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5. George Eliot (1819-1880)
Life
George Eliot was a Mid-Victorian novelist and was the pseudonym of Mary Ann
Evans. She was born in Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, a rural area in the
Midlands and spent her first twenty years in the very remote surroundings of
half manor and half farmhouse. Her father was a carpenter and then rose to
be a land agent. She studied at a private school. When her mother died in
1836, she was only 17 years old and she had to take charge of the family
household. But her active mind and strong emotional nature drove her on to
study. She read a lot of books and leaned music, and German, French and
Italian language. Then she moved to Coventry, where she lived until her
father’s death in 1849. There she met Charles Bray and later Charles Hennell,
who introduced her to many new religious and political ideas. During this
time, she read a book entitled An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of
Christianity (1838). This book and other rationalistic works influenced
deeply Eliot's thoughts. She was very interested in social and philosophical
problems and translated into Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity
into English. Although she was influenced by religious belief when she was
young, she abandoned the religious belief later. After her father's death,
Eliot traveled around Europe. In 1851, She settled in London as an assistant
editor of a progressive magazine Westminster Review.
Westminster Review enjoyed success for Eliot’s hard
working. She became the center of a literary circle. Then she became
acquainted with George Henry Lewes, a well-known philosopher and critic, who
would be her companion until his death in 1878. Lewes's wife was mentally
unbalanced. In 1854 Eliot went to Germany with Lewes. Their unconventional
union caused some difficulties because their union was without legal form.
However, their union was a pappy one. It was under the direction of Lewes
that Eliot discovered her talent for writing novels when she was nearly 40.
Eliot's first collection of tales, Scenes of Clerical Life including
3 stories for the magazine, published in 1858 under the pseudonym George
Eliot - in those days writing was considered to be a male profession. Then
followed by her first novel, Adam Bede(1859),a tragic love story. Her
other remarkable novels include The Mill On The Floss (1860), a story
of destructive relations between a brother and a sister, and Silas Marner
(1861). These three novels describe rural life, deal with moral problems and
contain psychological studies of character.
In 1860-61 Eliot began thinking about historical romance
Romola, a historical novel of the Renaissance in Italy and was published
in book form in 1863. Henry James considered it the finest thing she wrote,
"but its defects are almost on the scale of its beauties." When she wrote
this book, she had to study more than 500 books and documents about old
Italian history. In 1866 appeared her “Felix holt the Radical”, a novel on
political questions. In this novel, the writer criticized furiously the
bourgeois liberalism, but misrepresented the working class movement.
Middle-march(1871-1872), one of her greatest works, and Daniel
Deronda(1876) were her last novels.
After Lewes's death Eliot married twenty years younger
friend, John Walter Cross, an American banker, on May 6, 1880. But the dream
did not last very long. During their return from a tour, Cross had fallen
ill. After 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.
George Eliot was one of the foremost of Victorian
novelists. In the 19th century, women writers began to step into the
literature world. Eliot, as a woman writer, is the name recorded in English
annals. Through reading her novels, readers can feel her comprehensive
wisdom and her penetrating and luminous wit. Her wisdom and wit comes from
her power of observation of all the pathetic and all the humorous aspects of
human characters and from her religious conviction and her way to improve
the human soul.
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