Mary
Ann Evans, better known by the pen name George Eliot, was an English
novelist. She was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era.
Her novels, largely set in provincial England, are well known for
their realism and psychological perspicacity.
She
used a male pen name, she said, to ensure that her works were
taken seriously. Female authors published freely under their own
names, but Eliot wanted to ensure that she was not seen as merely
a writer of romances. An additional factor may have been a desire
to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent
scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry
Lewes.
Biography
Mary Ann Evans was the daughter of an estate agent in Warwickshire,
born on a farm on the Arbury Hall Estate near Nuneaton. She was
brought up with a narrowly low church religion. Charles Bray,
a Coventry manufacturer, brought her into contact with more liberal
theologies. She translated Strauss' Life of Jesus (1846) and began
contributing to the Westminster Review in 1850 and became its
assistant editor in 1851. The Westminster Review had been founded
by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and was the leading journal
for philosophical radicals. In 1854, she published a translation
of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, and it was at that time
that she began to live with George Henry Lewes in an extramarital
cohabitation.
In
1857, she published "Amos Barton," the first of the
"Scenes of Clerical Life" in Blackwood's Magazine. The
collected "Scenes" were well received and launched Evans
on a novelistic career. Evans' cohabitation with Lewes was a scandalous
matter. Lewes' wife refused to be divorced, and so he remained
married to her in name only, while he made house solely with Evans.
Two years after the death of Lewes, on May 6, 1880 she married
a friend, John Cross, an American banker, who was 20 years her
junior. They honeymooned in Venice and, allegedly, Cross jumped
from their hotel balcony into the Grand Canal on their wedding
night; he survived. She died on 22 December 1880 at the age of
61 in Chelsea of a kidney ailment and was interred in Highgate
Cemetery (East), Highgate, London.
Friend
and author Henry James once wrote of her:
She
had a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a
huge mouth full of uneven teeth and a chin and jawbone qui n'en
finissent pas... Now 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.
Yes behold me in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.
Select
Works
Scenes Of a Clerical Life, 1858
Adam Bede, 1859
The Mill on the Floss, 1860
Silas Marner, 1861
Felix Holt, the Radical, 1866
Middlemarch, 1871-72
The Legend of Jubal, 1874
Daniel Deronda, 1876
Literary
assessment
Eliot's most famous work, Middlemarch, is a turning point in the
history of the novel. Making masterful use of a counterpointed
plot, Eliot presents the stories of a number of denizens of a
small English town on the eve of the Reform Bill of 1832. The
main characters, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, each long
for exceptional lives but are powerfully constrained both by their
own unrealistic expectations and by a conservative society. The
novel is notable for its deep psychological insight and sophisticated
character portraits.
Throughout
her career, Eliot wrote with a politically astute pen. From Adam
Bede to The Mill on the Floss and the frequently-read Silas Marner,
Eliot presented the cases of social outsiders and small town persecution
of that which they consider alien. No author since Jane Austen
had been as socially conscious and as sharp in pointing out the
hypocrisy of the country squires. Felix Holt, the Radical and
The Legend of Jubal were overtly political novels, and political
crisis is at the heart of Middlemarch. By the time of Daniel Deronda,
Eliot's sales were falling off, and she faded from public view
to some degree.
As
an author, Eliot was not only very successful in sales, but she
was, and remains, one of the most widely praised for her style
and clarity of thought. Eliot's sentence structures are clear,
patient, and well balanced, and she mixes plain statement and
unsettling irony with rare poise. Her commentaries are never without
sympathy for the characters, and she never stoops to being arch
or flippant with the emotions in her stories. Villains, heroines
and bystanders are all presented with awareness and full motivation.
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