Mary Ann (sometimes Marian) Evans was born in Nuneaton in 1819. She was the third and youngest child (apart from twin boys who died shortly after birth) from her father’s second marriage; she had an elder brother and sister, and a half brother and half sister from her father’s first marriage. Her father was already 46 at the time of her birth; he had started as a skilled carpenter and was now the manager of the Newdigate family estate; a career later paralleled by that of Adamn Bede, the eponymous hero of Eliot’s first full novel. He could therefore afford to send the manifestly intelligent Mary Ann to a succession of boarding schools till she was 16 when her mother died and she returned home to act as housekeeper to her father.
An important feature of her early life was a deep devotion to religion but when she was 21, she and her father moved home to the outskirts of Coventry where she made friends with the Brays, radical freethinkers whose friends included included mill owner and social reformer Robert Owen, biologist Herbert Spencer (who later coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ to describe Darwinism), social theorist Harriet Martineau, and American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was also exposed to agnosticism and lost her faith (to the angry disapproval of her family) after she translated a life of Jesus by German David Strauss which argued that the New Testament stories were fundamentally myths.
She was thirty after her father died and, having a small inheritance, she moved to London in 1851 where she stayed at the Strand house of publisher John Chapman who had published her translation of the Strauss book. She worked for him on his Westminster Review, contributing reviews and articles anonymously, and soon becoming its (unpaid) assistant editor (and de facto editor).
She was at the centre of a literary set which was ‘unconventional’ in its attitudes to marriage. Already there had been a row when Marian had ‘got too close’ to a gentleman, now Mrs Chapman seems to have objected when John ‘got too close’ to Marian (he already had a mistress). Now, following a misunderstanding with Herbert Spencer (he was a life-long bachelor and metaphorically ran a mile when he realised Marian had romantic feelings for him), she became the mistress of George Henry Lewes whose wife was the mistress of Thornton Leigh Hunt (she had three children by George and four by Thornton; George couldn’t divorce his wife because he had accepted the children as his, therefore condoning the adultery which was the only grounds for divorce).
Marian now turned to writing novels, setting out her manifesto in one of her last essays for the Westminster Review: ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’. In this she praised the realism of continental novels. In 1857 she wrote a collection of three stories called ‘Scenes of Clerical Life’. She used the pseudonym George Eliot because she feared the ‘scandal’ of her unconventional relationship with George Lewes becoming a target for critics. (The men suffered no social censure but to the end of her life Marian was shunned by some society hostesses, though many took the view that her fame eventually trumped her reputation as a wicked woman.)
Her first full-length novel, Adam Bede, was a best-seller and critical success. By now, speculation as to the identity of George Eliot was rife Even her publisher John Blackwood didn’t know (though he must have suspected because he dealt with George Lewes). Suspicion focused on a man who had been linked with the characters suspected of being the originals in Scenes of Clerical Life and this caused Marian to acknowledge that she was George Eliot.
Her literary career lasted another fifteen years and included classics such as The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, as well as Silas Marner, Felix Holt, and Romola.
Shortly after she completed her last novel, Daniel Deronda, George Lewes died. GE very quickly married a much younger man, causing even more scandal, especially after, on their honeymoon, he leapt from their bedroom into the Grand Canal in Venice in what appears to have been a suicide attempt. He survived but Mary Ann died of kidney disease less than a year afterwards.
Biographies of George Eliot reviewed on this blog are:
- George Eliot by Jenny Uglow
- George Eliot: A Life by Rosemary Ashton
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