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George Eliot – biography (01_george_eliot-bio.doc)

George Eliot – biography

George Eliot was the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans born on November 22, 1819                   in South Farm, Arbury, near Nuneaton in Warwickshire, England. Mary Anne was the third child of estate manager Robert Evans and Christiana Pearson, after Chrissey and Isaac, and before the boy twins, who died in infancy.

Mary Anne spent her childhood and adolescence between her family's farm, Griff House, in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, and the two boarding schools she was sent to. including Mrs. Wallington's school in Nuneaton, where she became an Evangelical Christian.

Mary Anne idolized her older brother, Isaac, and despaired when he began to distance himself from her. Turning to books and reading for comfort, Mary Anne also found solace in the Evangelical preachings of her teacher, Miss Maria Lewis. Miss Lewis's teachings provided Mary Anne with the religious devotion that permeated most of her adolescence.

After her mother died of breast cancer on February 3, 1836 and her older sister, Chrissey, married in 1837, Mary Anne took charge of her father's household while continuing her education through private tutors. She learned Italian, German, and Latin, and within a few years also studied Greek and Hebrew.

Mary Anne and her father moved to a house near Coventry. There she met the philanthropist Charles Bray, a writer on phrenology,his wife, Caroline Hennell, as well as Hennell's family, who introduced her to new political and religious ideas and under whose influence she rejected Christianity.

It was during this time that Mary Anne changed her name to 'Mary Ann' and became known as 'Miss Evans.' Mary Ann nursed her father during his last years, especially when he fell sick with kidney disease. She was very much devastated when her father finally died on May 30, 1849.

Mary Ann changed her name yet again, this time to 'Marian' in 1851. She travelled to London, where she embarked on an adulterous affair with the married Mr. John Chapman. Her residence at 142 Strand gave her access to the literary and artistic circles in London at the time - most importantly, she began to associate with the men from the Westminster Review. Chapman bought the Westminster Review and gave the editorship to Marian Evans. Under Eliot's control the Westminster Review enjoyed success. But Chapman's wife, Susanna, and his mistress, Elisabeth Tilley, were jealous of Chapman's attention to Marian and made her leave London.

Evans travelled to Geneva but returned to London later that year, with her dear friend Cara Bray at her side. Marian became the center of a literary circle, one of whose members was George Henry Lewes, the charming, intelligent writer and philosopher, who would be her companion until his death in 1878. Lewes was married, but his wife had left him, and a divorce was impossible. Although Cara Bray and Marian's other friends severely disliked Lewes, Marian became fond of him and even began to love him, but she could not tell her friends of her growing affection for him. She loved his knowledge of literature, his fluency of languages, his confidence, and his intelligence; they both shared a love for literature, especially German literature, religion, and philosophy. In 1854, they prepared to live together openly in Germany, settling in Weimar and then Berlin. News of their relationship shocked many of their friends and their family back home in England and they shunned Marian and Lewes. However, both Marian and Lewes made it clear that their relationship was no ordinary affair and that they intended to be with each other. In 1855, they returned to England, where Marian was anxious how society would receive them. Marian had stopped editing for the Westminster Review because the job was unpaid, but continued to write articles.

As Marian and Lewes continued to live together as man and wife, people generally began to accept them as a married couple. At this point in her life Evans was still primarily interested in philosophy, but Lewes persuaded her to turn her hand to fiction instead. But it was not until she was nearly 40 that she appears to have discovered the true nature of her genius; for it was not until 1857 that The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton appeared in John Blackwood’s Magazine under the pseudonym George Eliot and announced that a new writer of singular power had arisen. Evans wanted critics to judge her on merit alone and not by her relationship with Lewes, taking the name George Eliot, as George was Lewes's first name. Later that year, Evans – still under the pseudonym George Eliot –  worked on her first collection of tales Scenes of Clerical Life, published in1858, which included Amos Barton, Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story and Janet’s Repentance.

Not even her close friends, John Chapman, the Brays, and Bessie Parkes, knew what Marian was doing for a living. The publication of her first collection of stories under the male pseudonym of George Eliot, brought immediate acclaim from critics as prestigious as Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, as well as much speculation about the identity of the mysterious George Eliot.

In 1858, Lewes and Marian set off for Munich and Dresden, where Marian focused her energy on her fiction. Her first novel, Adam Bede (1859), a tragic love story in which the model for the title character was Eliot's father, was based on Marian's memories of her childhood and youth in Nuneaton and became an immediate success. After the publication of Adam Bede, a number of impostors claimed authorship. In response, Evans asserted herself as the true author, causing quite a stir in a society that still regarded women as incapable of serious writing.

The Mill on the Floss (1860), a story of destructive family relations between Maggie and Tom Tulliver, was by far Eliot's most autobiographical, focusing on her relationship with her beloved brother, Isaac. Published in 1861, Silas Marner soon followed the success of The Mill on the Floss. The tale of a lonely, miserly village weaver transformed by the love of his adopted daughter, is also based on Marian's childhood in Warwickshire as a young girl.

In 1860-61 Eliot spent some time in Italy collecting material for her historical romance Romola. It was published serially first in the Cornhill Magazine in 1862-1863.  In 1876, she published Daniel Deronda, a tale of the times of Savonarola, which appeared in 1863 in the Cornhill Magazine. Felix Holt the Radical  followed in 1866. Evans now for a time abandoned novel-writing and took to poetry, and between 1868 and 1871 produced The Spanish Gipsy, Agatha, The Legend of Jubal, and Armgart. These poems, though containing much fine work, did not add to her reputation, and in fact in writing them she had departed from her true vocation.

Her greatest masterpiece, Middlemarch, published in 1871-1872, was probably inspired by her life at Coventry. Subtitled A Study in Provincial Life, this lengthy work tells the story of a small English village and its inhabitants, centering on the idealistic and self-sacrificing Dorothea Brooke and follows her sexual and intellectual frustrations.

Daniel Deronda, which came out in 1874–76, was greatly inferior, and it was her last novel. In 1878 she published The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, a collection of miscellaneous essays. Evans also translated and published David Friedrich Strauss's The Life of Jesus in 1846. In 1854 she also translated Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, the only one of her writings to which she attached her real name.

Lewes's death in 1878 left Marian more devastated than she had ever been in her life, losing a friend, a companion, and a lover. Eliot married a twenty years younger friend, John Cross, an American banker, on May 6, 1880. After the honeymoon they returned to London, where she died of a kidney ailment on the same year on December 22. In her will she expressed her wish to be buried in Westminster Abbey, but Dean Stanley of Westminster Abbey rejected the idea and Eliot was buried in Highgate Cemetery (East) in London in the area reserved for religious dissenters, next to George Henry Lewes.

Eliot’s novels are deeply philosophical. In exploring the inner workings of her characters and their relationship to their environment, she drew on influences that included the English poet William Wordsworth, the Italian poet Dante, the English art critic John Ruskin, and the Portuguese-Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose work Eliot translated into English. The philosophical concerns and references found in her novels – land the refusal to provide the requisite happy ending – struck some contemporary critics as unbecoming in a lady novelist.

Eliot´s great power lies in the minute painting of character, chiefly among the lower middle classes, shopkeepers, tradesmen, and country folk of the Midlands, into whose thoughts and feelings she had an insight almost like divination, and of whose modes of expression she was complete mistress. Her general view of life is pessimistic, relieved by a power of seizing the humorous elements in human stupidity and ill-doing. There is also, however, much seriousness in her treatment of the phases of life upon which she touches, and few writers have brought out with greater power the hardening and degrading effects of continuance in evil courses, or the inevitable and irretrievable consequences of a wrong act. Her descriptions of rural scenes have a singular charm.

Eliot’s detailed and insightful psychological portrayals of her characters, as well as her exploration of the complex ways these characters confront moral dilemmas, decisively broke from the plot-driven domestic melodrama that had previously served as the standard for the Victorian novel. Eliot’s break from tradition inspired the modern novel and inspired numerous future authors, among them Henry James, who admired Eliot.

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