Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively Mary Anne or Marian), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era."George Eliot (…) is the most earnestly imperative and the most probingly intelligent of the great mid-Victorian novelists". In: Sanders, Andrew The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Clarendon Press, 1994. p. 440 She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Her novels are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place, and detailed depiction of the countryside. Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people"Woolf, Virginia. "George Eliot." The Common Reader. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1925. pp. 166–176. and by Martin AmisLong, Camilla.Martin Amis and the sex war, The Times, 24 January 2010, p. 4: "They've [women] produced the greatest writer in the English language ever, George Eliot, and arguably the third greatest, Jane Austen, and certainly the greatest novel, Middlemarch..." and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.
Scandalously and unconventionally for the era, she lived with the married George Henry Lewes as his conjugal partner, from 1854 to 1878, and called him her husband. He remained married to his wife, Agnes Jervis, and supported their children, even after Jervis left him to live with another man and have children with him. In May 1880, 18 months after Lewes's death, Eliot married her longtime friend John Cross, a man much younger than she, and changed her name to Mary Ann Cross.
Life
Early life and education Mary Ann Evans was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, at South Farm on the Arbury Hall estate.Cooke, George Willis. George Eliot: A Critical Study of her Life, Writings and Philosophy. Whitefish: Kessinger, 2004. She was the third child of Robert Evans (1773–1849), manager of the Arbury Hall estate, and Christiana Evans (née Pearson, 1788–1836), daughter of a local mill-owner. Her full siblings were: Christiana, known as Chrissey (1814–1859), Isaac (1816–1890), and twin brothers who died a few days after birth in March 1821. She also had a half-brother, Robert Evans (1802–1864), and half-sister, Frances "Fanny" Evans Houghton (1805–1882), from her father's previous marriage to Harriet Poynton (1780–1809). In early 1820, the family moved to a house named Griff House, between Nuneaton and Bedworth.
The young Evans was a voracious reader. Because she was not considered physically attractive, Evans was not thought to have much chance of marriage, and this, coupled with her intelligence, led her father to invest in an education not often afforded to women.Karl, Frederick R. George Eliot: Voice of a Century. Norton, 1995. pp. 24–25 From ages five to nine, she boarded with her sister Chrissey at Miss Latham's school in Attleborough, from ages nine to thirteen at Mrs. Wallington's school in Nuneaton, and from ages thirteen to sixteen at Miss Franklin's school in Coventry. At Mrs. Wallington's school, she was taught by the evangelical Maria Lewis—to whom her earliest surviving letters are addressed. In the religious atmosphere of the Misses Franklin's school, Evans was exposed to a quiet, disciplined belief opposed to evangelicalism.Karl, Frederick R. George Eliot: Voice of a Century. Norton, 1995. p. 31
After age sixteen, Evans had little formal education.Karl, Frederick R. George Eliot: Voice of a Century. Norton, 1995. p. 52 Thanks to her father's important role on the estate, she was allowed access to the library of Arbury Hall, which greatly aided her self-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 correctly without the use of a Greek typeface), and her themes are often influenced by Greek tragedy".Christopher Stray Classics Transformed, p. 81 Her frequent visits to the estate 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.
Move to Coventry In 1836, her mother died and Evans (then sixteen) returned home to act as housekeeper, though she continued to correspond with her tutor Maria Lewis. When she was twenty-one, 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 in his career as a ribbon manufacturer and had used his wealth in the building of schools and in other philanthropic causes. Evans, who had been struggling with religious doubts for some time, became intimate friends with the radical, free-thinking Brays, who had a casual view of marital obligations and the Brays' "Rosehill" home 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 and agnostic theologies and to writers such as David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, who cast doubt on the literal truth of Biblical texts. Her first major literary work was an English translation of Strauss's Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet as The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1846), which she completed after it had been left incomplete by Elizabeth "Rufa" Brabant, another member of the "Rosehill Circle".
The Strauss book had caused a sensation in Germany by arguing that the miracles in the New Testament were mythical additions with little basis in fact.The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined by David Friedrich Strauss 2010 pp. 39–43, 87–91The Making of the New Spirituality by James A. Herrick 2003 pp. 58–65Familiar Stranger: An Introduction to Jesus of Nazareth by Michael J. McClymond (2004) p. 82 Evans's translation had a similar effect in England, with the Earl of Shaftesbury calling her translation "the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell."The historical Jesus question by Gregory W. Dawes 2001 pp. 77–79 Later she translated Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1854).
As a product of their friendship, Bray published some of Evans's own earliest writing, such as reviews, in his newspaper the Coventry Herald and Observer. As Evans began to question her own religious faith, her father threatened to throw her out of the house, but his threat was not carried out. Instead, she respectfully attended church and continued to keep house for him until his death in 1849, when she was 30. Five days after her father's funeral, she travelled to Switzerland with the Brays. She decided to stay on in Geneva alone, living first on the lake at Plongeon (near the present-day United Nations buildings) and then on the second floor of a house owned by her friends François and Juliet d'Albert Durade on the rue de Chanoines (now the rue de la Pelisserie). She commented happily that "one feels in a downy nest high up in a good old tree". Her stay is commemorated by a plaque on the building. While residing there, she read avidly and took long walks in the beautiful Swiss countryside, which was a great inspiration to her. François Durade painted her portrait there as well.Hardy, Barbara. George Eliot: A Critic's Biography. Continuum. London: 2006, pp. 42–45.
Move to London and editorship of the Westminster Review On her return to England the following year (1850), she moved to London with the intent of becoming a writer, and she began referring to herself as Marian Evans. She stayed at the house of John Chapman, the radical publisher whom she had met earlier at Rosehill and who had published her Strauss translation. She then joined Chapman's ménage-à-trois along with his wife and mistress. Chapman had recently purchased the campaigning, left-wing journal The Westminster Review. Evans became its assistant editor in 1851 after joining just a year earlier. Evans's writings for the paper were comments on her views of society and the Victorian way of thinking. She was sympathetic to the lower classes and criticised organised religion throughout her articles and reviews and commented on contemporary ideas of the time. Much of this was drawn from her own experiences and knowledge and she used this to critique other ideas and organisations. This led to her writing being viewed as authentic and wise but not too obviously opinionated. Evans also focused on the business side of the Review with attempts to change its layout and design. Although Chapman was officially the editor, it was Evans who did most of the work of producing the journal, contributing many essays and reviews beginning with the January 1852 issue and continuing until the end of her employment at the Review in the first half of 1854.Ashton, Rosemary. George Eliot: A Life. London: Penguin, 1997. 88ff. . Eliot sympathized with the 1848 Revolutions throughout continental Europe, and even hoped that the Italians would chase the "odious Austrians" out of Lombardy and that "decayed monarchs" would be pensioned off, although she believed a gradual reformist approach to social problems was best for England.
In 1850–51, Evans attended classes in mathematics at the Ladies College in Bedford Square, later known as Bedford College, London.Ladies College UCL Bloomsbury Project
Relationship with George Henry Lewes
The philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) met Evans in 1851, and by 1854 they had decided to live together. Lewes was already married to Agnes Jervis, although in an open marriage. In addition to the three children they had together, Agnes also had four children by Thornton Leigh Hunt. In July 1854, Lewes and Evans travelled to Weimar and Berlin together for the purpose of research. Before going to Germany, Evans continued her theological work with a translation of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, and while abroad she wrote essays and worked on her translation of Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, which she completed in 1856, but which was not published in her lifetime because the prospective publisher refused to pay the requested £75.Hughes, Kathryn, George Eliot: The Last Victorian, p. 168. In 1981, Eliot's translation of Spinoza's Ethics was finally published by Thomas Deegan, and was determined to be in the public domain in 2018 and published by the George Eliot Archive. It has been re-published in 2020 by Princeton University Press.
The trip to Germany also served as a honeymoon for Evans and Lewes, who subsequently considered themselves married. Evans began to refer to Lewes as her husband and to sign her name as Mary Ann Evans Lewes, legally changing her name to Mary Ann Evans Lewes after his death. The refusal to conceal the relationship was contrary to the social conventions of the time, and attracted considerable disapproval.
Career in fiction