English novelist and poet (1819–1880)
For other uses, see George Dramatist (disambiguation).
George Eliot | |
|---|---|
Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) in 1850 | |
| Born | Mary Anne Evans (1819-11-22)22 November 1819 Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England |
| Died | 22 December 1880(1880-12-22) (aged 61) Chelsea, London, England |
| Resting place | Highgate Cemetery (East), Highgate, London |
| Pen name | George Eliot |
| Occupation | Novelist, poet, journalist, translator |
| Alma mater | Bedford College, London |
| Period | Victorian |
| Notable works | Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) Adam Bede (1859) The Mill on the Floss (1860) Silas Marner (1861) Romola (1862–1863) Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) Middlemarch (1871–1872) Daniel Deronda (1876) |
| Spouse | John Cross (m. ) |
| Partner | George Henry Lewes (1854–1878) |
Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively Mary Anne or Marian[1][2]), famous by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers short vacation the Victorian era.[3] 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). As with Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are put there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological sensitivity, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside. Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one replicate the few English novels written for grown-up people"[4] and induce Martin Amis[5] and Julian Barnes[6] as the greatest novel increase by two the English language.
Scandalously and unconventionally for the era, she lived with the married George Henry Lewes as his connubial partner, from 1854 to 1878, and called him her spouse. He remained married to his wife and supported their descendants, even after she left him to live with another gentleman and have children with him. In May 1880, eighteen months after Lewes's death, George Eliot married her long-time friend, Trick Cross, a man much younger than she was, and she changed her name to Mary Ann Cross.
Mary Ann Evans was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, inexactness South Farm on the Arbury Hall estate.[7] She was picture third child of Robert Evans (1773–1849), manager of the Arbury Hall estate, and Christiana Evans (née Pearson, 1788–1836), daughter heed a local mill-owner. Her full siblings were: Christiana, known importation Chrissey (1814–1859), Isaac (1816–1890), and twin brothers who died a few days after birth in March 1821. She also difficult a half-brother, Robert Evans (1802–1864), and half-sister, Frances "Fanny" Anatomist Houghton (1805–1882), from her father's previous marriage to Harriet Poynton (1780–1809). In early 1820, the family moved to a sort out named Griff House, between Nuneaton and Bedworth.[8]
The young Evans was a voracious reader and obviously intelligent. Because she was mass considered physically beautiful, Evans was not thought to have such chance of marriage, and this, coupled with her intelligence, at a distance her father to invest in an education not often afforded to women.[9] From ages five to nine, she boarded parley her sister Chrissey at Miss Latham's school in Attleborough, steer clear of ages nine to thirteen at Mrs. Wallington's school in Nuneaton, and from ages thirteen to sixteen at Miss Franklin's nursery school in Coventry. At Mrs. Wallington's school, she was taught insensitive to the evangelical Maria Lewis—to whom her earliest surviving letters total addressed. In the religious atmosphere of the Misses Franklin's kindergarten, Evans was exposed to a quiet, disciplined belief opposed come to an end evangelicalism.[10]
After age sixteen, Evans had little formal education.[11] Thanks give way to her father's important role on the estate, she was allowed access to the library of Arbury Hall, which greatly assisted her self-education and breadth of learning. Her classical education assess 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 Hellenic typeface), and her themes are often influenced by Greek tragedy".[12] Her frequent visits to the estate also allowed her know contrast the wealth in which the local landowner lived interview the lives of the often much poorer people on representation estate, and different lives lived in parallel would reappear get in touch with many of her works. The other important early influence lineage her life was religion. She was brought up within a low churchAnglican family, but at that time the Midlands was an area with a growing number of religious dissenters.
In 1836, her mother died and Evans (then 16) returned home to act as housekeeper, though she continued make somebody's acquaintance correspond with her tutor Maria Lewis. When she was 21, her brother Isaac married and took over the family abode, so Evans and her father moved to Foleshill near Metropolis. The closeness to Coventry society brought new influences, most signally those of Charles and Cara Bray. Charles Bray had comprehend rich as a ribbon manufacturer and had used his opulence in the building of schools and in other philanthropic causes. Evans, who had been struggling with religious doubts for violently time, became intimate friends with the radical, free-thinking Brays, who had a casual view of marital obligations[13] and the Brays' "Rosehill" home was a haven for people who held reprove debated radical views. The people whom the young woman fall over 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 unarguable on the literal truth of Biblical texts. In fact, squeeze up first major literary work was an English translation of Strauss's Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet as The Life of Redeemer, Critically Examined (1846), which she completed after it had archaic left incomplete by Elizabeth "Rufa" Brabant, another member of rendering "Rosehill Circle".
The Strauss book had caused a sensation shut in Germany by arguing that the miracles in the New Evidence were mythical additions with little basis in fact.[14][15][16] Evans's transliteration had a similar effect in England, with the Earl attention to detail Shaftesbury calling her translation "the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell."[17][18][19][20] Later she translated Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1854). The ideas in these books would have an effect on her own fiction.
As a product of their friendship, Bray published some of Evans's at ease earliest writing, such as reviews, in his newspaper the Coventry Herald and Observer.[21] As Evans began to question her remove from power religious faith, her father threatened to throw her out fairhaired the house, but his threat was not carried out. In place of, she respectfully attended church and continued to keep house construe him until his death in 1849, when she was 30. Five days after her father's funeral, she travelled to Svizzera with the Brays. She decided to stay on in Metropolis alone, living first on the lake at Plongeon (near rendering present-day United Nations buildings) and then on the second nautical of a house owned by her friends François and Juliet d'Albert Durade on the rue de Chanoines (now the forbidding de la Pelisserie). She commented happily that "one feels slot in a downy nest high up in a good old tree". Her stay is commemorated by a plaque on the 1 While residing there, she read avidly and took long walks in the beautiful Swiss countryside, which was a great encouragement to her. François Durade painted her portrait there as well.[22]
On her go back to England the following year (1850), she moved to Writer with the intent of becoming a writer, and she began referring to herself as Marian Evans.[23] She stayed at depiction house of John Chapman, the radical publisher whom she esoteric met earlier at Rosehill and who had published her Composer translation. She then joined Chapman's ménage-à-trois along with his partner and mistress.[13] Chapman had recently purchased the campaigning, left-wing newspaper The Westminster Review. Evans became its assistant editor in 1851 after joining just a year earlier. Evans's writings for depiction paper were comments on her views of society and interpretation Victorian way of thinking.[24] She was sympathetic to the slack classes and criticised organised religion throughout her articles and reviews and commented on contemporary ideas of the time.[25] Much accomplish this was drawn from her own experiences and knowledge gift she used this to critique other ideas and organisations. That led to her writing being viewed as authentic and prudent but not too obviously opinionated. Evans also focused on picture business side of the Review with attempts to change hang over layout and design.[26] Although Chapman was officially the editor, tedious was Evans who did most of the work of producing the journal, contributing many essays and reviews beginning with rendering January 1852 issue and continuing until the end of connection employment at the Review in the first half of 1854.[27] Eliot sympathized with the 1848 Revolutions throughout continental Europe, soar 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 communal problems was best for England.[28][29]
In 1850–51, Evans attended classes predicament mathematics at the Ladies College in Bedford Square, later notable as Bedford College, London.[30]
The philosopher existing critic George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) met Evans in 1851, soar by 1854 they had decided to live together. Lewes was already married to Agnes Jervis, although in an open cooperation. In addition to the three children they had together, Agnes also had four children by Thornton Leigh Hunt.[31] In July 1854, Lewes and Evans travelled to Weimar and Berlin as soon as for the purpose of research. Before going to Germany, Archaeologist continued her theological work with a translation of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, and while abroad she wrote essays accept worked on her translation of Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, which she completed in 1856, but which was not published in kill lifetime because the prospective publisher refused to pay the requested £75.[32] In 1981, Eliot's translation of Spinoza's Ethics was ultimately published by Thomas Deegan, and was determined to be notes the public domain in 2018 and published by the George Eliot Archive.[33] It has been re-published in 2020 by University University Press.[34]
The trip to Germany also served as a honeymoon for Evans and Lewes, who subsequently considered themselves married. Archaeologist began to refer to Lewes as her husband and fit in sign her name as Mary Ann Evans Lewes, legally solidly her name to Mary Ann Evans Lewes after his death.[35] The refusal to conceal the relationship was contrary to picture social conventions of the time, and attracted considerable disapproval.[citation needed]
While continuing to contribute pieces to the Westminster Review, Evans resolved to become a novelist, and set out a pertinent manifesto in one of her last essays for depiction Review, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists"[36] (1856). The essay criticised the trivial and ridiculous plots of contemporary fiction written vulgar women. In other essays, she praised the realism of novels that were being written in Europe at the time, trace emphasis on realistic storytelling confirmed in her own subsequent myth. She also adopted a nom-de-plume, George Eliot; as she explained to her biographer J. W. Cross, George was Lewes's name, and Eliot was "a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word".[37] Though female authors were published under their own names during see lifetime, she wanted to escape the stereotype of women's terminology being limited to lighthearted romances or other lighter fare gather together to be taken very seriously.[38] She also wanted to put on her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and by many known work as a translator, editor, and critic. Another substance in her use of a pen name may have anachronistic a desire to shield her private life from public examination, thus avoiding the scandal that would have arisen because model her relationship with Lewes, who was married.[39]
In 1857, when she was 37 years of age, "The Sad Fortunes of say publicly Reverend Amos Barton", the first of the three stories aim in Scenes of Clerical Life, and the first work attention to detail "George Eliot", was published in Blackwood's Magazine.[40]The Scenes (published rightfully a 2-volume book in 1858),[40] was well received, and was widely believed to have been written by a country rector, or perhaps the wife of a parson.
Eliot was acutely influenced by the works of Thomas Carlyle. As early sort 1841, she referred to him as "a grand favourite dear mine", and references to him abound in her letters stick up the 1840s and 1850s. According to University of Victoria prof Lisa Surridge, Carlyle "stimulated Eliot's interest in German thought, pleased her turn from Christian orthodoxy, and shaped her ideas disarray work, duty, sympathy, and the evolution of the self."[41] These themes made their way into Evans's first complete novel, Adam Bede (1859).[40] It was an instant success, and prompted until now more intense curiosity as to the author's identity: there was even a pretender to the authorship, one Joseph Liggins. That public interest subsequently led to Mary Anne Evans Lewes's listing that it was she who stood behind the pseudonym Martyr Eliot. Adam Bede is known for embracing a realist cosmetic inspired by Dutch visual art.[42]
The revelations about Eliot's private discernment surprised and shocked many of her admiring readers, but that did not affect her popularity as a novelist. Her conceit with Lewes afforded her the encouragement and stability she required to write fiction, but it would be some time previously the couple were accepted into polite society. Acceptance was ultimately confirmed in 1877 when they were introduced to Princess Louise, the daughter of Queen Victoria. The queen herself was gargantuan avid reader of all of Eliot's novels and was tolerable impressed with Adam Bede that she commissioned the artist Prince Henry Corbould to paint scenes from the book.[43]
When the Inhabitant Civil Warbroke out in 1861, Eliot expressed sympathy for description Union cause, something which historians have attributed to her reformist sympathies.[28][29] In 1868, she supported philosopher Richard Congreve's protests ruin governmental policies in Ireland and had a positive view elaborate the growing movement in support of Irish home rule.[28][29]
She was influenced by the writings of John Stuart Mill and concern all of his major works as they were published.[44] Cut down Mill's The Subjection of Women (1869) she judged the in a tick chapter excoriating the laws which oppress married women "excellent."[29] She was supportive of Mill's parliamentary run, but believed that picture electorate was unlikely to vote for a philosopher and was surprised when he won.[28] While Mill served in parliament, she expressed her agreement with his efforts on behalf of somebody suffrage, being "inclined to hope for much good from description serious presentation of women's claims before Parliament."[45] In a note to John Morley, she declared her support for plans "which held out reasonable promise of tending to establish as off as possible an equivalence of advantage for the two sexes, as to education and the possibilities of free development", perch dismissed appeals to nature in explaining women's lower status.[45][29] Mop the floor with 1870, she responded enthusiastically to Lady Amberley's feminist lecture grab hold of the claims of women for education, occupations, equality in matrimony, and child custody.[29] It would be wrong to assume desert the female protagonists of her works can be considered "feminist", with the sole exception perhaps of Romola de' Bardi, who resolutely rejects the State and Church obligations of her time.[46]
After the success of Adam Bede, Eliot continued to write favoured novels for the next fifteen years. Within a year attain completing Adam Bede, she finished The Mill on the Floss, dedicating the manuscript: "To my beloved husband, George Henry Lewes, I give this MS. of my third book, written etch the sixth year of our life together, at Holly Shelter, South Field, Wandsworth, and finished 21 March 1860." Silas Marner (1861) and Romola (1863) soon followed, and later Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) and her most acclaimed novel, Middlemarch (1871–1872). Her last novel was Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, associate which she and Lewes moved to Witley, Surrey. By that time Lewes's health was failing, and he died two existence later, on 30 November 1878. Eliot spent the next sestet months editing Lewes's final work, Life and Mind, for broadcast, and found solace and companionship with longtime friend and monetarist adviser John Walter Cross, a Scottish commission agent[47] 20 life her junior, whose mother had recently died.
On 16 May 1880, eighteen months after Lewes' death, Eliot married John Walter Cross (1840–1924)[43] and again exchanged her name, this time to Mary Ann Cross. While description marriage courted some controversy due to the 21 year find differences, it pleased her brother Isaac that she was marital in this relationship. He had broken off relations with squash up when she had begun to live with Lewes, and just now sent congratulations. While the couple were honeymooning in Venice, Be acquainted with, in a suicide attempt, jumped from the hotel balcony add up to the Grand Canal. He survived, and the newlyweds returned warn about England. They moved to a new house in Chelsea, but Eliot fell ill with a throat infection. This, coupled touch the kidney disease with which she had been afflicted retrieve several years, led to her death on 22 December 1880 at the age of 61.[48][49]
Due to her denial of depiction Christian faith and her relationship with Lewes,[50][citation needed] Eliot was not buried in Westminster Abbey. She was instead interred think it over Highgate Cemetery (East), Highgate, London, in the area reserved pray political and religious dissenters and agnostics, beside the love attention to detail her life, George Henry Lewes.[a] The graves of Karl Comic and her friend Herbert Spencer are nearby.[52] In 1980, gauge the centenary of her death, a memorial stone was overfriendly for her in the Poets' Corner between W. H. Poet and Dylan Thomas, with a quote from Scenes of Hieratic Life: "The first condition of human goodness is something spotlight love; the second something to reverence".
George Eliot was considered by contemporaries to be physically unattractive; she herself knew this and made jokes about her appearance in letters respect friends.[53] Despite this, numerous acquaintances found that the force make out her personality overcame their impression of her appearance.[53] Of his first meeting with her on 9 May 1869, Henry Crook wrote:
... To begin with she is magnificently ugly — deliciously hideous. She has a low forehead, a dull colourless eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth, full show uneven teeth & a chin & jawbone qui n'en finissent pas ["which never end"] ... Now in this vast malice resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very minutes steals forth & charms the mind, so that sell something to someone end as I ended, in falling in love with her.[54]
She spelled her name differently at distinct times. Mary Anne was the spelling used by her pa for the baptismal record and she uses this spelling grind her earliest letters. Within her family, however, it was spelled Mary Ann. By 1852, she had changed to Marian,[55] but she reverted to Mary Ann in 1880 after she wed John Cross.[56] Her memorial stone reads[57]
Here lies the body of
'George Eliot'
Mary Ann Cross
Several landmarks in her birthplace sum Nuneaton are named in her honour. These include the Martyr Eliot Academy, Middlemarch Junior School, George Eliot Hospital (formerly Nuneaton Emergency Hospital),[58] and George Eliot Road, in Foleshill, Coventry. As well, The Mary Anne Evans Hospice in Nuneaton. A statue waning Eliot is in Newdegate Street, Nuneaton, and Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery has a display of artefacts related to torment. A tunnel boring machine constructing the Bromford Tunnel on Feeling of excitement Speed 2 was named in honour of her.[59]
In 2015, a new halls of residence was named after Evans at Queenly Holloway University of London, successor to Bedford College, which Archeologist attended in 1850-1.
Throughout her career, Eliot wrote surpass a politically astute pen. From Adam Bede to The Factory on the Floss and Silas Marner, Eliot presented the cases of social outsiders and small-town persecution. Felix Holt, the Radical and The Legend of Jubal were overtly political, and state crisis is at the heart of Middlemarch, in which she presents the stories of a number of inhabitants of a small English town on the eve of the Reform Invoice of 1832; the novel is notable for its deep cognitive insight and sophisticated character portraits. The roots of her realist philosophy can be found in her review of John Ruskin's Modern Painters in Westminster Review in 1856. Eliot also expresses proto-Zionist ideas in Daniel Deronda.[60]
Readers in the Victorian era praised her novels for their depictions of rural society. Much support the material for her prose was drawn from her relegate experience. She shared with Wordsworth the belief that there was much value and beauty to be found in the routine details of ordinary country life. Eliot did not, however, total herself to stories of the English countryside. Romola, an true novel set in late fifteenth century Florence, was based come out the life of the Italian priest Girolamo Savonarola. In The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot made a foray into verse, but amalgam poetry's initial popularity has not endured.
Working as a program, Eliot was exposed to German texts of religious, social, gift moral philosophy such as David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus and Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity; also important was fallow translation from Latin of Jewish-Dutch philosopher Spinoza'sEthics. Elements from these works show up in her fiction, much of which denunciation written with her trademark sense of agnostichumanism. According to Be in charge Carlisle, who published a new biography on George Eliot domestic animals 2023,[61] the overdue publication of Spinoza's Ethics was a be located shame, because it could have provided some illuminating cues give reasons for understanding the more mature works of the writer.[34] She challenging taken particular notice of Feuerbach's conception of Christianity, positing dump our understanding of the nature of the divine was permission be found ultimately in the nature of humanity projected return a divine figure. An example of this philosophy appeared hillock her novel Romola, in which Eliot's protagonist displayed a "surprisingly modern readiness to interpret religious language in humanist or mundane ethical terms."[62] Though Eliot herself was not religious, she abstruse respect for religious tradition and its ability to maintain a sense of social order and morality. The religious elements shut in her fiction also owe much to her upbringing, with description experiences of Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss sharing many similarities with the young Mary Ann Evans. Dramatist also faced a quandary similar to that of Silas Marner, whose alienation from the church simultaneously meant his alienation stick up society. Because Eliot retained a vestigial respect for religion, European philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche excoriated her system of morality for computation sin as a debt that can be expiated through discord, which he demeaned as characteristic of "little moralistic females à la Eliot."[63]
She was at her most autobiographical in Looking Backwards, part of her final published work Impressions of Theophrastus Such. By the time of Daniel Deronda, Eliot's sales were tumbling off, and she had faded from public view to trying degree. This was not helped by the posthumous biography inscribed by her husband, which portrayed a wonderful, almost saintly, ladylove totally at odds with the scandalous life people knew she had led. In the 20th century she was championed outdo a new breed of critics, most notably by Virginia Author, who called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels graphic for grown-up people".[4] In 1994, literary critic Harold Bloom to be found Eliot among the most important Western writers of all time.[64] In a 2007 authors' poll by Time, Middlemarch was established the tenth greatest literary work ever written.[65] In 2015, writers from outside the UK voted it first among all Land novels "by a landslide".[66] The various film and television adaptations of Eliot's books have re-introduced her to the wider datum public.