Middlemarch (Author Biography)

Author Biography

George Eliot was the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans (later Marian Evans and in the last year of her life Marian Cross), who was born on November 22, 1819, in Arbury, Warwickshire, the daughter of Robert Evans, an estate manager. Her excellent education was first shaped by Christian teachings and then by her conversion to Evangelicalism. In her schooling at Coventry, Evans lost her provincial accent and learned to speak English perfectly in a well-modulated voice. She learned French and German and was adept at playing the piano. Influenced by the German school of thought called Higher Criticism, she came in her twenties to regard sacred texts as historical documents rather than divinely revealed truth. Though she stopped going to church, she remained committed to the values of duty and love, and her writings, which are didactic, provide many positive portraits of clergymen and Dissenters.

After her mother died in 1836, Evans became the mistress of the family home and cared for her widowed father. In addition to housekeeping duties, she pursued her education rigorously, reading widely and furthering her study of foreign languages. In the early 1840s, she and her father relocated to a home outside Coventry, and there she met freethinkers Charles and Caroline Bray. The Brays contributed to Evans's shift from traditional religious thinking, which assumes sacred texts are divinely inspired, to a more radical position, in which she viewed such texts as humanly wrought fictions holding psychological and moral truths, a position to which her father strongly objected. In 1846, Evans published an English translation from the German of David Strauss's Life of Jesus; at the same time, she submerged herself in the work of Spinoza and published essays on various other subjects. After her father died, she traveled with the Brays to Europe, returning thereafter to live in London.

In 1850, she met John Chapman (1821 – 94), publisher and editor of the Westminster Review. Evans began contributing to this journal and in 1851 boarded temporarily in the home of Chapman and his wife. Evans was infatuated with the handsome, philandering Chapman, and subsequently, as assistant editor of the Westminster Review she became enamored with the scholarly Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903), who throughout the coming decades published books on biology, sociology, and evolutionary theory. In 1854, Evans published a translation of Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity. During this time she began to use the pseudonym George Eliot (and it is conventional to use this name when referring to her).

In 1854, Eliot began a long-term intimate union with George Henry Lewes (1817 – 78), an exceptional thinker with a wide variety of scholarly interests, who was estranged from his wife Agnes yet unable to obtain a divorce at the time he met Eliot. Lewes lived for the rest of his life with Eliot, and his influence on her work cannot be overstated. Among his many works, Lewes published a highly respected Life of Goethe (1853), which he and Eliot researched together in Weimar. Lewes was a constant support to Eliot, and though the irregularity of their relationship caused her initial social discomfort, the couple's London circle gradually accepted them. Indeed, Eliot preferred in social circumstances to be called Mrs. Lewes.

During the next twenty-two years, Eliot produced some of the greatest of all nineteenth-century English fiction. Her most highly respected novels are Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Romola (1863), Felix Holt, The Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1872 – 73); and Daniel Deronda (1876). Middlemarch is arguably the finest of all these works.

By the time she published Daniel Deronda, Eliot had reached the highpoint of her stellar career and was acknowledged to be the greatest living English novelist. Two years later, Lewes died. In 1880, Eliot married John Walter Cross, her financial advisor whom she had met in 1869 while in Rome. She died in London of heart failure seven months later on December 22.