George Eliot(1819–1880)

Mary Anne Evans was born on 22 November 1819 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, and Christiana Pearson. She was schooled at Nuneaton and Coventry, where the lessons in classical and modern languages, philosophy and English literature took her well beyond what her station was expected to reach.

Brought home at sixteen to keep house for her father, she made those years the foundation of her reading: the classics at her own desk, German philosophy and biblical criticism in the original, and a working friendship with the liberal-intellectual circle of Coventry. She translated Strauss's Life of Jesus into English at twenty-six and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity at thirty-four, introducing the German biblical and theological criticism of the period to the English reading public and making her reputation in the high-cultural London networks she was about to enter.

Her father's death in 1849 gave her the independence to leave the Midlands. She moved to London in 1851 to take up, in practice, the editorship of the Westminster Review, the English-language quarterly of radical and intellectual opinion, and made its office the hub of high-cultural London philosophical literature. There she met the writer George Henry Lewes, the biographer of Goethe of his generation, who became her partner for the rest of his life, the domestic basis of her writing years.

She took the pen name George Eliot in 1857 for her first fiction, the tales that became Scenes of Clerical Life, so the books could be read on their own. The novels followed across twenty-two years: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), Felix Holt (1866), Middlemarch (1871 to 1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876), each a study of moral life conducted at the highest register of Victorian intellectual seriousness. Middlemarch in particular became, by later critical consensus, the foundational English realist novel of the nineteenth century.

Lewes died in 1878. She married John Walter Cross in 1880 and died at her Chelsea house on 22 December 1880, sixty-one years old, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery. The Evans name, the Welsh patronymic son-of-John, she carried in its Mary Anne Evans form into the canon of English realist fiction under the George Eliot pen name.