ELIOT, GEORGE

ELIOT, GEORGE (Mary Anne Evans; 1819–1880), English novelist.

Born Mary Anne Evans in 1819, George Eliot lived the first thirty years of her life in rural Warwickshire, England, part of the English Midlands that later became the setting for her novels. The youngest of five children, she took over the duties of housekeeping soon after her mother, Christiana Pearson, died in 1835, when Mary Anne was still in her teens. Her father, Robert Evans, managed Newdigate Estate, and when he retired to the nearby provincial center of Coventry in 1841, she went along, caring for him until his death in 1849. During that time, she worked on her fluency in foreign languages—which included Latin, Greek, German, Italian, French, and Hebrew—studied literature, and began reading German higher criticism of the Bible. She was encouraged in this self-imposed intellectual regimen by Charles and Caroline Bray, the centers of the local circle of intellectuals. Through them, she was introduced to the much larger community of London intellectuals who visited the Brays. In 1851 she changed her name to the less provincial sounding "Marian Evans," and moved to London, where she would reside until her death. She wrote for and, beginning in 1852, became the anonymous editor of the influential Westminster Review, a position that brought her into contact with new developments in European philosophy, science, and literature.

The following year, at age thirty-four, the fledgling writer fell in love with George Henry Lewes (1817–1878), then editor of a radical London weekly, the Leader. A protégé of the philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) and an important popularizer of Auguste Comte's (1798–1857) philosophy of positivism; he became well known for his Life and Works of Goethe (1855) and published widely as a critic, scientist, and philosopher. Unfortunately Lewes was married, and though separated from Agnes Lewes, divorce was an impossibility. After 1854, he and Eliot lived openly together in a companionship that scandalized English society. As a result Marian Evans Lewes (as she now signed her name) was largely excluded from polite society, although later in life her reputation as a writer of considerable wisdom gave her a renewed social acceptability. Their life together was characterized by annual trips to the Continent, with visits to Germany, France, Spain, and Italy until Lewes's death in 1878. Two years later Eliot caused another scandal when she married the much younger John Cross (1840–1924), who later wrote her first biography. She died less than a year after the wedding, on 22 December 1880, and is buried next to Lewes in London's Highgate Cemetery.

early works

Her first published volume was not fiction but a translation of the German philosopher David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (1846; The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined). Eliot was much interested in higher criticism, which appealed to her realist values by historicizing the Bible, and in 1854 she published a translation of Ludwig Feuerbach's Das Wesen des Christenthums (The Essence of Christianity). Intermittently, she translated from Latin the works of Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677), the Renaissance philosopher and forerunner of higher criticism. Her version of his Ethics went unpublished until 1981.

Eliot developed her own views on realism and fiction in her writing for the Westminster Review during the 1850s, before her relatively late appearance as a novelist toward the end of the decade, at age thirty-seven. "We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness," she wrote in 1856, expressing an insistence on factual accuracy that became a key element in her realism (1963, p. 271). She began writing fiction that same year and three stories in Blackwood's Magazine signed "George Eliot" were the immediate result, soon republished as Scenes from Clerical Life (1858). The pseudonym was in part a tribute to her partner, but the choice of a male pen name is thought to be a pragmatic response to the practices of reviewers at the time, who rarely took works by women seriously, a problem she discussed in an important Westminster Review article in 1856, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists." Her stories were praised as the voice of a major new writer, and because of their success the identity of the author (along with her unsanctioned marriage) was soon unmasked.

novels

She cemented her critical reputation with her first two novels. Set in the English Midlands, Adam Bede (1859) focuses on a rural carpenter who is hopelessly in love with a local farm girl. Beautiful, shallow, and none too smart, Hetty Sorrel is the first of a female type that reappears throughout Eliot's fiction. The character nonetheless receives a compassionate treatment, and the narrator's sympathy for Hetty as she commits infanticide illustrates a hallmark of Eliot's style as a realist. In The Mill on the Floss (1859), Eliot adds a historical dimension to rural life that was absent from Adam Bede. The action illustrates the broader pattern of social change caused by England's transition from an agricultural to a commercial society. The novel's "spit-fire" heroine, Maggie Tulliver, is Eliot's first extensive engagement with the limited possibilities available to women and a model for subsequent Eliot heroines.

Her two middle novels distance themselves in different ways from the English Midlands. Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861) injects a dose of lyrical fantasy into the story of a rural outcast who finds a new home in another village. Romola (1862–1863) is a historical fiction of a young woman's disastrous marriage set in fifteenth-century Italy.

The late novels see a return to the familiar Midlands setting. Felix Holt: The Radical (1866) the matizes the effects of the electoral reform bill of 1832 on a working-class community, but emotionally it centers on the tragic and rich portrait of Mrs. Transome. Middlemarch: A Story of Provincial Life (1872) revisits the same historical setting, but employs a larger canvas to paint Victorian social issues, particularly that of the Woman Question, a more extreme problem in England than on the Continent. Middlemarch was also a technical breakthrough for the writer, who successfully masters the intricacies of a double-plotted novel, in which two independent stories intersect to convey a broader sense of community than either could do alone. The strategy reappears in her last novel Daniel Deronda (1876). Together with Middle-march, this work marks the high point of the Victorian realist novel. While partially set in the Midlands, this last novel is also her first to use London, a city she knew well, as a setting. Deronda is a young man of unknown birth who slowly discovers and then embraces his Jewish heritage. Gwendolyn Harleth is a beautiful, headstrong, and spoiled young woman whose family loses its fortune; her choice to marry for money, rather than love, proves unbearable.

In addition to novels, essays, and reviews, Eliot also published poetry; her novel-length The Spanish Gypsy: A Poem (1868) has thematic similarities to Daniel Deronda as an exploration of Victorian racial theory. Few know how to classify her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), a fascinating series of character sketches that can readily be seen as her most innovative work of fiction.

See alsoDickens, Charles; Gaskell, Elizabeth; Mill, John Stuart.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Eliot, George. Essays. Edited by Thomas Pinney. New York, 1963. The standard collection of her essays and reviews.

——. The Journals of George Eliot. Edited by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston. Cambridge, U.K., 1998. The first complete edition of the journals she maintained from 1854 to her death.

Secondary Sources

Ashton, Rosemary. George Eliot: A Life. London, 1996. An authoritative critical biography in which Eliot emerges as more independent and strong-willed than in earlier biographies.

Beer, Gillian. George Eliot. Bloomington, Ind., 1986. A thoughtful examination of Eliot's major novels as the products of a woman writer.

Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994. An important study that finds her novels more revealing of her emotional life than her letters.

Levine, George, ed. The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot. Cambridge, U.K., 2001. An informative series of essays by prominent Eliot scholars on her novels and ideas about science, religion, politics, philosophy, and gender.

Rignall, John, ed. Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot. Oxford, U.K., 2001. A fact-filled encyclopedia of biographical, historical, and critical information.

Peter Melville Logan