George eliot poems
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George Eliot (1819-1880)
George Eliot ©George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, one of the leading English novelists of the 19th century. Her novels, most famously 'Middlemarch', are celebrated for their realism and psychological insights.
George Eliot was born on 22 November 1819 in rural Warwickshire. When her mother died in 1836, Eliot left school to help run her father's household. In 1841, she moved with her father to Coventry and lived with him until his death in 1849. Eliot then travelled in Europe, eventually settling in London.
In 1850, Eliot began contributing to the 'Westminster Review', a leading journal for philosophical radicals, and later became its editor. She was now at the centre of a literary circle through which she met George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived until his death in 1878. Lewes was married and their relationship caused a scandal. Eliot was shunned by friends and family.
Lewes encouraged Eliot to write. In 1856, she began 'Scenes of Clerical Life', stories about the people of her native Warwickshire, which were published in 'Blac
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George Eliot
Born
in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, The United KingdomNovember 22, 1819
Died
December 22, 1880
Genre
Literature & Fiction, Poetry, Journalism
Influences
Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, George Sand, Charles DickJane Austen, Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, George Sand, Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Auguste Comte, Miguel de Cervantes, Arthur Schopenhauer, David Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, Herbert Spencer, Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl...more
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Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and
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George Eliot was never elected a Fellow of the RSL.
When I first became aware of this, I couldn’t quite believe it. Silly men, I thought. They weren’t able to read past their beards or past the scandal of her transgressive living arrangements with the married writer-philosopher George Henry Lewes.
Yet how could they have shunned the miraculous Marian? She had, in all but name, edited the prestigious and progressive Westminster Review in the first half of the 1850s. Her sparkling essays and reviews for it bristle with erudition. She translated Spinoza’s Ethics and the biblical sceptic David Strauss’s bestselling Life of Jesus. All this, before embarking on her poetry and novel-writing life on the cusp of her fortieth birthday. Under her new pen name, George Eliot, she proceeded to give the world the best fiction in English: novels that plumbed the recesses of character as well as the individual’s relationship with society.
Eliot is above all the novelist who illuminates the complexities of the individual mind, the seemingly free choices that fail to fulfil hopes and desires.
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