George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans, also known by her pen name "George Eliot," was a Victorian novelist who left an unremovable mark on English literature. She was born on 22nd November 1819, in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England. She would go on to become one of the most important literary figures of the 19th century. The life of Eliot was a fascinating journey that had intellectual curiosity, unconventional choices, and a deep impact on the field of literacy. She also developed some methods of psychological analysis characteristics of today's fiction.

Early Life of George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans, who was later known as George Eliot, was born on 22nd November 1819 in Nuneaton. From 1828 to 1832, she went to a school run by Mrs. Wallington in Nuneaton, and there, she met a teacher named Maria Lewis, who taught her a lot about being religious.

After that, she went to another school in Coventry from 1832 to 1835, and the daughters of a Baptist minister ran it. Her religious feelings grew stronger there, and she started dressing simply and doing a lot of good things for others. This school helped her learn to read in French and Italian; when her mom passed away, she had to go back home and take care of her dad.

When Mary Ann Evans lived in Coventry, she met a man named Charles Bray; he was a successful person who made ribbons and believed in thinking freely and supporting changes in life. Charles Bray's brother-in-law, Charles Hennell, wrote a book in 1838 that made Mary Ann question the usual beliefs about Christianity, and this made her decide not to go to church anymore in 1842, which made her Father angry.

For many months, there was a big disagreement between Mary Ann and her Father about going to church, but eventually, they found a solution. Mary Ann could believe what she wanted as long as she still looked respectable and went to church sometimes. She stayed with her Father until he passed away in 1849.

Mary Ann Evans started to learn new ideas from the Brays and the Hennells, who were different from her Father's beliefs, and they introduced her to thoughts that disagreed with her Father's religious and political views. In 1843, when Charles Hennell got married, Mary Ann took over translating a book by D.F. Strauss called Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, and it was published as "The Life of Jesus Critically Examined" in 1846 and had a big impact on the thinking of English people.

After Charles Hennell's wedding, Mrs. Hennell's Father, R.H. Brabant, invited Mary Ann to visit Devizes. He was a man who had been working for a long time on a book that he never finished; this book aimed to explain away the supernatural parts of religion. They read German and Greek together and talked about theology on long walks, but Mrs. Brabant became jealous of their friendship, and Mary Ann had to leave before her visit was over.

Mrs. Hennell thought her Father was not fair in how he acted, so this difficult experience became a part of George Eliot's memory and shaped the character Mr. Casaubon in her novel Middlemarch. In the winter of 1849-50, Mary Ann Evans went to Geneva and stayed with François D'Albert Durade's family; she spent so much time reading a lot. While there, a painter named Durade made a portrait of her, just like Mrs. Bray and Sir Frederic Burton did in 1842 and 1865. You can see all these portraits in the National Portrait Gallery. They show her with light brown hair, gray-blue eyes, and a very fair complexion.

After coming back to Coventry, she spent the rest of 1850 with the Brays, thinking about how to live on the £100 a year her Father left her. Then, John Chapman, who published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, helped her get a chance to review a book called The Progress of the Intellect in The Westminster Review in January 1851, and after this, she decided to move to London and work as a writer, so in January 1851, she went to live with the Chapmans at 142 Strand.

Life of George Eliot with George Henry Lewes

After moving to London, she named herself Marian, and she faced many challenges. Mrs. Chapman, the wife of John Chapman and the governess of children, who was also the girlfriend of Chapman, became jealous of her; sadly, after just 10 weeks, Marian (George Eliot) had to return to Coventry after feeling upset, but it seems her feelings were drawn to John Chapman, as mentioned in her diary, but there is no proof she was ever romantically involved with him.

A few months later, Chapman bought The Westminster Review, a magazine; Marian, feeling sorry for the mistakes she unintentionally made at the home of Chapman, came back to London; there, from 1851 to 1854, she worked as a sub-editor for The Westminster, making it very successful. During this time, she attended parties at the house of Chapman and met many famous writers in an atmosphere of ideas about politics and religion.

Across the street, Herbert Spencer, the subeditor of The Economist, used to live; Chapman had just published the book of Spencer, Social Statics, in 1851. Marian and Spencer shared many interests, and they spent a lot of time together, so naturally, people started to think they were engaged, but they never got married. However, Spencer introduced Marian to the two men who eventually became her husbands (in the future).

George Henry Lewes was a very talented journalist during the Victorian era; in 1841, he married Agnes Jervis, and they had four sons together. In 1850, Lewes and his friend Thornton Leigh Hunt started a bold weekly publication called The Leader, where Lewes wrote about literature and theatre. A complex problem arose when, in April 1850, Agnes gave birth to a son, and the Father was Thornton Hunt (not George Lewes); despite this, Lewes, who held liberal views, registered the child as Edmund Lewes and remained on good terms with Agnes and Hunt. However, when Agnes had another child with Hunt in October 1851, Lewes no longer considered her his wife, although he could not legally divorce her since he had forgiven her earlier.

At this challenging time, when his family life was in chaos, Lewes met Marian Evans; they worked together on articles and attended plays and operas that Lewes reviewed for The Leader; convinced that his relationship with Agnes was over, Marian decided to openly live with Lewes as his wife (without marriage); in July 1854, after Marian translated Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, they traveled to Germany together. Though they were not legally married, they lived as if they were, and their relationship continued happily until Lewes passed away in 1878. Marian, reflecting on her choices, shared with Mrs. Bray that her commitment was different from those who easily give up on relationships, and she found fulfillment in her unconventional path, unlike those who settle for simpler connections.

Career of George Eliot

While George Eliot was in Weimar and Berlin, Marian wrote some of her best essays for The Westminster and translated Spinoza's Ethics, a philosophical work, which was published in 1981; during this time, George Lewes was very busy writing his groundbreaking biography of Goethe. To support his three sons in Switzerland and Agnes, whom he gave £100 a year, Lewes had to rely on his writing alone. This financial support continued until the death of Agnes in 1902; although Agnes had four children with Thornton Hunt, born between 1850 and 1857, all of them were registered under the name of Lewes. The conduct of Lewes towards Agnes was considered generous by the few friends who knew the truth but talked rubbish gossip about the "strong-minded woman" who had "run off with" her husband.

Marian's biggest sadness was that her actions isolated her from her family in Warwickshire, so to cooperate, encouraged by Lewes, she turned to early memories and wrote a story based on a childhood episode in Chilvers Coton parish; this story was titled "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton," was published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857 and became a great success in no time. Two more stories, "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story and Janet's Repentance," also inspired by local events, were published serial-wise in the same year; these three books were published by Blackwood in 1858 as "Scenes of Clerical Life," a book attributed to the pseudonym George Eliot. This marked the beginning of George Eliot's great career as a novelist.

In 1859, George Eliot published her first long novel, "Adam Bede," in three volumes or parts in which she described it as "a country story—full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay." The storyline of the novel lay in its finest realism, skillfully showing everyday things with great detail, a quality also praised by John Ruskin in the works of the Pre-Raphaelites; this book is filled with humor and captures the importance of ordinary life.

The inspiration for the story of this book came from a story told by her Methodist aunt about a girl accused of child murder. The dialect (dialogues or language in a particular language) spoken by the Bede family in the novel was taken from the conversations between George Eliot's Derbyshire uncles and her Father, with some of her Father's early experiences shown in the character Adam. What set "Adam Bede" apart in English fiction was its unique combination of human understanding and strict moral judgments.

The novel quickly gained popularity because of its good storyline, and this book went through eight printings within a year; impressed by its success, the publisher of this book, Blackwood, doubled the initial payment of £800 and even returned the copyright of the book to George Eliot. This was the beginning of George Eliot's remarkable journey as a novelist.

In her novel "The Mill on the Floss," which was published in three volumes in the year 1860, George Eliot revisited the places of her early life. The first part of the book, which mostly depicts childhood, is very captivating and charming. The novel, as a whole, introduces scenes that display a high level of psychological knowledge, which makes it engaging and inspires the reader to read.

During the 1860s, historical novels were quite popular; while George Eliot was visiting Florence in 1860, her partner, George Henry Lewes, suggested that Girolamo Savonarola would be an excellent subject to write a novel. George Eliot enthusiastically embraced the idea and started planning "Romola" (1862-63). However, before getting to know about the Italian material, she wrote "Silas Marner" (in 1861), a shorter and perfectly written story about a weaver whose lost gold is replaced by an abandoned child; despite its literary goodness and richness, "Silas Marner" has sometimes been unfairly forced on generations of schoolchildren.

"Romola" was previously planned as a serial for Blackwood's Magazine; however, George Eliot was offered £10,000 by The Cornhill Magazine, so she switched publishers. Instead of dividing the book into 16 installments as the editor wanted, she chose to accept £3,000 less, showing a rare artistic integrity. George Eliot deeply researched Florentine history, settings, costumes, and dialogues at the British Museum and during a second trip to Italy in 1861; "Romola" was published in 14 parts between July 1862 and August 1863, although the book may lack the spontaneity of her English stories, it has been unjustly criticized.

The next two novels of George Eliot were set in England during a time when there was a push for the Reform Bill; in "Felix Holt, the Radical," which was published in three volumes in 1866, she was trying to show an election riot based on her memories of seeing a similar event in Nuneaton in December 1832; while the inspiration for the book to start was not its political theme but the tragic character of Mrs. Transome, it turned out to be one of her greatest achievements. The storyline of the novel, which was popular at that time, may now be seen as a drawback.

"Middlemarch," published in eight parts between 1871 and 1872, is considered one of the masterpieces by George Eliot; she increased the standard of a novel from entertainment to a highly intellectual form of art. The story tells about every class in Middlemarch society, from the landed gentry and clergy to manufacturers, shopkeepers, publicans, farmers, professionals, and laborers; many plot strands are shown to increase each character through contrast and parallelism. However, the strength of the story does not lie in tight intrigue but in showing the impact of the unnoticed actions of those who "lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs."

"Daniel Deronda," which was published in eight parts in the year 1876, is a novel in which George Eliot comes closest to showing contemporary society; the story of this novel revolves around the contrast between Mirah Cohen, a poor girl who was a Jewish, and Gwendolen Harleth who was an upper-class woman who marries for wealth but regrets her choice. The main character of the storyline, Daniel, less convincingly shown, discovers that he is Jewish, so he marries Mirah and travels to Palestine to establish a home for his people; the depiction of the Cohen family received praise from Jewish readers.

However, the main thing of this novel "Daniel Deronda" is the good analysis of the character of Gwendolen; many critics also consider this work (novel) to be the pinnacle of George Eliot's accomplishments. The novel explores the complexities of society and personal choices, making it a worthy contribution to literature.

Last Times of George Eliot

In 1863, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes purchased a house at 21 North Bank, Regent's Park, known as the Priory; their Sunday afternoons there became a main part of Victorian social life, but sadly, on 30th November 1878, George Henry Lewes passed away. He had been a supportive helper of George Eliot's genius and took care of many matters for almost 25 years, but after his death, those responsibilities now fell entirely upon her; George Eliot deeply missed the support that Lewes provided her, which had been important for her writing.

For many months, she secluded herself and only saw his (Lewes) son, Charles Lee Lewes; during this time, she only focused on finishing the last volume of the work left by Lewes, "Problems of Life and Mind" (1873-79), and established the George Henry Lewes Studentship in Physiology at Cambridge.

Her financial matters were maintained by John Walter Cross; a banker introduced to the Leweses by Herbert Spencer; Cross's mother had passed away shortly after Lewes. Seeking support and advice, George Eliot found comfort and affection in Cross, and on 6th May 1880, they married at St. George's, Hanover Square. At that time, Cross was 40 years old, and she was in her 61st year of age; after a wedding trip to Italy, they first lived at her country house in Witley before moving to 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, but George Eliot passed away in December and was buried at Highgate Cemetery.

Some Facts about George Eliot

• George Eliot's real and full name was "Mary Anne Evans."
• She is known by many names: Marian Evans, George Eliot, and Mary Anne Evans.
• She is Famous for Writing English Literature.
• She was born on 22nd November 1819, in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England.
• She died on 22nd December 1880 in London, England.
• Her Father's name was Robert Evans, and her Mother's name was Christiana Evans.
• She had two partners in her life: first was George Hanry Lewes from 1854 to 1878, and second, John Cross in 1880.
• She received her education from Mrs. Wallington's, Misses Franklin's, Bedford College.

George Eliot Works

Editorial Works (from 1850 to 1856)

• The Westminster Review (from 1850 to 1856)
• The Essence of Christianity (1854, translation)
• Ethics (in 1856, translation completed and was published after her death)

Fictional Work (from 1856 to 1859)

• Scenes of Clerical Life (from 1856 to 1858)
• The Lifted Veil (in the year 1859)
• Adam Bede (in the year 1859)

Popular Novels and Political Ideas (from 1860 to 1876)

• The Mill on the Floss (in the year 1860)
• Silas Marner (in the year 1861)
• Romola (in the year 1863)
• Brother Jacob (in the year 1864)
• The Influence of Rationalism (in the year 1865)
• In a London Drawing Room (in the year 1865)
• Two Lovers (in the year 1866)
• Felix Holt, the Radical (in the year 1866)
• The Choir Invisible (in the year 1867)
• The Spanish Gypsy (in the year 1868)
• Agatha (in the year 1869)
• Brother and Sister (in the year 1869)
• Armgart (in the year 1871)
• Middlemarch (from 1871 to 1872)
• The Legend of Jubal (in the year 1874)
• I Grant You Ample Leave (in the year 1874)
• Arion (in the year 1874)
• A Minor Prophet (in the year 1874)
• Daniel Deronda (in the year 1876)
• Impressions of Theophrastus Such (in the year 1879)

Conclusion

In the history of English literature, George Eliot is remembered as one of the important writers who challenged societal norms and left behind a deep impact; her stories make us understand the complexities of human nature, social dynamics, and moral challenges, still interesting readers today. Mary Ann Evans, using the pen name George Eliot, not only broke barriers for women in literature but also increased the literary world with her deep understanding and stories.