Mary Anne (Sometimes Marian) Evans who was better known by her pen name George Eliot.was born at Chilvers Coton, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England. An acclaimed English novelist, philosopher and poet, who as a woman was ahead of her time,in the way she defied the sexual, religious and social rules of her day.
The daughter of an estate manager known for his conscientious work habits and staunchly conservative political views.Not much is said about George Eliot's mother except that she died when Mary was 17 years old. This caused Mary to leave Mrs. Wallington's School at Nuneaton where she had attended from 1832 to 1835. She left to help care for her father and keep the house. It seems her mother's death was sudden but there is no available cause of death listed. Recognized at an early age for her intelligence, Evans gained access to the estate’s library. At school, as an adolescent, she was allowed considerable freedom in what she read; she devoured books, including Sir Walter Scott’s novels.
Evans was strongly touched by Evangelicalism in her later teenage years, and devoted several years to taking religion and religious study seriously. During that time, she disapproved of frivolities such as the theater and novels. However, her theological ardor eventually cooled and she found herself reading all of Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Southey and, especially, Wordsworth, among others.
In 1841, she and her father moved to a house near Coventry where Mary Anne came under different intellectual influences. There was clearly something in the social air as well, including no doubt the impact of the Chartist movement and the depression of 1841-1842, that made her susceptible to new ideas, among them those advanced by Charles and Caroline Bray, who became her close friends. Charles Bray was a ribbon manufacturer and a free thinker. He was an acquaintance of, among other figures, Robert Owen, the utopian socialist, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher, to both of whom he introduced Mary Anne, who had by now stopped attending church. She “was quickly brought,” as biographer Gordon S. Haight writes, “from provincial isolation into touch with the world of ideas.”
Formidably knowledgeable across a range of subjects: Mary Anne was able to speak several languages including German, Hebrew, and Greek, she translated two books into English that were central to the rejection of Christianity by the intellectual avant-garde: David Friedrich Strauss' Life of Jesus (1846) and Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1854). These translations lead to Eliot's atheism and her eventual renunciation of the Christian faith, that led her tp to develop a sense of secular humanism, which is the belief that humanity is capable of morality and self-fulfillment without belief in God.
After her fathers death in 1849 when she was 30 she travelled extensively abroad in Switzerland, Germany, Italy and France. After settling in London in 1850, from 1851 to 1854 she served as a writer and editor of the left wing journal Westminster Review. In London she met she met George Henry Lewes, a journalist and advanced thinker. Lewes was separated from his wife, who had had two sons by another man, but had been unable to obtain a divorce. In a step daring for Victorian times, Mary Ann Evans began living openly with Lewes in 1854, in a union they both considered as sacred as a legal marriage and one that lasted until his death in 1878. The fact that they publicly acknowledged their relationship rather than hiding it brought them disapproval from the rest of society. Her brother Isaac ceased contact with her.
Many people over time have made comments about George Eliot' appearance. She did not adhere to what consensus society considered beautiful, but beauty is after all skin deep, but what Eliot was gifted with was a radiant, luminous intelligence,, and emphatic tenderness that more than outshone many others on the planet, that did not prevent many admiring her'and before her immensely happy, 23 year liaison with George Henry Lewes, she had attracted the attentions, of several personable and distinguished men.
With Lewes’s encouragement, Mary Ann Evans wrote her first fictional work, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” for Blackwood’s Magazine in 1857, when she was 37, it was followed by two more stories published under the pseudonym George Elliot, partly in order to avoid her work being judged in relation to her scandalous domestic situation., and "George” because it was Lewes’s name and “Eliot” because, she said, it was good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.” It also gave Eliot a shield against a society that despised her decision to question the church, speak her mind and live, for 25 years, with a married man.
At the age of thirty-nine she used her memories of Warwickshire to write her first long novel, Adam Bede (1859), it caused such a sensation on its publication in February 1859 and, tired of the intense speculation surrounding the author’s identity, she revealed her real name in June of the same year. It established her as the foremost woman novelist in her day. Then came The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Romola (1863). Her masterpiece and one of the greatest English novels, Middlemarch, was published in 1871. Her last work was Daniel Deronda (1876).
From the outset of her career as a novelist, she was convinced that a writer's first obligation was a moral one and she would use her words to write with a politically astute pen, and understood and wrote about the daily life of people at all levels of English society with great empathy and passion.
From Adam Bede to The Mill 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 political crisis is at the heart of Middlemarch, in which she presents the stories of a number of denizens of a small English town on the eve of the Reform Bill of 1832; the novel is notable for its deep psychological insight and sophisticated character portraits, the roots of this realist philosophy in her review of John Ruskin's Modern Painters in Westminster Review in 1856. Readers in the Victorian era particularly praised her books for their depictions of rural society, for which she drew on her own early experiences, and she shared with Wordsworth the belief that there was much interest and importance in the mundane details of ordinary country lives.
In her own works she emphasized two major doctrines - that of renunciation and that of retribution. She chose the novel as the best medium for moral teaching because it was the popular literary type of the age. Her moral principles were not those of any particular religious creed, but were the universal ideals of reason, love of mankind, and renunciation of mean and selfish aims. She said that the “inspiring principle” that gave her courage to write was that of “so presenting our human life as to help my readers in getting a clearer conception and a more active admiration of those vital elements which bind men together and give a higher worthiness to their existence”. She took satisfaction in having produced work that would “gladden and chasten human hearts”
What is important to remember is Eliot wrote with neither an exclusively male nor an exclusively female sensibility, but from a well-rounded human perspective. She mixed with some of the greatest intellectuals of her day, including Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Charles Dickens. Proselytizing however was not her thing though, because she knew that her scandalous liaison with Lewes could only make her discussion of controversial matters a liability, but she thought of herself as an a activist, "teaching the world through books." Thinking that she could more forcefully present her views by maintaining the persona of a neutral observer in her fiction, she objected to the role of political activist, who presents ideas in her own person. Finally, as a shy woman who cared only for her husband and her writing, who was often ill, and who hated publicity, she had neither the taste nor energy for public life, but who can fail to admire her rebellion against Victorian conventions by living with a married man in spite knowing it would cause a scandal.
And despite causing both scandal and outrage in Victorian English society, love for her work would eventually overwhelm many of the prejudices that she encountered. From being an outcast, she even enjoyed royal approval. Queen Victoria was an avid reader of all her work, and by the time of her death , she had become the richest and most successful, self-made women in the country with her celebrated across the world.
After Lewes’s death in 1878, George Eliot found comfort with and married John Walter Cross on 16th May 1880. He was forty; she was sixty-one, and this again opened her to gossip because of the age difference, but this legal marriage helped at least to reconcile her with her brother. They moved to Chelsea but George Eliot fell ill with a throat infection. She was already suffering with kidney disease and she died on 22nd December 1880.
Before her death, she had been recognized by her contemporaries as the greatest living writer of English fiction and her thoughts, writings and books have since become renowned for their psychological insight and realism, touching boldly on timeless issues such as gender, justice, love, morality. politics and religion. None of her characters are perfect, and come with flaws as do most people.
Due to her unconventional lifestyle and atheist principles, she was refused internment at Westminster Abbey. Instead, she was buried in the area reserved for religious dissenters or agnostics alongside her beloved George Lewes at Highgate Cemetery. In 1980, 100 years after her death, a plaque was erected in Poets' Corner in recognition of George Eliot's literary achievements and lasting reputation.
She lives on through her written works , and to quote George Eliot herself :"Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them"
I will end with the following lovely quote written in a letter written to her teacher Maria Lewis in October, 1841, in which she reflects on autumn :
"Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love — that makes life and nature harmonize. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
