GEORGE ELIOT was born Mary Ann Evans in Warwickshire, England, on November 22, 1819. The daughter of an estate manager, Evans spent her childhood living on the Newdigate estate in Griff House with her parents; sister, Chrissie; and brother, Isaac. Upon the death of her mother and Chrissie's marriage, she assumed charge of Griff House. After Isaac's marriage and her father's retirement, Evans went with her father to live in Coventry. Marian (as she now wrote her name) became a close friend of Charles Bray, a wealthy manufacturer who had abandoned conventional Christianity to live by his own system of ethics. Influenced by Bray, she translated David Friedrich Strauss's
Life of Jesus from the German.
After her father's death, Evans went to London, where she had been offered a job as assistant editor of the
Westminster Review by John Chapman, the publisher of her translation of Strauss's
Life of Jesus. Here she socialized with many of the leading writers and thinkers of the day, including journalist George Henry Lewes.
Lewes's wife had deserted him and their three young sons. Because he could not obtain a divorce under English law, Lewes and Evans entered into a common-law union that would last until his death. It was Lewes who recognized Evans's literary genius and encouraged her to write fiction. Writing under the pen name George Eliot, her first story, "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton," was accepted for publication in the January 1857 issue of
Blackwood's Magazine.
Blackwood's accepted two more stories, "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story" and "Janet's Repentance," and reprinted them in the book
Scenes of Clerical Life (1858).
Each new book by George Eliot was acclaimed by the critics and widely read by the public. Writing about rural life, she was primarily concerned with people's moral choices and their responsibility for their own lives. She published
Adam Bede (1859),
The Mill on the Floss (1860),
Silas Marner (1861),
Romola (1862-63),
Felix Holt the Radical (1866), the dramatic poem
The Spanish Gypsy (1868), the sonnet sequence
Brother and Sister (1869),
Middlemarch (1871-72),
Daniel Deronda (1876), and
Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879).
After Lewe's death in 1878, George Eliot stopped writing. In 1880 she married a long-time friend, John Cross. Eliot died on December 22, 1880. Cross arranged her letters and journals into a
Life, which was published in 1885.
