George Eliot

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann (later Marian) Evans, one of the greatest novelists in English. A provincial estate manager’s daughter who taught herself Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German and Italian, she lost her evangelical faith, translated the most radical German theology of her age, became the effective editor of the leading intellectual journal in London, and then — in her late thirties, living openly with a married man — began writing fiction. Her novels, from Adam Bede (1859) and The Mill on the Floss (1860) to Silas Marner (1861) and her masterpiece Middlemarch (1871–72), combine the realism of English provincial life with philosophical depth, psychological insight and a profound moral purpose: to extend the reader’s sympathy to ordinary, flawed people. Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

Life

Warwickshire and faith

Mary Ann Evans was born on 22 November 1819 at South Farm on the Arbury estate in Warwickshire, in the English Midlands, the youngest child of Robert Evans, the estate’s manager, a respected, practical, conservative man, and his second wife, Christiana. She adored her elder brother Isaac; their childhood together, and later estrangement, is the heart of The Mill on the Floss. Plain, clever, intense and needing love, she was sent to boarding schools, where she came under the influence of an evangelical teacher and became earnestly pious. When her mother died in 1836 she left school to keep house for her father.

In 1841 they moved to Coventry, where she met the freethinking ribbon-manufacturer Charles Bray and his circle. Reading Charles Hennell’s Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity, she lost her faith, and in 1842 refused to go to church — the “Holy War” with her father, who threatened to throw her out. She compromised by attending church while keeping her own opinions. She translated David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1846), which treated the Gospels as myth, and later Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1854), which argued that God is a projection of human qualities. These ideas — that religion expresses human needs and values — remained central to her thought.

London and Lewes

After her father’s death in 1849 she travelled to Geneva, then moved to London in 1851 to work for the publisher John Chapman on the Westminster Review, the leading radical quarterly, which she edited in all but name. She knew Herbert Spencer (whom she loved, and who rejected her), John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens. In 1851 she met George Henry Lewes, a versatile writer, critic and scientist, who was married but separated from his wife, Agnes, who had had children by another man; under the law, Lewes could not divorce her, having condoned the adultery. In 1854 Marian Evans and Lewes went to Germany together and lived as husband and wife for the rest of his life. Respectable society ostracised her; her brother Isaac broke off all contact for twenty-three years.

Novelist

Lewes encouraged her to write fiction. Her first stories, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857–58), appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine under the pseudonym “George Eliot”, to protect her from the scandal of her private life and from the prejudice against women novelists — and to distance herself from the “silly novels by lady novelists” she had mocked in a famous essay. Readers assumed the author was a clergyman. Dickens alone guessed it was a woman.

Adam Bede (1859), set in rural Warwickshire in 1799, the story of an upright carpenter, a vain dairymaid seduced by the young squire, and her trial for infanticide, was an enormous success. When an impostor claimed authorship, her identity was revealed, causing a sensation. The Mill on the Floss (1860) followed — the story of Maggie Tulliver, a passionate, intelligent, misunderstood girl, and her love for her rigid brother Tom, ending in a flood in which they drown in each other’s arms. Silas Marner (1861), a short fable-like novel, tells of a lonely, embittered weaver, robbed of his hoarded gold, who is redeemed by adopting a golden-haired child left at his door. Romola (1862–63), a historical novel of Savonarola’s Florence, for which she researched exhaustively; Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), a political novel set at the time of the 1832 Reform Act; and the dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy followed.

Middlemarch (1871–72), published in eight parts, is her masterpiece. Her last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), divides between the story of Gwendolen Harleth, a beautiful, selfish young woman who marries a cruel aristocrat for money, and that of Daniel Deronda, who discovers his Jewish ancestry and commits himself to the cause of a Jewish homeland — a remarkable sympathetic treatment of Judaism that was admired in Jewish communities and anticipated Zionism.

She was now wealthy and revered; on Sunday afternoons at the Priory, their house near Regent’s Park, admirers, including Turgenev, the young Henry James and members of the royal family, came to pay homage. Lewes died in 1878; she was devastated, and completed his unfinished work on psychology. In May 1880 she married John Walter Cross, a banker twenty years younger, a friend of the household — and her brother Isaac at last wrote to congratulate her. She died on 22 December 1880 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, beside Lewes.

Art and thought

Realism and sympathy. George Eliot’s realism is a moral programme. In chapter 17 of Adam Bede, she defends her choice to paint ordinary, imperfect people truthfully, like the Dutch painters, rather than heroes or ideal figures: “These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are… it is these people — amongst whom your life is passed — that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love.” “If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,” she wrote in a letter.

The narrator. Her narrators are wise, ironic, compassionate and essayistic, moving in and out of characters’ minds, generalising about human nature, and drawing the reader into reflection: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

Egoism and moral growth. Her central drama is the slow, painful passage from egoism to sympathy — the recognition that others have “an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.” Her characters are tested by choices with consequences that run far beyond what they foresee, in the “web” of social life.

Science and society. Influenced by Comte’s positivism, Spencer’s evolutionary sociology and Lewes’s physiology, she approached society as an organism in which every part affects every other, and the individual is shaped by history, community and inheritance. Yet she insisted on moral responsibility.

Women. She herself defied convention, but her novels are ambivalent about women’s emancipation: her heroines — Maggie, Dorothea, Gwendolen — are constrained by their society, and their lives are often frustrated or diminished. Feminist critics have debated whether she is a feminist or a conservative; the prelude to Middlemarch explicitly laments the “Saint Theresas” of ordinary life “foundress of nothing”.

Legacy

Admired by her contemporaries as a sage, George Eliot fell out of favour after her death, when Cross’s reverent biography made her seem solemn. Virginia Woolf’s essay (1919) began her revival, and F. R. Leavis placed her at the head of The Great Tradition (1948). Middlemarch regularly tops polls of the greatest English novel. Her house at Nuneaton and Coventry associations commemorate her.

In conversation

• “Unhistoric acts” — the quiet good done by ordinary lives, which history does not record.
• “The roar which lies on the other side of silence” — what we would hear if we felt all the suffering around us.
• “An equivalent centre of self” — the recognition that other people are as real to themselves as we are to ourselves.