George Eliot (pseudonym of MARY ANN EVANS) was
born Nov. 22, 1819, in Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, the daughter of an
estate agent. She was educated at a local school in Nuneaton and later
at a boarding school in Coventry. At the age of 17, after the death of
her mother and the marriage of her elder sister, she was called home to
care for her father. From that time on she was self-taught. A strict religious
training, received at the insistence of her father, dominated Eliot's youth.
In 1841 she began to read rationalist works, which influenced her to rebel
against dogmatic religion, and she remained a rationalist throughout her
life. Her first literary attempt, at which she worked for two years (1844-46),
was a translation of Das Leben Jesu (The Living Jesus, 1835-36) by the
German theologian David Strauss. In 1851, after traveling for two years
in Europe, she returned to England and wrote a book review for the Westminster
Review. She subsequently became assistant editor of that publication. Through
her work on the Review she met many of the leading literary figures of
the period, including Harriet Martineau, John Stuart Mill, James Froude,
Herbert Spencer, and George Lewes. Her meeting with Lewes, a philosopher,
scientist, and critic, was one of the most significant events of her life.
They fell in love and decided to live together, although Lewes was married
and a divorce was not possible. Nevertheless, Eliot looked upon her subsequent
long and happy relationship with Lewes as a marriage.
Eliot continued to write reviews, articles for periodicals,
and translations from the German. Then, with encouragement from Lewes,
she began to write fiction in 1856. Her first story, "The Sad Fortunes
of the Reverend Amos Barton," appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in January
1857. It was followed by two other stories in the same year, and all three
were collected in book form as Scenes from Clerical Life (1858). The author
signed herself George Eliot and kept her true identity secret for many
years.
Eliot's best-known works are Adam Bede (1859), The Mill
on the Floss (1860), and Silas Marner (1861). These novels deal with the
Warwickshire countryside and are based, to a great extent, on her own life.
Travels in Italy inspired her next novel, Romola, a historical romance
about the Italian preacher and reformer Girolamo Savonarola and 15th-century
Florence. She began writing the book in 1861, and it appeared in 1863,
after being serialized in The Cornhill Magazine. Following the completion
of Romola, she wrote two outstanding novels, Felix Holt, the Radical (1866),
concerned with English politics, and Middlemarch (1862), dealing with English
middle-class life in a provincial town. Daniel Deronda (1876) is a novel
attacking anti-Semitism, and The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)
is a collection of essays. Her poetry, which is considered to have much
less merit than her prose, includes The Spanish Gypsy (1868), a drama in
blank verse; Agatha (1869); and The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1874).
During the period in which she wrote her major works,
Eliot was always encouraged and protected by Lewes. He prevented her even
from seeing unfavorable reviews of her books. After his death in 1878 she
became a recluse and stopped writing. In May 1880 she married John Cross
(1840-1924), an American banker, who had long been a friend of both Lewes
and herself, but she died in London on December 22.
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