Background

Mary Ann Evans was born on November 22, 1819 in Warwickshire, England; the daughter of an estate agent or manager Robert Evans and Christiana Evans.

Education

Eliot's education was a conventional one, dominated by Christian teachings and touched by the enthusiasm generated by the Evangelical movement of church reform. 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. After age sixteen, Evans had little formal education, as her mother died in 1836 and Eliot had to leave school to help run her father's household. In 1841, she moved with her father to Coventry and lived with him until his death in 1849.

Career

In her 20's Eliot came into contact with a circle of freethinkers and underwent a radical transformation of her beliefs. Influenced by the so-called Higher Criticism - a largely German school of biblical scholarship that attempted to treat sacred writings as human and historical documents - she devoted herself to translating its findings for the English public. She published her translation of David Strauss's Life of Jesus in 1846 and her translation of Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity in 1854. In 1851 Evans became an editor of the Westminster Review, a rationalist and reformist journal. In that capacity she came into contact with the leading intellectuals of the day, among them a group known as the positivists. They were followers of the doctrines of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who were interested in applying scientific knowledge to the problems of society. One of these men was George Henry Lewes with whom she formed a lasting relationship.

In the same period Evans turned her powerful mind from scholarly and critical writing to creative work. In 1857 she published a short story, "Amos Barton," and took the pen name "George Eliot" in order to obviate the special aura then attached to lady novelists.

After collecting her short stories in Scenes of Clerical Life (2 vols., 1858), Eliot published her first novel, Adam Bede (1859). The plot was drawn from a reminiscence of Eliot's aunt, a Methodist preacher, whom she idealized as a character in the novel. The story concerns the seduction of a stupid peasant girl by a selfish young squire, and it follows the stages of the girl's pregnancy, mental disorder, conviction for child murder, and transportation to the colonies. A greater interest develops, however, in the growing love of the lady preacher and a village artisan, Adam Bede. The religious inspiration and moral elevation of their life stand in contrast to the mental limitations and selfishness that govern the personal relations of the other couple.

Eliot's next novel, The Mill on the Floss (1860), shows even stronger traces of her childhood and youth in small-town and rural England. It follows the development of a bright and attractive heroine, Maggie Tulliver, among the narrow-minded provincials who surround her. Through the adversities that follow her father's bankruptcy, Maggie acquires a faith in Christian humility, fostered by her reading of Thomas à Kempis. But events become more complex than her ascetic way of life can respond to, and the final pages of the novel show the heroine reaching toward a "religion of humanity," which it was Eliot's aim to instill in her readers.

In 1861 Eliot published a short novel, Silas Marner, which through use as a school textbook is unfortunately her best-known work. It concerns the redemption from misanthropy of the lonely, long-suffering Silas Marner by a child who comes accidentally to his door and whom he adopts. The fairy-tale qualities of the plot are relieved by the realism with which Eliot invested the rural setting and by the psychological penetration with which she portrayed her somewhat grotesque characters.

In 1860 and 1861 Eliot lived abroad in Florence and studied Renaissance history and culture. She wrote a historical novel, Romola (published 1862 - 1863), set in Renaissance Florence. This work has never won a place among the author's major achievements, yet it stands as a major example of historical fiction. The story follows the broad outlines of The Mill on the Floss - a young woman's spiritual development amid the limitations of the world around her - but the surroundings of Florentine history are considerably more complex than those of provincial English life. Romola experiences Renaissance humanism, Machiavellian politics, and Savonarola's religious revival movement. She moves beyond them all to a "religion of humanity" expressed in social service.

Despite some lapses into doctrinaire writing, Eliot always aimed at creating conviction in her readers by her honesty in describing human beings, refraining from the tendency to make them illustrations of her ideas. In her next novel, Felix Holt (1866), she came as close as she ever did to setting up her fiction in order to convey her doctrines. In this work, however, it is not her ethical but her political thought that is most in evidence, as she addressed herself to the social questions that were then disturbing England. The hero of the novel is a young reformer who carries Eliot's message to the working class. This message is that their advancement beyond widespread misery could be made by the inner development of their intellectual and moral capacities and not alone through political reforms or union activities. In contrast to Holt, the conventional progressive politician is shown to be tainted by political corruption and insincere in his identification with the working class. The heroine validates this political lesson by choosing the genuine, but poor, reformer rather than the opportunist of her own class.

Eliot did not publish any novel for some years after Felix Holt, and it might have appeared that her creative vein was exhausted. After traveling in Spain in 1867, she produced a dramatic poem, The Spanish Gipsy, in the following year, but neither this poem nor the other poems of the period are on a par with her prose.

Then in 1871-1872 Eliot published her masterpiece, Middlemarch, a comprehensive vision of human life, with the breadth and profundity of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. The main strand of its complex plot is the familiar Eliot tale of a girl's awakening to the complexities of life and her formulation of a humanistic substitute for religion as a guide for her conduct. But the heroine, Dorothea Brooke, is here surrounded by other "seekers in life's ways," a man of science and a political reformer, whose struggles and discoveries command almost equal attention. Moreover, the social setting, in which the heroes' challenges are presented, is not merely sketched in or worked up from historical notes but rendered with comprehensiveness and subtlety that makes Middlemarch a major social document as well as a work of art. The title-drawn from the name of the fictional town in which most of the action occurs - and the subtitle, A Study of Provincial Life, suggest that the art of fiction here develops a grasp of the life of human communities, as well as that of individuals.

Eliot's last novel was Daniel Deronda (1874 - 1876). It is perhaps her least-read work, although recent critical attention has revealed its high merits in at least one half of its plot, while raising still unanswered questions about its less successful half. The novel contrasts and interweaves two stories. One is a marriage for personal advantages by a young woman of keen intelligence who discovers that she has given herself to a scoundrel. The other story is the discovery by a young British gentleman that he is of Jewish origin and his subsequent dedication to the Jewish community by espousal of the Zionist resettlement of Palestine. The ethical relationship of these widely divergent situations and characters is one of the chief interests of the author, but although her intention is clear, her literary success is less so.

Achievements

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  Eliot developed the method of psychological analysis characteristic of modern fiction. Her masterpiece, Middlemarch, is not only a major social document but also one of the greatest novels in the history of fiction. Her books have also been adapted into various films and television programs.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Romola

    (One of George Eliot's most ambitious and imaginative nove...)

    1863
  • Scenes of Clerical Life

    (These stories contain Eliot's earliest studies of what be...)

    1857
  • Felix Holt, the Radical

    (When the young nobleman Harold Transome returns to Englan...)

    1866
  • The Mill on the Floss

    (Drawing on George Eliot's own childhood experiences to cr...)

    1860
  • Silas Marner

    (Wrongly accused of theft and exiled by community of Lante...)

    1861
  • Middlemarch

    (George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial ...)

    1871
  • Daniel Deronda

    (Gwendolen Harleth gambles her happiness when she marries ...)

    1876
  • The Journals of George Eliot
  • The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob

Religion

Though Eliot herself was not religious, she had respect for religious tradition and its ability to maintain a sense of social order and morality. The religious elements in her fiction also owe much to her upbringing - she was brought up within a low church Anglican family. Up to the age of 20, she developed a religious and self-repressive character. After, she started questioning her religious faith, which led to her father refusing to live with her, which forced her to go and live with her brother. Later, her brother and her friends arranged reconciliation, and she respectfully attended church till her father’s death in 1849.

Much of Eliot’s fiction is written with her trademark sense of agnostic humanism. She supported Feuerbach’s conception of Christianity, positing that our understanding of the nature of the divine was to be found ultimately in the nature of humanity projected onto a divine figure.

Politics

Eliot sympathized with the 1848 Revolutions throughout continental Europe, and even hoped that the Italians would chase the "odious Austrians" out of Lombard and that "decayed monarchs" would be pensioned off, although she believed a gradual reformist approach to social problems was best for England.

When the American Civil War broke out, Eliot expressed sympathy with the North, which was a rare stance in England at the time. In 1868 she supported Richard Congreve's protests against Britain's imperial policy toward Ireland and her view of the growing movement in support of Irish Home Rule was positive.

Views

Quotations: "It is never too late to be what you might have been."

"What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?"

"I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear."

"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact."

"A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away."

"It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view."

"It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses."

"What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?"

"It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted."

"It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them."

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

"And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better."

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

"We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others."

"Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you."

"I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her... I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me."

"Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music."

"No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from."

"Adventure is not outside man; it is within."

"Keep true. Never be ashamed of doing right. Decide what you think is right and stick to it."

Personality

Physical Characteristics: François D’Albert Durade's portrait of Eliot, like those by Mrs. Bray (1842) and Sir Frederic Burton (1865), all in the National Portrait Gallery, shows her with light brown hair, gray-blue eyes, and a very fair complexion.

People spoke of her intelligence, her wit, her lovely, well-modulated voice – and her very unfortunate physical appearance. George Eliot was not a pretty woman. She was painfully aware of her undeniably unique looks and the effect they had on her romantic prospects. Yet her personality and charm were such that men still found themselves drawn to her, even if they did not find her physically attractive.

Quotes from others about the person

• Leo Tolstoy: "If you were in Russia, I would send you Eliot's "Scenes of Clerical Life," but now I only ask you to read it, especially "Janet's Repentance." Fortunate are the people who, like the English, imbibe Christian teachings with their mother's milk, and in such an elevated, purified form, as Evangelical Protestantism. Here is a moral as well as a religious book, but one which I liked very much and which made a powerful impression on me..."
  
  Henry James: "She is magnificently ugly — deliciously hideous... in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her."
  
  Henry James: "What is remarkable, extraordinary — and the process remains inscrutable and mysterious — is that this quiet, anxious, sedentary, serious, invalidical English lady, without animal spirits, without adventures, without extravagance, assumption, or bravado, should have made us believe that nothing in the world was alien to her; should have produced such rich, deep, masterly pictures of the multifold life of man."
  
  Vincent van Gogh: "Have you read anything beautiful lately? Do make sure somehow to get hold of and read the books by Eliot, you won’t be sorry, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Felix Holt, Romola (Savonarola’s story), Scenes of clerical life. You know we gave the 3 underlined ones to Pa on his birthday last year. When I get the time for reading, I’ll read them again."
  
  D. H. Lawrence: "You see, it was really George Eliot who started it all… It was she who started putting all the action inside."
  
  D. H. Lawrence: "Folks will want things intellectually done, so they take refuge in George Eliot. I am very fond of her, but I wish she'd take her specs off, and come down off the public platform."

Connections

Eliot formed a lasting relationship with George Henry Lewes, a brilliant philosopher, psychologist, and literary critic. As he was separated from his wife but unable to obtain a divorce, their relationship challenged Victorian ideas of respectability. Nevertheless, the obvious devotion and permanence of their union came to be respected. In 1880, after the death of Lewes, Eliot married a friend of long standing, John Walter Cross, who was 20 years her junior.

Father:

Robert Evans

Mother:

Christiana Evans

husband:

John Walter Cross

Partner:

George Henry Lewes

George Henry Lewes (18 April 1817 – 30 November 1878) was an English philosopher and critic of literature and theatre. He was also an amateur physiologist.

References

• George Eliot: A Life A biography of the nineteenth-century novelist examines her transformation from shy Midlands girl to London intellectual and discusses her development as a novelist
  1997
• George Eliot
  1985
• George Eliot in Love Brenda Maddox brings her lively style to bear on the intersection of Eliot's life and novels. She delves into the human side of this larger-than-life figure, revealing the pleasure and pain behind the intellectual's public face. The result is a deeply personal biography that sheds new light on a woman who lived life on her own terms and altered the literary landscape in the process.
  2010
• George Eliot: The Last Victorian This highly praised biography is the first to explore fully the way in which her painful early life and rejection by her brother Isaac in particular, shaped the insight and art which made her both Victorian England’s last great visionary and the first modern.
  2012
• The Transferred Life of George Eliot This new biography of George Eliot goes beyond the much-told story of her life. It gives an account of what it means to become a novelist, and to think like a novelist: in particular a realist novelist for whom art exists not for art's sake but in the exploration and service of human life. It shows the formation and the workings of George Eliot's mind as it plays into her creation of some of the greatest novels of the Victorian era.
  2017