in Warwickshire; her mother, the daughter of a local farmer. The Evans’ family position was such that it brought the young George Eliot in contact with people from many walks of life, including the squire, local farmers, coal miners, clergy, tradespeople etc., allowing her to store up the memories she would later utilize in writing her novels. Until the age of sixteen, Eliot went to boarding school, a somewhat unusual practice for a girl at that time. It’s possible that Eliot’s parents realized the extent of her genius, as she was a bookish girl thirsting for knowledge which wasn’t always within her reach. However, biographers have attributed her extended education to her lack of good looks and, by extension, her poor matrimonial prospects. Her father apparently reasoned that if his daughter couldn’t have the life conventionally assigned to a woman, she might as well develop her mind enough to be able to do something else.
While at school, Eliot began to think seriously about religion, pouring her heart and soul into the practice of a faith that promised rewards in the hereafter in exchange for the renunciation of material things in the present. However, when she was sixteen, her mother died and her sister Chrissey got married, forcing Eliot to return home and manage the house for her father and brother. At first, Eliot’s reading and her correspondence with her evangelical teacher Maria Lewis only contributed to her increasing religious fervor. However, her views changed as she was exposed to works that were more skeptical towards Christianity, and was left to care for her ailing father while her brother got married. Her growing friendship with Charles and Cara Bray, a progressive couple who hosted various intellectuals and reformers at their home in Coventry, gave Eliot the space that she required to air out the views that had hitherto been festering within her. Thus it came about that, at the age of 22, she refused to go to church with her father, creating a rift between them which threatened, for a time, to be serious. Eventually, Eliot was forced to succumb to family pressure and go through the motions of practicing, if not devoutly, Christianity for the remaining eight years that she lived with her father. Inwardly, however, Eliot did not renounce her new beliefs and she continued her association with the Brays.
Eliot’s father died in 1849, when she was 30. After a short time in Geneva, recuperating from the intense nursing she had undertaken the previous year, Eliot moved to London. She had already published a translation of Strauss’ The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined and her publisher, John Chapman, ran a lodging house which served as a hub for a number of broad-minded intellectuals. When Chapman bought The Westminster Review, it was Eliot who ran the enterprise even though it was Chapman’s name on the masthead. Thus, even before she started writing novels, Eliot had already begun to make a name for herself in literary circles.
During this period, Eliot also had a few romantic entanglements, one with Chapman himself. The exact extent of their relationship is not known but it was apparently strenuously objected to by Chapman’s wife and mistress, forcing the pair to redefine their interaction as purely professional. Another fondness developed, this time to the biologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer. Spencer didn’t return Eliot’s affections but the two managed to remain friends. Finally, Eliot met Spencer’s good friend, George Henry Lewes, a philosopher and critic who had published several books and articles, and was himself the editor of a journal called the Leader. Lewes had a checkered past, as he was illegitimate by birth and already married with three children, which prevented him from asking for Eliot’s hand. Lewes could, at one point, have divorced his wife, for she was having an affair with his friend Thornton Hunt, but being a free-thinking man, he had recognized Hunt’s children as his own, thereby relinquishing his right to a divorce. At first, Eliot kept her relationship with Lewes secret, but eventually the truth was revealed and Eliot was cut off from her family.
Eliot lived with Lewes for the next twenty years and often signed her name “Marian Evans Lewes” even though they were not technically married. Lewes was the ideal partner, encouraging Eliot to continue writing even when she felt depressed or unsure of herself. It was with his support that she finally made her foray into fiction-writing, beginning anonymously with the novella The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton which, combined with two more novellas, were eventually published under the pseudonym George Eliot as Scenes of Clerical Life. As the title suggests, each story involved a different Anglican clergyman but attempted to portray their “human” aspect rather than their “theological” leanings. It might have been the strength of the female characters in these works that prompted Dickens to see through the façade in a letter he wrote to the author, saying, “I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman”.
A few years later, Eliot wrote Adam Bede, which was an immediate best-seller as it explored the somewhat sensation topic of infanticide. The story of Adam Bede is a moving one, in which one can’t help but sympathize with the woman who murders her own child in order to retain her respectability. In his critique on the novel, Henry James wrote, “she [George Eliot] is neither Dickens nor Thackeray. She has over them the great advantage that she is also a good deal of a philosopher; and it is to this union of the keenest observation with the ripest reflection that her style owes its essential force”. Adam Bede was drawn largely from life, and many of the characters depicted in it were real people who, as it turned out, recognized themselves in the novel. This led to controversy about the true identity of George Eliot. When Joseph Liggins, a poor, disreputable clergyman, was rumored to be the real author behind the pseudonym, Eliot was forced to reveal her true identity.
Given Eliot’s sensitivity to remarks by the press, Lewes began to act as the buffer between her and the outside world. He would only show her favorable reviews, and gave her the time and space she needed to produce more writing. The next decade was a very productive one for Eliot, despite her emotional ups and downs. She wrote The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, both of which fall within the parameters of the realist tradition i.e. the depiction of things as they were, eschewing the tendency to romanticize occurrences. The Mill on the Floss is considered to be her most autobiographical novel, as the heroine shares Eliot’s intellectual aspirations but is trapped in a provincial life that is isolating and restrictive. The novel ends with a double tragedy as the river Floss overflows, drowning the protagonist and her brother. Silas Marner, on the other hand, has a thematic resemblance to Les Misérables which was published only a year later. The protagonist, falsely accused of stealing, is forced to relocate to a different village where he is saved from a life of bitterness by his adoption of a young girl. Unlike Les Misérables, however, Silas Marner puts everything right at the end and concludes the story on an optimistic note.
After making a name for herself as an author of realist novels, Eliot decided to experiment, writing Romola—a historical novel set in fifteenth century Florence. Eliot researched the time period and locale intensely in an effort to make the novel accurate, but her own preoccupations, especially those having to do with religion, shine through, making this very much a fifteenth century novel written by a nineteenth century novelist. The book did not do quite as well as Eliot’s previous writing, possibly because of her tendency to, as Anthony Trollope put it, “fire too much over the heads of her readers”. Romola was followed by The Spanish Gypsy, a long blank verse poem which exhausted Eliot so much that Lewes insisted she take a break from it for a couple of years, during which time she wrote the realistic but highly politically-oriented Felix Holt.
Eliot endured a difficult period in her life after the deaths of her two stepsons in the South African colonies. But these tragedies only added to her literary luster, as she soon produced Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch, which is generally acknowledged as her masterpiece. The vast scope of Middlemarch is what separates it from its predecessors; it has a large cast of characters which is tenuously but gracefully held together. A wide range of issues are invoked and commented upon with an underlying delicacy. Often, Eliot simply poses a question, allowing the reader to draw his/her own conclusions. For example, she writes that Celia, the protagonist’s younger sister, “had always worn a yoke” and then goes on to ask, “but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?” (Middlemarch). It is George Eliot’s ability to enter into the minds of all her characters without subordinating the lesser ones like Celia that makes Middlemarch such a great work of art. Virginia Woolf wrote that Middlemarch was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” but Florence Nightingale challenged the novel’s premise, saying “This author now can find no better outlet for [Dorothea