to some. Although clearly strong-minded, she was frequently sensitive, depressed, and crippled by self-doubt. She was well aware of her ill-favoured appearance, and she formed a number of embarrassing, unreciprocated emotional attachments, including that to her employer, the married Chapman, and
Herbert Spencer. However, another highly inappropriate attraction would prove to be much more successful and beneficial for Evans.
The philosopher and critic
George Henry Lewes met Evans in 1851, and by
1854 they'd decided to live together. Lewes was married to Agnes Jervis, but they'd decided to have an
open marriage, and in addition to having three children together, Agnes had also had several children with other men. As he was named on the birth certificate as the father of one of these children despite knowing this to be false, and since he was therefore complicit in adultery, he wasn't able to divorce Agnes. In July 1854 Lewes and Evans travelled to
Weimar and
Berlin together for the purpose of research. Before going to Germany, Evans continued her interest in theological work with a translation of
Ludwig Feuerbach's
Essence of Christianity and while abroad she wrote essays and worked on her translation of
Baruch Spinoza's
Ethics, which she'd however never complete.
The trip to Germany also doubled as a honeymoon as they were now effectively married, with Evans calling herself Marian Evans Lewes, and referring to George Lewes as her husband. It wasn't unusual for men in Victorian society to have mistresses, including both Charles Bray and John Chapman. What was scandalous was the Leweses' open admission of the relationship. 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, Evans 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
. The essay criticised the trivial and ridiculous plots of contemporary fiction by women. In other essays she praised the
realism of novels written in
Europe at the time, and subsequently an emphasis placed on realistic story-telling would become clear throughout her subsequent fiction. She also adopted a new nom-de-plume, the one for which she'd become best known: George Eliot. This masculine name was chosen partly in order to distance herself from the lady writers of silly novels, but it also quietly hid the tricky subject of her marital status.
In
1858 Amos Barton, the first of the
Scenes of Clerical Life, was published in
Blackwood's Magazine and, along with the other
Scenes, was well received. 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 might be.
Scenes of Clerical Life was widely believed to have been written by a country
parson or perhaps the wife of a parson. With the release of the incredibly popular
Adam Bede, speculation increased markedly, and there was even a pretender to the authorship, one Joseph Liggins. 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 this apparently didn't affect her popularity as a novelist. Eliot's relationship with Lewes afforded her the encouragement and stability she so badly needed to write fiction, and to ease her self-doubt, but it would be some time before they were accepted into polite society. Acceptance was finally confirmed in
1867, when they were introduced to
Princess Louise, the daughter of
Queen Victoria, who was an avid reader of George Eliot's novels.
After the popularity of
Adam Bede, she continued to write popular novels for the next fifteen years. Within a year of completing
Adam Bede, she finished
The Mill on the Floss, inscribing 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 21st March 1860."
Her last novel was
Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, whereafter she and Lewes moved to
Witley,
Surrey; but 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 she found solace with
John Walter Cross, an
American banker whose mother had recently passed away.
On
16 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 Anne Cross. The legal marriage at least pleased her brother Isaac, who sent his congratulations after breaking off relations with his sister when she'd begun to live with Lewes. John Cross was a rather unstable character, and apparently jumped or fell from their hotel balcony into the Grand Canal in
Venice during their honeymoon. Cross survived and they returned to England. The couple moved to a new house in Chelsea but Eliot fell ill with a throat infection. This, coupled with the
kidney disease she'd been afflicted with for the past few years, led to her death on the
22 December 1880 at the age of 61.
The possibility of burial in
Westminster Abbey being rejected due to her denial of Christian faith and "irregular" though monogamous life with Lewes, she was buried in
Highgate Cemetery (East),
Highgate,
London in the area reserved for religious dissenters, next to
George Henry Lewes. In 1980, on the centenary of her death, a memorial stone was established for her in the
Poets’ Corner. Several key buildings in her birthplace of Nuneaton are named after her or titles of her novels. For example
George Eliot Hospital, George Eliot Community School and Middlemarch Junior School.
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. The main characters, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, long for exceptional lives but are powerfully constrained both by their own unrealistic expectations and by a conservative society. The novel is notable for its deep psychological insight and sophisticated character portraits.
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. No author since
Jane Austen had been as socially conscious and as sharp in pointing out the hypocrisy of the country squires.
Felix Holt, the Radical and
The Legend of Jubal were overtly political, and political crisis is at the heart of
Middlemarch. Readers in the Victorian era particularly praised her books for their depictions of rural society, for which she drew on her own early experiences, and she shared with
Wordsworth the belief that there was much interest and importance in the mundane details of ordinary country lives. 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 hasn't 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. When Silas Marner is persuaded that his alienation from the church means also his alienation from society, the author's life is again mirrored with her refusal to attend church. She was at her most autobiographical in
Looking Backwards, part of her final printed work
Impressions of Theophrastus Such. By the time of
Daniel Deronda, Eliot's sales were falling off, and she faded from public view to some degree. This wasn't helped by the biography written by her husband after her death, which portrayed a wonderful, almost saintly, woman totally at odds with scandalous life they knew she'd led. In the
20th century she was championed by a new breed of critics; 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 wasn't 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. Her commentaries are never without sympathy for the characters, and she never stoops to being arch or flippant with the emotions in her stories. Villains, heroines and bystanders are all presented with awareness and full motivation.
Works
Novels
Poetry
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
From a London Drawing Room,
Count That Day Lost, ?
Other works
Translation of "The Life of Jesus Critically Examined" by David Strauss, 1846
Translation of "The Essence of Christianity" by Ludwig Feuerbach, 1854
Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858
- The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton
- Mr Gilfil's Love Story
- Janet's Repentance
The Lifted Veil, 1859
Brother Jacob, 1864
Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 1879Further Information
Get more info on 'George Eliot'.
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