George Eliot

George Eliot (1819-1880), pseudonym of Mary Anne or Marian Evans, English novelist, whose novels, with their profound feeling and broad intellectual range, raised her immediately to the first rank of English writers.

Eliot was born in the Warwickshire parish of Chilvers Coton, the daughter of a land agent in the service of the Newdigate family of Arbury Hall. She was sent to boarding school at the age of five, first locally, then in Nuneaton where she met and befriended Maria Lewis, who introduced her to evangelicalism, which the young Eliot took up enthusiastically. At the age of 13 she was sent to the Miss Franklins' school in Coventry, where she was further influenced by the Baptists at Cow Lane Chapel. As a young woman, she was evangelically severe and self-critical: in 1840 she wrote: “I need rigid discipline, which I have never yet had.” In 1836 her mother died and Eliot took over the running of her father's house. Around this time she made the acquaintance of Charles and Caroline (Cara) Bray, a free-thinking couple who lent her a book by Charles Hennel, Caroline's brother, An Inquiry into the Origins of Christianity (1838), which rejected Christianity as divine revelation, but maintained that it was “the purest form yet existing of natural religion”.

In 1842 doubts about Christianity led Eliot to stop going to church for a time, which caused a temporary but painful rupture in relations with her father in whose house she was still living. Through the Brays she was asked to complete a translation from the German The Life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss, which appeared anonymously in 1846. Her father died in 1849, leaving her a small inheritance. She travelled abroad after his death, and spent a winter in Geneva reading intensively and pondering her future. In 1850 she met John Chapman, the publisher, and became a contributor to the Westminster Review, a leading intellectual periodical of the time; the following year she accepted unpaid work as an assistant editor on the journal, and moved to London as a paying guest in Chapman's house on the Strand. She published a translation of Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach in 1854, and she came to accept Feuerbach's view of religious belief as an imaginative necessity for mankind rather than a divinely revealed “truth”. Around this time she was developing a friendship with the journalist and author, George Henry Lewes, with whom she left for Germany in 1854, spending the autumn in Weimar, where Lewes was researching his Life of Goethe (1855), while Eliot worked on her translation of Ethics by Spinoza, which was never published in her lifetime. Eliot and Lewes returned to Britain calling themselves husband and wife, and set up house together. Lewes was unable to divorce his wife, although she had openly borne children to his friend, Thornton Hunt, because he had condoned her adultery, so he and Eliot were never able to marry. This scandal isolated Eliot from polite society until her immense fame eventually outweighed the irregularities of her personal life.

Eliot was interested in the work of the French positivist philosopher, Auguste Comte; the ideas of the primacy of science and the rejection of superstition and irrationality are clearly at work in her fiction, and can perhaps be traced back to her reading of the philosopher. With encouragement from Lewes, she wrote the story of The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton (1856), and Lewes negotiated with John Blackwood for its anonymous publication in Blackwood's Magazine as the first in a series of Scenes of Clerical Life. Lewes was to devote much of his energy over the ensuing years to protecting and encouraging Eliot in her writing, about which she was morbidly under-confident.

The three Scenes were very well received, and Eliot was encouraged to attempt a full-length novel, which became Adam Bede (1859). Meanwhile, speculation about the identity of “George Eliot” was growing, and after Adam Bede, she was forced reluctantly to reveal her identity, mainly because a man called Joseph Liggins was pretending to be the author of her work. Adam Bede was an extraordinary success. Set in the Midlands during the Methodist revival, it describes the lives of simple, working people with a respect and fidelity to detail which represented a firm departure from what Eliot had called the “mind and millinery” school of fiction in her 1856 article, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”. The Times declared that Adam Bede was “a first-rate novel, and its author takes rank at once amongst the masters of the art”. Eliot's reputation was assured.

In 1860 Eliot published The Mill on the Floss, the most autobiographical of her novels. Also written around this time, although not published until 1878, was The Lifted Veil, a Gothic novella narrated by a man who has visions of future events. In 1860, Eliot and Lewes visited Florence, and he suggested that she could base a novel around the story of Girolamo Savonarola. She returned the following year to research her historical novel, Romola, but interrupted it to write Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861). Silas Marner is the fairy tale-like story of an old miser brought back to the world of human relations by the accidental arrival of a small child, Eppie. Its emphasis on the redemptive power of human love exemplifies George Eliot's strong belief in humanity's duty to itself. Romola appeared in The Cornhill Magazine in 1862-1863, but proved less popular than her previous work. It has remained the least-known of Eliot's novels, and its 15th-century Florentine setting and abundant historical detail make it initially less accessible than her fiction about England. It contains, however, some of Eliot's finest writing, and the description of Romola's realization of the faithlessness of her husband, Tito, is sharply and poignantly described.

By now, Eliot was a rich woman and was giving substantial assistance to Lewes in the financial support of his many dependants. After Romola, Eliot was much occupied with a long poem, The Spanish Gypsy (1868). Her next novel, Felix Holt: The Radical (1866), was her version of the “social problem novel”. Written amidst agitation over the Reform Bill (see Reform Bill: Reform Bill of 1867), the eponymous hero of Felix Holt is a conservative radical who preaches restraint to the working classes. In 1869, she began work on another novel, which was to become one of the most famous in the English language, Middlemarch: A Tale of Provincial Life (1871-1872). It appeared in eight parts, and was immensely successful. Virginia Woolf later described Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. The range of the book is wide, and the ease with which Eliot makes allusions to philosophy, science, literature, and art is impressive.

Her last novel was even more ambitious. Published in parts in 1876, Daniel Deronda takes on the vast subject of Judaism, and through the characters of Daniel and Mordecai, explores ideas of race and nationhood. It also incorporates what is perhaps Eliot's greatest study of a human relationship in the portrayal of Gwendolen Harleth's unhappy marriage to the languorously cruel Grandcourt. Despite the intellectually challenging sections on Judaism, the book was immediately popular and successful. Eliot was working on a series of essays that was to be published as The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879) when Lewes died in 1878. Desperate with grief for a time, she devoted herself to editing Lewes's unfinished Problems of Life and Mind (1874-1879), and gradually re-entered social life. In 1880 she married John Walter Cross, a banker who had been the Lewes's friend and financial adviser for many years. The marriage was short-lived, however: Eliot died just before Christmas 1880. Cross wrote an adulatory biography, The Life of George Eliot (1885), which attempts to make her extraordinary life seem less unconventional. Eliot was buried in Highgate cemetery, in a grave touching Lewes's. Although she is chiefly remembered for her novels, Eliot also wrote a considerable number of poems, among the most notable of which are Brother and Sister (1869), a sequence of sonnets which recalls her happy childhood; “The Legend of Jubal” (1874); and “Armgart” (1871).