George Eliot

Chapter 1 · The Estate Agent's Daughter

Warwickshire, an evangelical girlhood, and a refusal to go to church

1819 – 1849 · Nuneaton · Coventry

Mary Anne Evans was born on 22 November 1819 on an estate in Warwickshire where her father Robert was the land agent — the man who managed the property, collected the rents, valued the timber and dealt with tenants at every social level. She often rode with him on his rounds, and the result was an unusual education: she saw farmers, labourers, clergy, tradesmen and gentry from close range and understood how their interests connected.

She was, everyone agreed, plain and formidably clever. Her father, judging that she would not marry well, invested in her education, and at boarding school she came under the influence of an intensely evangelical teacher.

Her mother died in 1836 and she left school at sixteen to keep house for her father. Her education continued privately: Greek, Latin, German, Italian, music, and unrestricted use of the library at the great house.

The reading destroyed her faith. In 1841 the family moved near Coventry, where she met Charles and Cara Bray, freethinkers whose house was a meeting place for radicals. In January 1842 she refused to go to church with her father. He threatened to throw her out; the quarrel, which she called the Holy War, lasted months and ended in a compromise under which she attended church and thought what she liked.

She then took on a task no English publisher had managed: translating David Friedrich Strauss's *Life of Jesus*, a fifteen-hundred-page German work arguing that the Gospel narratives are myth. She finished it in 1846. It took two years and, she said, made her ill.

Why this matters

Eliot's loss of faith and her translation work gave her a philosophical framework — sympathy as the basis of morality without God — that underlies every novel she wrote.

You have the young scholar. What would you ask her?

Ask Eliot

• “What did riding with your father teach you about English society?”
• “What was the Holy War with your father about?”
• “How did you lose your religious belief?”
• “Why translate Strauss's Life of Jesus?”
• “What did your father expect for you?”

Chapter 2 · London, and Mr Lewes

Editing a review, and choosing social ruin

1850 – 1856 · London · Weimar

After her father's death, Evans moved to London in 1851 and joined the household of the publisher John Chapman, who had bought the *Westminster Review*, the leading radical quarterly. She became its assistant editor and, in practice, ran it — commissioning, editing and writing — while Chapman's name appeared on the masthead, because a woman editor was not possible.

She moved among the most advanced thinkers in England: Herbert Spencer, with whom she fell in love and was refused; John Stuart Mill; Harriet Martineau; and George Henry Lewes, a critic, biographer of Goethe and amateur scientist, small, ugly and, by universal agreement, delightful company.

Lewes was married. His wife had had children by another man, and Lewes had registered them as his own, which under English law counted as condoning the adultery and permanently barred him from divorce. There was no legal way out.

In July 1854 Evans went with him to Germany, and from then on they lived openly together and she called herself Marian Evans Lewes.

The cost fell almost entirely on her. Lewes continued to be received in society; she was not. Respectable women would not visit her, and for years she was largely excluded. Her brother Isaac, who managed the family money, cut off all contact and did not write to her again for over twenty years.

Her 1856 essay 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' is a demolition of the fashionable fiction written by and for genteel women — vain, ignorant, unresearched — and it explains a good deal about the pen name she was about to choose.

Why this matters

Eliot's exclusion from respectable society was the price of the partnership that gave her the confidence and support to begin writing fiction at thirty-seven.

You have the decision that cost her everything social. What would you ask her?

Ask Eliot

• “What did you actually do at the Westminster Review?”
• “Why could Lewes not divorce?”
• “Why did society punish you and not him?”
• “What did your brother's silence cost you?”
• “What were you attacking in 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists'?”

Chapter 3 · Choosing a Man's Name

Scenes of Clerical Life, and an impostor who forced her out

1857 – 1861 · London · Warwickshire

Lewes encouraged her to try fiction. She wrote a story about a clergyman and sent it to Blackwood's magazine under a pen name: George — Lewes's first name — and Eliot, which she said was simply a good mouth-filling word.

The reasons for the pseudonym were specific. She wanted her fiction judged on its merits rather than against the category of lady novelist she had just attacked. And a book by Marian Evans, a woman living with another woman's husband, would have been reviewed as a scandal.

*Scenes of Clerical Life* (1857) was admired; Dickens wrote to say he suspected the author was a woman, because no man could have written the domestic detail. *Adam Bede* (1859) was an enormous success.

Her cover was then broken from an unexpected direction. A man named Joseph Liggins let it be understood that he was the real George Eliot, and gathered sympathy and subscriptions. The imposture became embarrassing enough that Evans revealed herself in 1859.

Sales did not suffer, though some reviewers turned cooler once they knew.

*The Mill on the Floss* (1860) is her most autobiographical book: Maggie Tulliver is a clever, passionate girl in a community that has no use for cleverness in women, whose relationship with her narrow, beloved brother Tom drives the novel to its end. Readers recognised her brother Isaac immediately.

*Silas Marner* (1861), a short novel about a weaver ruined by false accusation and restored by raising an abandoned child, became the book generations of schoolchildren met first.

Why this matters

Eliot's pseudonym was a calculated professional decision, and the reaction when it was uncovered demonstrates exactly the prejudice she had anticipated.

You have the pen name. What would you ask her?

Ask Eliot

• “Why choose a man's name?”
• “What forced you to reveal yourself?”
• “How much of Maggie Tulliver is you?”
• “Did reviewers change once they knew you were a woman?”
• “Why write about clergymen and weavers rather than the fashionable world?”

Chapter 4 · Middlemarch

A study of provincial life, and of what happens to unused ability

1869 – 1876 · London · Surrey

*Middlemarch* was published in eight parts across 1871 and 1872. Virginia Woolf called it one of the few English novels written for grown-up people, and the judgement has stuck.

It braids several stories in a Midlands town around 1830: Dorothea Brooke, intelligent and hungry for a life of significance, who marries a dry scholar in the belief that she can assist a great work and discovers he is producing nothing; Tertius Lydgate, a doctor with genuine scientific ambition, whose career is destroyed by an unwise marriage, local politics and debt; and a wide cast of tradesmen, clergy and landowners whose small decisions constrain everyone.

What makes it exceptional is the narrator's method. Eliot repeatedly turns from a character we have been judging and asks the reader to consider the world from inside that person's self-regard instead — including Casaubon, the useless scholar, whom the narrator pauses to pity. Her stated moral principle was that art's greatest benefit is the extension of sympathy, and the novel is built to enforce it.

It is also a book about waste. Dorothea's capacities have nowhere to go, because there is no public role for a woman of her ability. The final paragraph refuses a triumphant ending: it says that the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with us as they might have been thanks to the number of people who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.

*Daniel Deronda* (1876), her last novel, is unusual in a different way: it treats Jewish characters and Jewish national aspiration with a seriousness and sympathy almost unknown in English fiction of the period, and was read approvingly by early Zionists.

“…the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”

— George Eliot, Middlemarch, finale, 1872

Why this matters

Middlemarch's method — moving the reader inside the self-justification of characters they have been judging — is the central technique by which the novel teaches sympathy.

You have the great novel. What would you ask her?

Ask Eliot

• “Why ask readers to pity Casaubon?”
• “What happens to Dorothea's abilities?”
• “Why does Lydgate fail?”
• “What do you mean by unhistoric acts?”
• “Why write sympathetically about Jewish life in Daniel Deronda?”

Chapter 5 · Marriage at Sixty, and a Grave Outside the Abbey

Isaac writes back

1878 – 1880 and after · London · Venice · Highgate

George Henry Lewes died in November 1878 after twenty-four years together. Eliot was devastated and saw almost nobody for months, working only to complete the final volume of his unfinished philosophical work.

In May 1880, aged sixty, she married John Cross, a banker and family friend twenty years younger, who had helped manage her finances. The marriage astonished everyone, including her friends.

It had one immediate effect. Her brother Isaac, who had not communicated with her for over twenty years because she had lived with a man she was not married to, wrote to congratulate her on her marriage. She replied warmly. It is one of the coldest facts in English literary biography.

The honeymoon in Venice produced an incident that has never been explained. Cross went over the balcony of their hotel into the Grand Canal and was pulled out by gondoliers. Whether it was an accident, a fever, or an attempt at suicide has been argued over ever since, and the surviving accounts are guarded.

Eliot died on 22 December 1880, seven months after the wedding, of kidney disease, aged sixty-one.

A campaign to have her buried in Westminster Abbey failed. She had rejected Christianity in print and had lived for a quarter of a century with a man she could not marry, and the Dean would not have her. She was buried instead in Highgate Cemetery, in the section for religious dissenters, beside Lewes. A memorial stone was finally placed in Poets' Corner in 1980, a century later.

Her reputation dipped in the early twentieth century, when her seriousness was out of fashion, and has since risen steadily. She is now generally counted among the two or three most important novelists in English.

Why this matters

The refusal of Westminster Abbey and Isaac's letter arriving only after her marriage show precisely what Victorian respectability required — and what it cost her to work outside it.

You have the end. What would you ask her?

Ask Eliot

• “Why did Isaac write only after you married?”
• “Why marry John Cross at sixty?”
• “What happened in Venice?”
• “Why were you refused Westminster Abbey?”
• “Was living openly with Lewes worth what it cost?”

What Eliot changed

Eliot brought philosophical and psychological seriousness to the English novel, and Middlemarch is routinely named among the finest novels in the language. Her method of directing the reader's sympathy toward characters they are inclined to judge influenced Henry James, Woolf and the modern psychological novel, and her translations introduced German biblical criticism to English readers.

A debate that continues

Critics debate whether her endings soften her social criticism — particularly Dorothea's — and biographers still disagree about the marriage to John Cross and what happened in Venice.

Keep exploring — ask Eliot

• “How do you make a reader sympathise with someone tiresome?”
• “What did you lose by not being able to write as a woman?”
• “What would Dorothea have done in a later century?”

Related lives

• Virginia Woolf — Voice of the Inner Life
• Charles Dickens — The Inimitable · Chronicler of London
• Jane Austen — Novelist of Manners & Marriage

Related themes

The Victorian novel · Women writers and pseudonyms · Religion and doubt in the nineteenth century