George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans, better known by the pen name George Eliot (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880), was an English novelist. She was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era, whose novels, largely set in provincial England, are well known for their realism and psychological perspicacity.

Biography

Mary Ann Evans was the daughter of an estate agent in Warwickshire, born on a farm on the Arbury Hall Estate near Nuneaton. She was brought up with a narrowly low church religion. Charles Bray, a Coventry manufacturer, brought her into contact with more liberal theologies. She translated Strauss' Life of Jesus (1846) and began contributing to the Westminster Review in 1850 and became its assistant editor in 1851. The Westminster Review had been founded by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and was the leading journal for philosophical radicals. In 1854, she published a translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, and it was at that time that she began to live with George Henry Lewes in an extramarital cohabitation.

Related Topics:
Warwickshire - Arbury Hall - Nuneaton - Low church - Coventry - Strauss - 1846 - Westminster Review - 1850 - 1851 - John Stuart Mill - Jeremy Bentham - 1854 - Feuerbach - George Henry Lewes

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In 1857, she published "Amos Barton," the first of the "Scenes of Clerical Life" in Blackwood's Magazine. The collected "Scenes" were well received and launched Evans on a novelistic career. Evans' cohabitation with Lewes was a scandalous matter. Lewes' wife refused to be divorced, and so he remained married to her in name only, while he made house solely with Evans.

Related Topics:
1857 - Blackwood's Magazine

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Two years after the death of Lewes, on May 6, 1880 she married a friend, John Cross, an American banker, who was 20 years her junior. They honeymooned in Venice and, allegedly, Cross jumped from their hotel balcony into the Grand Canal on their wedding night; he survived. She died at the age of 61 in London of a kidney ailment and was interred in Highgate Cemetery (East), Highgate, London.

Related Topics:
May 6 - 1880 - John Cross - American - Venice - Wedding night - Kidney - Ailment - Interred - Highgate Cemetery - Highgate - London

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Friend and author Henry James once wrote of her:

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She had a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth and a chin and jawbone qui n'en finissent pas... Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end, as I ended, in falling in love with her. Yes behold me in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.

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