Eliot, George

Eliot, George (1819–80). Novelist whose real name was Mary Anne (later Marian) Evans. Born in Warwickshire, she was the daughter of a land agent whose moral qualities are reflected in those of the upright Adam Bede. The landscapes and rhythms of daily life in the (fictionalized) towns of the English midlands are reflected in much of her best work, notably in her two novels set at the time of the first Reform Bill, Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) and the masterly Middlemarch: A Tale of Provincial Life (1871–2). In 1854 she established a lasting partnership with George Henry Lewes, the ‘scandal’ of her open liaison obliging her to publish her fiction under an assumed masculine name. Her reading of the works of Feuerbach, Hegel, Comte, and later, Darwin informs the arguments of her fiction with a decidedly ‘historical’ base, a positivist theme being especially noticeable in Romola (1863), a novel set in Savonarola's Florence.

Bruce Coleman