Mary Ann Evans was born on November 22, 1819, at Chilvers Coton,
Warwickshire, England, the last child of an estate agent. During
her girlhood, she went through a phase of evangelical piety, but
her strong interest in philosophy and her friendship with religious
freethinkers led to a break with orthodox religion. When one of
these friends married in 1843, Mary Ann took over from his wife the
task of translating D.F. Strauss's The Life of Jesus Critically
Examined (1846), a work that had deep effect on English
rationalism. After her father's death she settled in London and
from 1851 to 1854 she served as a writer and editor of the
Westminster Review, the organ of the Radical party. In London she
met she met George Henry Lewes, a journalist and advanced thinker.
Lewes was separated from his wife, who had had two sons by another
man, but had been unable to obtain a divorce. In a step daring for
Victorian times, Mary Ann Evans began living openly with Lewes in
1854, in a union they both considered as sacred as a legal marriage
and one that lasted until his death in 1878.
With Lewes's encouragement, Mary Ann Evans wrote her first
fictional work, "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton," for
Blackwood's Magazine in 1857; it was followed by two more stories
published under the pseudonym George Elliot-"George" because it was
Lewes's name and "Eliot" because, she said, it was good
mouth-filling, easily pronounced word." At the age of thirty-nine
she used her memories of Warwickshire to write her first long
novel, Adam Bede (1859), a book that established her as the
foremost woman novelist in her day. Then came The Mill on the Floss
(1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Romola (1863). Her masterpiece and
one of the greatest English novels, Middlemarch, was published in
1871-72. Her last work was Daniel Deronda (1876). After Lewes's
death George Eliot married John Walter Cross. He was forty; she was
sixty-one. Before her death on December 22, 1880, she had been
recognized by her contemporaries as the greatest living writer of
English fiction.
"No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of
reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable
spaciousness of its narrative."
--V. S. Pritchett
"No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of
reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable
spaciousness of its narrative."
--V. S. Pritchett
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