On August 2, 1869, George Eliot begins work on her
masterpiece Middlemarch. She was born Mary Ann Evans on November 22, 1819
in Warwickshire, England. After her mother’s death in 1841 the family moved to Coventry.
In Coventry, Eliot grew close with her neighbors, the radical intellectual Bray
family. With their encouragement, she began writing. After her father's death
in 1849, she moved to London to become a freelance writer. There, she boarded
with the family of John Chapman, who had published some of her work. Chapman
purchased the Westminster Review in 1842, which Eliot edited for three
years. About this time, Eliot became involved with married journalist and
writer George Henry Lewes. Divorce was extremely difficult in Victorian
England, so Lewes and Eliot lived together but never married. Her polite
Victorian acquaintances refused to call on her. Fearful that her unconventional
relationship would provoke unfair criticism of her work, she began publishing
fiction under the pseudonym George Eliot. Her earliest fiction Scenes of
Clerical Life was published in 1858. Her first full-length novel, Adam
Bede, was published in 1859. It was well received, as was most of her six
other novels, including The Mill on the Floss (1869) and Silas Marner
(1861). Middlemarch, published in eight parts from 1871 to 1872, and is
considered Eliot's finest work. The novel presented a sweeping survey of all
social classes in a rural town, drawing psychological insights that set the
stage for the modern novel. After Lewes' death in 1878, Eliot married John
Cross, her investment manager who was some 20 years her junior. She died seven
months later.
Michael Thomas Barry
is the author of Literary Legends of the British Isles. The book can be
purchased from Amazon through the following links:
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