George Eliot (1819-1880) was a groundbreaking English novelist, poet, and translator who is considered one of the greatest writers of the Victorian Era.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s Storyteller was a groundbreaking English novelist, poet, and translator who is considered one of the greatest writers of the Victorian Era. She is perhaps most revered today for her development of the method of literary psychological analysis that has become a defining characteristic of modern fiction. Let’s talk about George Eliot.
Mary Ann Evans was born in Nuneaton, England on November 22, 1819 to Robert Evans, the manager of a local estate called Arbury Hall, and his wife Christiana. Mary Ann was the third of their five children.
Mary Ann was an evidently brilliant child and a particularly voracious reader. Because she was viewed by her family as somewhat unattractive, and thus unlikely to garner a good marriage proposal, her father invested in her education well beyond what was common for the period. She attended three different boarding schools between the ages of 5 and 16 where she learned French and Italian and was given significant evangelical religious instruction, which had a lasting impact on her perception of the world around her.
When Mary Ann was 16 years old, her mother died and Mary Ann was encouraged to return home from boarding school to take care of her father and the household. While her formal education had come to a close, Mary Ann had access to Arbury Hall’s excellent library and took private lessons in Latin and German with a local tutor.
In 1841, Mary Ann moved with her father to Coventry. There she became friends with Charles Bray, a wealthy ribbon manufacturer and philanthropist, and his wife Cara. They were known as freethinkers who supported radical causes of the period and ran a sort of salon for like-minded friends. It was there that Mary Ann was first introduced to the debate over the relationship between science and religion. This caused Mary Ann to break with the religious orthodoxy of her early life. She started refusing to go to church with her father, creating a massive rift in their relationship.
In 1843, Mary Ann took over the translation of a famous D.F. Strauss work. It was published in English in 1846 as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. It was Mary Ann’s first major piece of translation and it had a profound impact on English Rationalism.
In 1849, Mary Ann’s father died. She was left with a yearly allowance of 100 pounds and many questions about what to do with her future.
Her questions were answered when John Chapman, the publisher of The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, got Mary Ann a job reviewing R.W. Mackay’s “The Progress of the Intellect” for The Westminster Review, a quarterly publication based in London.
Chapman bought The Westminster Review a few months later and convinced Mary Ann, who started going by the shortened Marian, to move to London and take over as the Review’s subeditor. During her tenure, which lasted until 1854, Marian successfully revitalized the publication.
When she wasn’t working, Marian spent her time at the Chapman’s house where they regularly hosted parties for London’s literary elite. There she met luminaries like Herbert Spencer, who became a dear friend and introduced Marian to both of the men with whom she would have long term relationships.
The first of the two men, George Henry Lewes, was a journalist who co-founded a radical weekly called The Leader. Though married, he and his wife separated after she gave birth to two children fathered by his business partner. Soon after, Lewes met Marian. Their relationship blossomed over a shared love of intellectual pursuits and trips to the theater and opera. While still technically married to his first wife, Lewes and Marian lived openly together as husband and wife first in London and then in Germany, where the couple moved in 1854.
This situation was not without some major challenges. Marian once said of the relationship, “Women who are content with light and easily broken ties do not act as I have done. They obtain what they desire and are still invited to dinner.”
While living in Germany, Marian translated Spinoza’s seminal work called “Ethics,” while continuing to write some of her very best essays for The Westminster Review. Marian and Lewes’ life was a happy one for the most part, but was marred somewhat for Marian by the amount of gossip that she had to put up with. She was also estranged from her very religious and conservative family, who wholly disapproved of her out-of-wedlock relationship.
Lewes encouraged Marian to write a story about her childhood as a means of catharsis. That story, The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, was published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1857. It was an instant success. Two more serialized stories quickly followed and, in 1858 all three were republished as Scenes of Clerical Life, written under the pseudonym by which Marian would soon come to be known, George Eliot.
A year later, George, as we will now call her, published her first novel, “Adam Bede.” She described it as “a country story—full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay.” A novel of deep pathos and humor, it was a rich portrait of everyday English country life. It was unlike anything her audience had ever read before. In just one year, Adam Bede went through eight printings.
In 1860, George published the novel, “The Mill on the Floss.” In it, George again transports readers to the English countryside where her writing provides an extraordinary portrait of the experiences of childhood and coming of age. It’s been lauded for the groundbreaking way in which George incorporated subtle components of psychology and psychological analysis into the story.
The next year, George wrote another of her great works, the much shorter Silas Marner, which continues to be a favorite of high school English teachers to this day. Though not perhaps her most endearing novel, Silas Marner has earned great praise for its perfection of form.
George continued to publish throughout the 1860s. Then in 1871 she published what most critics agree is her magnum opus, Middlemarch. A provincial novel set in the English Midlands, Middlemarch is an extraordinary examination of the realities and complexities of life for the different classes in Victorian English society.
Emily Dickinson once wrote of Middlemarch, "What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory – except that in a few instances 'this mortal has already put on immortality.'”
Virginia Woolf famously called it "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."
George published her final novel, Daniel Deronda, in 1878. Many modern critics view it as the most contemporary of her works, particularly because of its brilliant psychological analyses.
Two years later, Lewes, George’s life and business partner of almost 25 years, died. Suddenly George found herself alone and without either the encouragement Lewes provided or the stability.
But it wasn’t long before she found another companion in a Scottish banker named John Walter Cross. Cross had been in charge of George’s investments for a number of years. Just a week after the death of Lewes, Cross’s own mother had died, and the two bonded over their grief. Two years later, George and Cross married in London. She was 61 and he was 40. After honeymooning in Italy, they moved into a new house in London together. Soon after, George fell ill.
On December 22nd, 1880, George Eliot passed away. She was 61 years old. She was buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery in the area reserved for political and religious dissenters and agnostics, next to George Lewes.
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