George Eliot

George Eliot the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), the English novelist, essayist and translator who ranks among the greatest Victorian novelists, known for Middlemarch and other works that combine psychological depth, moral seriousness and a searching sympathy for ordinary lives.

Early Life and Intellectual Formation

Mary Ann Evans was born on 22 November 1819 at South Farm, Arbury, in Warwickshire, the daughter of a land agent for a local estate. She grew up in the countryside of the English Midlands, a landscape of farms, small towns and country houses that she would later render in her fiction with unmatched intimacy. The rural society of her childhood supplied the setting and much of the material of her novels.

She was educated at several schools and became a formidable scholar, learning French, German and Italian and reading widely in theology, philosophy and science. In her youth she was deeply religious, but by her early twenties she had rejected orthodox Christianity in favour of a compassionate humanism, a change that distressed her family and shaped the ethical outlook of all her later writing.

After her father's death in 1849 she travelled in Europe and settled in London, where she became assistant editor of the Westminster Review, an influential journal of radical opinion. Her essays and reviews showed a powerful critical intelligence, and her translation of Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity and of David Strauss's Life of Jesus made her known in intellectual circles as a serious thinker and a freethinker of great learning.

From Essayist to Novelist

Her intimate friendship with the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes, a married man unable to obtain a divorce, scandalised respectable society. From 1854 the couple lived together openly, and although they could not marry, their union lasted until his death in 1878 and provided the emotional support for her writing. It was in part the desire to publish fiction without the prejudice attached to her irregular life that led her to adopt the male pen name George Eliot.

Her first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, appeared in 1857 and was followed in 1859 by the novel Adam Bede, which was a great success. Readers and critics speculated about the identity of the author, and the revelation that George Eliot was a woman caused a sensation. Adam Bede was praised for its truthfulness and its moral weight.

There followed a series of major novels: The Mill on the Floss in 1860, Silas Marner in 1861, Romola in 1863 and Felix Holt, the Radical in 1866. Each extended her range, from the tragic story of a brother and sister in the Midlands to the historical novel set in Renaissance Florence. By the late 1860s she was recognised as one of the leading novelists of the age.

Middlemarch and the Mature Novels

Middlemarch, published in instalments in 1871 and 1872, is widely considered her masterpiece and one of the greatest of all English novels. Set in a provincial town in the years before the Reform Act of 1832, it follows a large cast of characters, chiefly Dorothea Brooke, an idealistic young woman, and Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor, whose high hopes are thwarted by the narrowness and the compromises of provincial life.

The novel is remarkable for the breadth of its social canvas and the depth of its psychological insight. It weaves together several plots, involving marriage, money, religion, politics and medicine, and it examines how character is shaped by circumstance and how large historical forces work themselves out in ordinary lives. The narrator's voice, wise, ironic and compassionate, is one of the wonders of the book.

Her last novel, Daniel Deronda, appeared in 1876 and joins the story of a self-centred young woman with that of a young man who discovers his Jewish heritage. The novel anticipates the themes of Zionism and explores identity and moral growth. It also shows, as much of her work does, her interest in the inner lives of people whose ambitions are larger than their circumstances allow them to satisfy.

Ideas, Method and the Art of the Novel

George Eliot's fiction is distinguished by its realism and by its ethical seriousness. Influenced by the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte and by the evolutionary thought of her time, she held that human beings are bound to one another by ties of sympathy and consequence, and that moral growth consists in widening the range of that sympathy and accepting responsibility for the effects of one's actions.

Her method is above all psychological. She enters the minds of her characters with an almost clinical precision and yet with unfailing compassion, showing how small vanities, self-deceptions and good intentions combine to produce the fate that befalls them. She refuses villains and heroes in the ordinary sense, and insists that ordinary people, in their ordinary lives, deserve the full resources of serious literary art.

Her prose is dense, allusive and often ironic, and her narrators comment on the action in a voice that is by turns playful and profound. Her interest in science and philosophy, and her knowledge of several literatures, gave her work an intellectual range rare among novelists. Her treatment of women's education and aspirations, and her criticism of the limits placed on women, made her a forerunner of later feminist reading of Victorian fiction.

Later Life and Posthumous Reputation

In 1880, two years after the death of George Henry Lewes, she married John Cross, a friend many years her junior. The marriage was brief. She died on 22 December 1880 in London, and her burial was marked by controversy because of her rejection of Christian belief. Her reputation was immense at the time of her death and has remained high ever since.

Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss are established classics, and her other novels are widely read and studied. She influenced a great many later novelists, from Henry James and Thomas Hardy to more recent writers, and her name is associated with the highest ambitions of the realistic novel. The completeness of her imagined world and the moral intelligence of her narration remain her distinctive achievements.

She has been the subject of many biographies and critical studies, and her letters and essays add to the picture of a woman of extraordinary intellect who overcame the restrictions of her age. She is remembered as the writer who brought the novel to a new level of psychological and ethical complexity, and whose sympathetic imagination extended the boundaries of what literature could honestly say about human motive and human failure.

See also

• Middlemarch
• Victorian literature
• Realism
• The Mill on the Floss