George Eliot
- George Eliot: British LibraryGeorge Eliot was the pen name of the novelist Mary Ann Evans. She grew up in Warwickshire at a time when industrialisation was transforming the countryside. Her mother died when she was 17, and in 1841 she and her father moved to Coventry which she would use as inspiration for the fictional town of Middlemarch. There she joined a circle of free-thinking intellectuals, and lost her Christian faith. After her father died in 1849, she travelled abroad before settling in London working as an editor at the left-wing Westminster Review. This led to her meeting the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes, married but separated from his wife. Eliot lived with Lewes openly and started referring to herself as Marian Lewes, in defiance of Victorian notions of propriety.
- George Eliot: Historic UKMary Ann Evans, writing under the pseudonym of George Eliot, was a highly acclaimed Victorian novelist. Fans of her work included Queen Victoria herself and even today her novels entertain and delight readers. But it wasn’t just her written works that brought her notoriety; she also courted controversy in her personal life....
- George Eliot: Poetry FoundationGeorge Eliot is widely recognized as one of the most important writers of the nineteenth century; yet her two volumes of poetry are often ignored in modern critical assessments. Like so many of her contemporaries, Eliot tried to make significant literary contributions in more than one genre; her poems—both narrative and lyric—deal, however, with some of the same themes which inform her novels and short stories. Her poems are less accomplished than her prose fiction—only one poem, “O May I Join the Choir Invisible,” has achieved any lasting fame—but they do stand as an informative window on to her life as a writer...
Research & Reference
- Eliot, George (pseud. of Mary Ann, later Marian, Evans): Credo ReferenceEliot is now indubitably the most highly regarded 19th-c. woman writer. Her work was highly acclaimed in her own lifetime, but went out of fashion toward the end of the Victorian period and only commenced on the road to critical recovery with the publication in 1948 of F. R. LEAVIS’s highly influential The Great Tradition, which placed Eliot in a tradition of novelists whose concerns are to eschew “complacent confusions of judgement” but whose texts are “distinguished by a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness for life, and a marked moral intensity.” Gordon S. Haight’s publication of nine volumes of Eliot’s letters (1954–78) formed the indispensable base of modern critical scholarship...
- George Eliot: BritannicaGeorge Eliot, pseudonym of Mary Ann, or Marian, Cross, née Evans, (born November 22, 1819, Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, England—died December 22, 1880, London), English Victorian novelist who developed the method of psychological analysis characteristic of modern fiction. Her major works include Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876)...
- George Eliot: New World EncyclopediaGeorge Eliot is the pen name of Mary Anne Evans[1] (November 22, 1819 – December 22, 1880) an English novelist who was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Her novels, set largely in provincial England, are well known for their realism and psychological perspicacity. Victorian literature, particularly the novel, largely reflected the Victorian virtues of hard work, moral acuity and sober living...
- George Eliot collection: Herbert Art Gallery & MuseumGeorge Eliot was the pen name chosen by Mary Ann Evans, a Victorian writer. She chose a male pen name so that her works were taken seriously, in response to an 1856 essay she wrote for the Westminster Review, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’. Middlemarch is her most famous book and the fictional Midlands town which gives the novel its name is thought to be based on Coventry...
Streaming Media
- George Eliot (A Concise Biography)This overview of the life and literature of George Eliot from the Famous Authors series follows Eliot’s comfortable childhood through the several phases of her education and religious development, during which she discovered major influences like Sir Walter Scott, Shakespeare, and evangelism. Later in life, she moved away from her evangelist views, eventually leaving the Church of England altogether, and took a liking to the Romantic poets. The video traces Eliot’s entrance into journalism, via editing The Westminster Review, through her successful career as a novelist.
- George Eliot: Life and LiteratureAuthor George Eliot achieved mass popularity and was acclaimed by her literary contemporaries. In contrast, Marian Evans flouted Victorian conventions by living with a man she was unable to marry and by ceasing to attend church. She was refused entry into Victorian society. This documentary tells the story of Evans, from her pious Midland childhood and through her development into an independent-minded academic before emerging as the novelist George Eliot. She transformed the novel from a form of entertainment to a social critique incorporating serious moral judgments and faithful representations of commonplace things.
Perspectives
George Eliot
Mr Jones treats the main novels in chronological sequence examining with the aid of extensive quotation George Eliot's means of description and characterisation and the moral purpose of her fiction. He emphasises her appeal to the inner life of her readers, as exemplified in her frequent use of such phrases as 'Have we not all...' George Eliot assumes that no human act or emotion is entirely unconnected with what we have all done or felt at some time. Her sympathy with human weakness often carries her to the point where she has difficulty in reconciling her tolerance with her moral purpose. This book gives a useful introduction to George Eliot's novels. As in the other books in the series British Authors: Introductory Critical Studies, the author assesses his subject simply and clearly, using as a basis the internal evidence of the novels themselves rather than biographical detail.
Silas Marner
Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered weaver Silas Marner lives alone in Raveloe, living only for work and his precious hoard of money. But when his money is stolen and an orphaned child finds her way into his house, Silas is given the chance to transform his life. His fate, and that of the little girl he adopts, is entwined with Godfrey Cass, son of the village Squire, who, like Silas, is trapped by his past. Silas Marner, George Eliot's favourite of her novels, combines humour, rich symbolism and pointed social criticism to create an unsentimental but affectionate portrait of rural life.
Adam Bede
Novel written by George Eliot, published in three volumes in 1859. The title character, a carpenter, is in love with a woman who bears a child by another man. Although Bede tries to help her, he eventually loses her but finds happiness with Dinah Morris, a Methodist preacher. Adam Bede was Eliot's first long novel. Its masterly realism--evident, for example, in the recording of Derbyshire dialect--brought to English fiction the same truthful observation of minute detail that John Ruskin was commending in the Pre-Raphaelites. But what was new in this work of English fiction was the combination of deep human sympathy and rigorous moral judgment. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
The Mill on the Floss
Drawing on George Eliot's own childhood experiences to craft an unforgettable story of first love, sibling rivalry and regret, The Mill on the Floss is edited with an introduction and notes by A.S. Byatt, author of Possession, in Penguin Classics. Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, the clash between their expectations and her desires is painfully played out as she finds herself torn between her relationships with three very different men: her proud and stubborn brother; hunchbacked Tom Wakem, the son of her family's worst enemy; and the charismatic but dangerous Stephen Guest. With its poignant portrayal of sibling relationships, The Mill on the Floss is considered George Eliot's most autobiographical novel; it is also one of her most powerful and moving. In this edition, writer and critic A.S. Byatt, author of Possession, provides full explanatory notes and an introduction relating The Mill on the Floss to George Eliot's own life and times. Mary Ann Evans (1819-80) began her literary career as a translator, and later editor, of the Westminster Review. In 1857, she published Scenes of Clerical Life, the first of eight novels she would publish under the name of 'George Eliot', including The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. If you enjoyed The Mill on the Floss, you might like Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, also available in Penguin Classics.