George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans was born on November 22, 1819, at South Farm on the Arbury Hall estate near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, where her father Robert Evans managed the land for the Newdigate family ^[1]. She was the youngest surviving child of Robert and his second wife, Christiana Pearson. A few months after her birth the family moved to Griff House, a substantial farmhouse between Nuneaton and Coventry, and the fields, canals and coal pits of that corner of the Midlands later supplied the settings for much of her fiction ^[2].

Her father recognised her intelligence early and, unusually for a girl of her class at the time, paid for a serious education. She boarded at schools in Attleborough, Nuneaton and Coventry, where the evangelical teacher Maria Lewis became a strong influence and encouraged an intense religious piety in the young pupil ^[1]. When her mother died in 1836, sixteen-year-old Mary Ann left school to keep house for her father, but she continued studying on her own, reading widely and taking lessons in Italian and German ^[2].

The move that changed her life came in 1841, when she and her father settled at Foleshill on the edge of Coventry. There she met Charles and Cara Bray, freethinking ribbon manufacturers whose home, Rosehill, drew writers and reformers. Under their influence, and after reading Charles Hennell's inquiry into the origins of Christianity, she stopped attending church in January 1842, provoking a painful standoff with her father that was patched up only when she agreed to resume outward observance ^[3].

Her first substantial literary labour was translation. Through the Rosehill circle she took over the English translation of David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu, a demanding work of German biblical criticism, published in 1846 as The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined ^[3]. The project established her command of German scholarship and her willingness to engage with ideas that unsettled Victorian orthodoxy. She later translated Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity in 1854, the only book ever to appear under her real name ^[1].

After Robert Evans died in 1849, she travelled on the Continent and then moved to London in 1851, lodging at the house of the publisher John Chapman. Chapman had bought the Westminster Review, a leading radical quarterly, and Evans became its assistant editor in all but name, planning issues, commissioning articles and writing essays and reviews herself ^[4]. Few women in England held comparable editorial responsibility, and the position placed her at the centre of London intellectual life, where she met Herbert Spencer and, decisively, the writer George Henry Lewes.

Lewes encouraged her to attempt fiction. In 1856 she began a story called The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, which the publisher John Blackwood accepted for Blackwood's Magazine. It appeared in 1857 with two companion tales under the pseudonym George Eliot, chosen partly because Lewes's first name was George and partly to shield her work from prejudice against women novelists and from gossip about her private life ^[2]. The collected Scenes of Clerical Life came out in 1858 and won praise from Charles Dickens, who suspected from the first that the author was a woman ^[4].

Adam Bede, her first full-length novel, appeared in 1859 and was an immediate success, going through several printings within a year and prompting intense speculation about the identity of George Eliot ^[1]. Anyone asking who was George Eliot soon had an answer: the secret could not survive the book's fame, and by mid 1859 it was widely known that the celebrated new novelist was Marian Evans, as she now styled herself. The Mill on the Floss followed in 1860, drawing on her Warwickshire childhood and her bond with her brother Isaac, and Silas Marner, a shorter tale of a miser redeemed by a foundling child, appeared in 1861 ^[2].

She then widened her range. Romola (1863), set in fifteenth-century Florence, cost her enormous research and, she said, aged her; Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) turned to English electoral politics around the 1832 Reform Act ^[4]. The greatest of George Eliot achievements came in 1871 and 1872, when Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life was published in eight parts. Its interwoven stories of Dorothea Brooke, the doctor Tertius Lydgate and the town around them examined marriage, vocation, money and failure with a breadth no English novel had matched, and Virginia Woolf later called it one of the few English novels written for grown-up people ^[5].

Her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), paired a study of the spoiled Gwendolen Harleth with a sympathetic portrait of Jewish life and proto-Zionist aspiration, a subject almost no major Victorian novelist had treated seriously ^[1]. She also published poetry, including The Spanish Gypsy (1868) and the sonnet sequence Brother and Sister, and a final book of essays, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879) ^[4].

The central relationship of her life began in the early 1850s with George Henry Lewes, a versatile critic, biographer and student of science. Lewes was married, and although his wife Agnes had children by another man, the legal circumstances of the time made divorce impossible for him ^[3]. In July 1854 Evans and Lewes travelled together to Weimar and Berlin, and from then on they lived openly as husband and wife. She called herself Marian Evans Lewes, and their union, though never legalised, lasted until his death.

The decision carried a heavy social price. Respectable society shunned her for years, her brother Isaac cut off contact, and invitations that would have flowed to a famous male author arrived slowly or not at all ^[2]. Yet the partnership was, by the accounts of those who knew them, devoted and intellectually rich. Lewes managed her contracts, protected her from hostile reviews and steadied her through recurring self-doubt, while she helped support his sons from his marriage ^[4].

As her fame grew, the ostracism softened. From the 1860s the couple's Sunday afternoon gatherings at the Priory, their house near Regent's Park, became a fixture of literary London, attended by writers, scientists and admirers who came to hear the novelist talk ^[1].

Lewes died in November 1878, and the loss devastated her. She withdrew from company for months, occupying herself with preparing his unfinished work Problems of Life and Mind for publication and endowing a studentship in physiology at Cambridge in his memory ^[4].

In May 1880 she surprised nearly everyone by marrying John Walter Cross, a banker and family friend twenty years her junior who had long managed her investments. The marriage restored her to conventional respectability, and her brother Isaac wrote to her for the first time in over two decades to offer congratulations ^[2]. During their honeymoon in Venice, Cross, in a state of illness or mental distress, jumped from their hotel balcony into the Grand Canal; he survived, and the couple returned to England.

They settled at 4 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea early in December 1880. Within weeks she caught a throat infection which, combined with the kidney disease that had troubled her for years, proved fatal. She died on December 22, 1880, at the age of sixty-one ^[1]. Because of her unorthodox life she was not offered burial in Westminster Abbey; she was buried in Highgate Cemetery beside Lewes, in the area reserved for religious dissenters ^[3].

Any George Eliot biography has to reckon with her double achievement: she enlarged the technical possibilities of fiction while insisting that the novel was a serious instrument of moral understanding. Her use of an intrusive, reflective narrator, her psychological analysis of ordinary provincial lives and her refusal of tidy endings influenced Henry James, Marcel Proust and the modernists who followed ^[5]. Middlemarch in particular has been repeatedly ranked by writers and critics among the greatest novels in the English language, including first place in a 2015 BBC Culture poll of book critics outside the United Kingdom ^[6].

Her reputation dipped in the decades after her death, when John Cross's carefully sanitised 1885 biography made her seem solemn, but the revival led by critics such as F. R. Leavis in the twentieth century restored her to the centre of the canon ^[5]. Feminist scholars have since examined the contrasts between her own unconventional life and the constrained fates of her heroines.

A century after her death, in 1980, a memorial stone was placed in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, the recognition denied her in 1880 ^[3]. Among enduring George Eliot facts, admirers often note that she published her first novel at thirty-nine, proof that her slow route through translation, journalism and scandal fed rather than delayed the books that made her name. Nuneaton's museum keeps a permanent collection devoted to her, and her novels remain continuously in print, studied, adapted for film and television, and read ^[2].