George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880), who also went by Mary Anne or Marian, published her work under the pen name George Eliot. She was a novelist, poet, journalist, and translator, and is counted among the major literary figures of the Victorian era. Her seven novels are *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). These books are recognized for their realism, psychological depth, strong sense of place, and careful portrayal of rural life. Virginia Woolf called *Middlemarch* “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” and both Martin Amis and Julian Barnes considered it the greatest novel in the English language.

Her personal life defied Victorian convention. From 1854 until his death in 1878, she lived with George Henry Lewes as his conjugal partner, referring to him as her husband. Lewes remained legally married to Agnes Jervis and continued to support their children, even after Jervis left him to live with another man and had children with him. In May 1880, eighteen months after Lewes died, Eliot married her longtime friend John Cross, who was much younger than she, and changed her legal name to Mary Ann Cross.

**Life**

**Early life and education**

Evans was born at South Farm on the Arbury Hall estate in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. She was the third child of Robert Evans, the estate manager, and Christiana Evans, whose father owned a local mill. Her full siblings were Chrissey (1814–1859), Isaac (1816–1890), and twin brothers who died shortly after birth in March 1821. She also had a half-brother, Robert Evans (1802–1864), and half-sister, Frances “Fanny” Evans Houghton (1805–1882), from her father’s first marriage to Harriet Poynton. In early 1820 the family moved to a house called Griff House, between Nuneaton and Bedworth.

As a child, Evans read widely. Because she was not considered physically attractive, she was thought unlikely to marry; this, along with her intelligence, led her father to invest in an education that was unusual for women at the time. She boarded with her sister Chrissey at Miss Latham’s school in Attleborough from ages five to nine, then at Mrs. Wallington’s school in Nuneaton from nine to thirteen, and finally at Miss Franklin’s school in Coventry from thirteen to sixteen. At Mrs. Wallington’s, she was taught by the evangelical Maria Lewis, to whom her earliest surviving letters are addressed. The religious atmosphere at Miss Franklin’s school introduced her to a quiet, disciplined faith opposed to evangelicalism.

After turning sixteen, Evans had little formal schooling. However, her father’s position on the estate allowed her access to the library at Arbury Hall, which greatly supported her self-education. Her classical training left a clear mark: scholar Christopher Stray noted that “George Eliot’s novels draw heavily on Greek literature (only one of her books can be printed correctly without the use of a Greek typeface), and her themes are often influenced by Greek tragedy.” Frequent visits to the estate also let her contrast the wealth of the local landowner with the poverty of many estate workers, a theme of parallel lives that appears often in her work.

**Move to Coventry**

When Evans was sixteen, her mother died, and she returned home to manage the household, though she kept up correspondence with her tutor Maria Lewis. At twenty-one, her brother Isaac married and took over the family home, so Evans and her father moved to Foleshill near Coventry. Proximity to Coventry society brought new influences, especially from Charles and Cara Bray. Charles Bray had made his money as a ribbon manufacturer and used it to build schools and support philanthropic causes. Evans, who had been wrestling with religious doubts, became close friends with the radical, free-thinking Brays, who had a casual view of marital obligations. Their home, “Rosehill,” was a gathering place for people who held and debated radical views. There she met Robert Owen, Herbert Spencer, Harriet Martineau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Through this circle, she was introduced to more liberal and agnostic theologies and to writers like David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, who questioned the literal truth of the Bible.

Her first major literary work was an English translation of Strauss’s *Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet*, published as *The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined* (1846). She completed the translation after Elizabeth “Rufa” Brabant, another member of the Rosehill Circle, had left it unfinished. The original German book had caused a sensation by arguing that New Testament miracles were mythical additions with little factual basis. Evans’s translation had a similar effect in England; the Earl of Shaftesbury called it “the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell.” She later translated Feuerbach’s *The Essence of Christianity* (1854).

As a friend, Charles Bray published some of Evans’s earliest writing—reviews—in his newspaper, the *Coventry Herald and Observer*. When she began to question her own religious faith, her father threatened to throw her out, but he did not follow through. She continued to attend church respectfully and kept house for him until his death in 1849, when she was thirty. Five days after her father’s funeral, she traveled to Switzerland with the Brays. She then decided to stay on alone in Geneva, first living on the lake at Plongeon (near the present-day United Nations buildings) and then on the second floor of a house owned by her friends François.