George Eliot(1819–1880)

Mary Anne Evans was born on 22 November 1819 at the small farmhouse at South Farm on the Arbury Hall estate in north Warwickshire, the youngest daughter of Robert Evans, a Welsh-descended land agent to the Newdigate family of Arbury, and his second wife Christiana Pearson. The Welsh-origin Evans family of the previous generation had come up from the Denbighshire borderland in the mid-eighteenth century; Robert had built a respected working career as Newdigate estate manager. The household was Anglican-evangelical, comfortable, and held to the strict Sunday observance of the late-Georgian rural professional class. Mary Anne was schooled first at the Miss Lathom's day school at Attleborough and then as a boarder at Mrs Wallington's school in Nuneaton from nine; from thirteen to sixteen she boarded at the Miss Franklins' school in Coventry, where the lessons in classical and modern languages, philosophy and English literature took her academically beyond what the conventional working position of a girl from her station would expect.

Her mother died in 1836 when she was sixteen, and she was brought home to keep the household for her father. The next eight years at the Foleshill house outside Coventry were the years of the foundational reading: the Greek and Latin classics at her own desk, German philosophy and biblical criticism in the original (Strauss's *Das Leben Jesu*, Feuerbach's *Wesen des Christentums*, the writings of the higher critics), and the long working friendship with the Bray-Hennell circle of Coventry liberal-Unitarian intellectuals who kept her in books and conversation. She translated Strauss's *Life of Jesus* into English (published anonymously, 1846) at twenty-six and Feuerbach's *Essence of Christianity* (published, again anonymously but under her own initials, 1854) at thirty-four. The two translations introduced the German biblical and theological criticism of the 1830s and 1840s to the English-language reading public and were the foundation of her literary reputation in the high-cultural London intellectual networks she was about to enter.

Her father died in May 1849; she was thirty. The small inheritance of a hundred pounds a year and the household effects gave her the independence to leave the Midlands. She moved to London in 1851 to take up the assistant editorship (in practice the editorship, though the masthead position remained the proprietor's) of the *Westminster Review*, the English-language quarterly of post-1832 radical and intellectual opinion. The *Westminster Review* office was at 142 Strand and was, through the 1851-1853 period of her editorship, the hub of the high-cultural London philosophical literature. She met the journalist George Henry Lewes there in 1851. Lewes was thirty-four, was the biographer of Goethe of his generation, and was married to Agnes Jervis. The marriage was, by the agreement of the two parties, effectively over (Agnes had been living since 1849 with the journalist Thornton Leigh Hunt and had borne three children to him), but English divorce law of the period required parliamentary procedure that was beyond the means of either Lewes or his wife. Lewes was, in effect, permanently married without being able to live with his wife and permanently unable to marry anyone else.

She made the decision to live with him as his wife in everything but the legal register, took the name *Mrs Lewes* in her private correspondence, and travelled with him to Weimar and Berlin in July 1854 to be received in the cultural society they could not be received in at home. The English literary establishment of the next two decades was largely closed to her by the irregular domestic arrangement; she lost the friendship of her brother Isaac (who refused to see her again on the news of the relationship), found herself unable to be received at many of the houses she would have been welcome in single, and was made the subject of a low-key but sustained social scandal that ran across the next quarter-century of her life. She and Lewes ran the household at Holly Lodge, Wandsworth and from 1863 at the Priory at North Bank, Regent's Park as the domestic basis of the rest of her writing life. The pen name *George Eliot*, taken in 1857 for the first published fiction (the three Blackwood's tales that became *Scenes of Clerical Life*), kept the irregular domestic situation off the title pages of the books and let the books be read on their own.

The novels followed across the next twenty-two years. *Adam Bede* (1859), *The Mill on the Floss* (1860), *Silas Marner* (1861), *Romola* (1863), *Felix Holt the Radical* (1866), *Middlemarch* (1871-72) and *Daniel Deronda* (1876) ran as the foundational moral-realist novel-sequence of mid-Victorian English literature, each one a study of provincial English (or, in *Romola*, Renaissance Florentine; in *Daniel Deronda*, English Jewish) moral life conducted at the highest working register of Victorian intellectual seriousness. *Middlemarch* in particular, the eight-hundred-page provincial-Warwickshire novel published in eight monthly parts across the year 1872, became, by post-Victorian critical consensus, the foundational English realist novel of the nineteenth century. Lewes died of bowel cancer at the Priory on 30 November 1878. She married the much younger John Walter Cross at St George's, Hanover Square on 6 May 1880, seven months after Lewes's death and seven months before her own. She died of throat infection at her Cheyne Walk Chelsea house on 22 December 1880, sixty-one years old, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery near Lewes. The Evans name in the Welsh-side catalogue is the patronymic of *ap Iefan*, son-of-John in Welsh; she carried the Mary Anne Evans variant of it into the canon of English realist fiction under the borrowed George Eliot pen name.