George Eliot

• 1. Introduction

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  George Eliot was the pen name of a woman who lived openly with a man who was married to someone else. From 1854 to 1878 Mary Ann Evans shared a home with George Henry Lewes, called him her husband, and weathered the disapproval that followed. Lewes never divorced his wife, Agnes Jervis, and he kept supporting their children even after Jervis left him for another man and bore children with him. Across those years Evans wrote under a man's name and produced seven novels, among them Middlemarch, which Virginia Woolf later called "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." So how did a woman barred from Westminster Abbey become a writer that Martin Amis and Julian Barnes would name as the author of the greatest novel in the English language? Why did a vicar's supposed handiwork turn out to be hers? And what did a young reader on a country estate, allowed into a private library, carry into the realism that would define Victorian fiction?

• 2. An Estate Education

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  Robert Evans managed the Arbury Hall estate, and his place there opened a library door for his daughter. Mary Ann Evans was born on the 22nd of November 1819 at South Farm on that estate in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. Her mother, Christiana, was the daughter of a local mill-owner. In early 1820 the family moved to Griff House, between Nuneaton and Bedworth.

  A voracious reader and plainly intelligent, the young Evans was not considered physically beautiful, and her family thought her chances of marriage slim. That judgment, with her evident mind, led her father to fund an education rare for women of the time. From ages five to nine she boarded at Miss Latham's school in Attleborough, from nine to thirteen at Mrs. Wallington's school in Nuneaton, and from thirteen to sixteen at Miss Franklin's school in Coventry. At Mrs. Wallington's she was taught by the evangelical Maria Lewis, to whom her earliest surviving letters are addressed.

  At sixteen her formal schooling ended, but her father's role on the estate let her into the library of Arbury Hall. Christopher Stray observed that her novels "draw heavily on Greek literature," noting only one of her books can be printed correctly without a Greek typeface, and that Greek tragedy often shaped her themes. Visiting the estate, she could set the landowner's wealth against the poorer lives around him, and those parallel lives would surface across her fiction. She was raised in a low church Anglican family, in a Midlands region then filling with religious dissenters.

• 3. Doubt And Translation

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  Charles Bray had grown rich as a ribbon manufacturer and spent his money building schools and on other causes. After her mother died in 1836, Evans kept house, and when her brother Isaac married and took over the family home, she and her father moved to Foleshill near Coventry. There she became close friends with Charles and Cara Bray, free-thinking radicals whose Rosehill home drew people who debated daring ideas. Among the guests she met there were Robert Owen, Herbert Spencer, Harriet Martineau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

  David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach were among the writers this circle introduced her to, thinkers 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 in 1846, finished after Elizabeth "Rufa" Brabant left it incomplete. The Strauss book had caused a sensation in Germany by arguing the New Testament miracles were mythical additions with little factual basis. Her translation had a similar effect in England, prompting the Earl of Shaftesbury to call it "the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell." In 1854 she translated Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity.

  Her father threatened to throw her out when she began questioning her faith, but never carried it through. She respectfully attended church and kept house for him until his death in 1849, when she was 30. Five days after his funeral she travelled to Switzerland with the Brays, then stayed on alone in Geneva, lodging eventually in a house owned by François and Juliet d'Albert Durade. She wrote happily that "one feels in a downy nest high up in a good old tree," and François Durade painted her portrait there.

• 4. The Review Years

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  John Chapman was the radical publisher who had issued her Strauss translation, and on returning to England in 1850 she moved to London and stayed at his house. She had begun calling herself Marian Evans, intent on becoming a writer. Chapman had recently bought the campaigning, left-wing journal The Westminster Review, and she joined his household alongside his wife and mistress.

  Assistant editor by 1851, just a year after arriving, Evans wrote pieces critical of organised religion and sympathetic to the lower classes. Though Chapman was officially the editor, she did most of the work of producing the journal, contributing essays and reviews from the January 1852 issue until her employment ended in the first half of 1854. She also took up the business side, attempting to change the Review's layout and design. She sympathized with the 1848 revolutions across continental Europe, hoping Italians would drive the "odious Austrians" out of Lombardy and that "decayed monarchs" might be pensioned off, while still favouring gradual reform at home.

  Mathematics drew her too. In 1850-51 she attended classes at the Ladies College in Bedford Square, later known as Bedford College, London.

• 5. A Husband In All But Law

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  George Henry Lewes, the philosopher and critic, met Evans in 1851, and by 1854 they had decided to live together. Lewes was already married to Agnes Jervis in an open marriage; besides their three children, Agnes also had four children by Thornton Leigh Hunt. In July 1854 the pair travelled to Weimar and Berlin to do research, a trip that also served as their honeymoon.

  Before Germany she had completed the Feuerbach translation, and while abroad she worked on translating Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, finished in 1856. It went unpublished in her lifetime after the prospective publisher refused to pay the £75 she asked. The translation finally appeared in 1981, published by Thomas Deegan, was found to be in the public domain in 2018, and was re-published by Princeton University Press in 2020.

  From this point she signed herself Mary Ann Evans Lewes and called Lewes her husband. Refusing to hide the relationship ran against the social conventions of the era and drew heavy disapproval. Yet the partnership gave her the encouragement and stability she needed to write fiction, even as it would be years before the couple were welcomed into polite society.

• 6. Becoming George Eliot

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  "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," one of her last essays for the Westminster Review in 1856, attacked the trivial and ridiculous plots of contemporary fiction by women. In it she set out a kind of manifesto, praising instead the realism of novels then being written in Europe. She chose the pen name George Eliot and told her biographer J. W. Cross that George was Lewes's forename and Eliot was "a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word." The name let her escape the stereotype that women's writing was limited to lighter fare, kept her fiction separate from her known work as translator and critic, and helped shield her private life.

  "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton" appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857, when she was 37, the first of the three stories that made up Scenes of Clerical Life and the first work signed George Eliot. Published as a two-volume book in 1858, it was well received and widely thought to be the work of a country parson or a parson's wife. She had been profoundly influenced by Thomas Carlyle, calling him as early as 1841 "a grand favourite of mine." Lisa Surridge noted that Carlyle "stimulated Eliot's interest in German thought, encouraged her turn from Christian orthodoxy, and shaped her ideas on work, duty, sympathy, and the evolution of the self."

  Adam Bede, her first complete novel, followed in 1859 and was an instant success. Curiosity about the author grew so intense that a man named Joseph Liggins pretended to have written it, which finally pushed her to acknowledge that she stood behind the pseudonym. Queen Victoria read all of Eliot's novels and was so taken with Adam Bede that she commissioned Edward Henry Corbould to paint scenes from it.

• 7. The Realist And Her Politics

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  The Reform Bill of 1832 sits at the heart of Middlemarch, where Eliot presents the lives of a small English town's inhabitants on its eve. From Adam Bede to The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, she gave voice to social outsiders and the cruelties of small-town persecution, while Felix Holt, the Radical and The Legend of Jubal were openly political. The roots of her realism appear in her 1856 review of John Ruskin's Modern Painters in the Westminster Review.

  John Stuart Mill shaped her thinking, and she read all his major works as they appeared. She judged the second chapter of his The Subjection of Women, attacking the laws that oppress married women, "excellent." She backed his parliamentary run, was surprised when the electorate chose a philosopher, and supported his efforts for female suffrage, hoping "for much good from the serious presentation of women's claims before Parliament." In a letter to John Morley she dismissed appeals to nature in explaining women's lower status and called for "an equivalence of advantage for the two sexes" in education. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861 she sympathized with the Union, which historians link to her abolitionist views, and in 1868 she supported protests against governmental policies in Ireland.

  Romola, an historical novel set in late fifteenth century Florence, drew on the life of the priest Girolamo Savonarola. Her translating work steeped her in Feuerbach's idea that the divine reflects human nature projected outward, and that thread runs through her agnostic humanism. Friedrich Nietzsche scorned her morality for treating sin as a debt expiated through suffering, dismissing it as the work of "little moralistic females à la Eliot." Daniel Deronda, her last novel, even expresses proto-Zionist ideas.

• 8. Marriage, Death, And Reputation

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  John Walter Cross was a Scottish commission agent 20 years her junior, and after Lewes died on the 30th of November 1878 she found companionship with him. She spent six months editing Lewes's final work, Life and Mind, for publication. On the 16th of May 1880, eighteen months after Lewes's death, she married Cross and changed her name to Mary Ann Cross. The marriage drew controversy over the age gap, yet it pleased her brother Isaac, who had cut off relations when she began living with Lewes and now sent congratulations.

  Venice nearly turned tragic on the honeymoon, when Cross jumped from the hotel balcony into the Grand Canal in a suicide attempt. He survived, and the couple returned to England and moved to a house in Chelsea. A throat infection, combined with the kidney disease that had afflicted her for years, led to her death on the 22nd of December 1880, at 61.

  Because she had denied the Christian faith and lived with Lewes, she was not buried in Westminster Abbey. She was interred in Highgate Cemetery, in the area reserved for political and religious dissenters and agnostics, beside Lewes; the graves of Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer lie nearby. Her husband's posthumous biography painted an almost saintly woman at odds with the life people knew she had led, and her reputation faded for a time. In 1980, on the centenary of her death, a memorial stone was placed for her in Poets' Corner between W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas, carrying a line from Scenes of Clerical Life: "The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second something to reverence."