George Eliot (1819–1880) is the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, the English novelist of Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Middlemarch. A translator and journal editor before she turned to fiction, she brought to the Victorian novel an unprecedented depth of psychological insight and moral seriousness. Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.
Works
The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda
Warwickshire
Mary Ann Evans was born on 22 November 1819 on the Arbury estate in Warwickshire, where her father, Robert Evans, was the land agent. A gifted and serious girl, she went to boarding schools in Nuneaton and Coventry and was deeply religious in her teens.
After her mother's death in 1836 she kept house for her father, and they moved to Coventry in 1841. There she met freethinking friends, read widely in science and German scholarship, and gave up attending church, which led to a long quarrel with her father before they reached a compromise.
Translator and editor
Her first published work was a translation of David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus (1846), a critical study of the Gospels as history, followed by a translation of Ludwig Feuerbach. After her father's death in 1849 she travelled to Geneva, then settled in London.
From 1851 she worked, unpaid and unnamed, as the effective editor of the Westminster Review, the leading radical journal of the day, and wrote essays and reviews for it. She met the writer and critic George Henry Lewes, who was married but separated; in 1854 they went to Germany together and lived openly as a couple until his death, which cut her off from much of respectable society.
George Eliot
Encouraged by Lewes, she began writing fiction at thirty-six. Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) was signed George Eliot, a man's name chosen, she said, partly because George was Lewes's name. Adam Bede (1859), a story of rural life in the Midlands, was a great success, and readers speculated about the author's identity until she acknowledged it.
The Mill on the Floss (1860), about Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom, draws on her own childhood; Silas Marner (1861) tells of a miserly weaver whose life is transformed by a child. Romola is set in Renaissance Florence, and Felix Holt in the time of the 1832 Reform Act.
Middlemarch and the last years
Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life, published in eight parts in 1871–72, follows a whole community around 1830, especially the idealistic Dorothea Brooke and the ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate. It was followed by Daniel Deronda (1876), which explores Jewish identity and the hopes of Zionism.
Lewes died in 1878. In May 1880 Eliot married John Walter Cross, a banker twenty years younger than herself; she died in London on 22 December 1880. Refused burial in Westminster Abbey because of her unconventional life and views, she was buried in Highgate Cemetery; a memorial stone was placed in Poets' Corner in 1980.
Anecdotes
The impostor
When Adam Bede became a success in 1859, a man from Nuneaton named Joseph Liggins let it be believed that he was its author, and his supporters claimed he had been cheated of his earnings. The affair helped push Mary Ann Evans to reveal that she was George Eliot.
A honeymoon in Venice
During her honeymoon with John Cross in Venice in June 1880, her husband jumped or fell from the balcony of their hotel into the Grand Canal. He was rescued by gondoliers, and the cause of the incident was never made clear.
Frequently asked questions
What is George Eliot's real name?
Mary Ann Evans, who also spelled her name Marian Evans. She adopted the pen name George Eliot in 1857 and later used the name Marian Evans Lewes.
Why did George Eliot use a male pen name?
To be taken seriously at a time when women's novels were often dismissed as light romance, and to keep her work apart from the scandal of her life with George Henry Lewes.
What are George Eliot's major novels?
Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch (1871–72) and Daniel Deronda (1876).