George Eliot, novelist and short-story writer, was the pen name of Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans. She is best known for her novels Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Middlemarch. Her reputation as one of the greatest English novelists continues to this day.
Early Years of George Eliot: Training and Exposure
Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), who wrote under the pseudonym George Eliot, was born on November 22, 1819, in Arbury Farm in Warwickshire in the Midlands. That was the time of great changes when the country was changing very rapidly in infrastructures and technology, new industrial age of steam engines, locomotives, railroads and factories. The effect on people was tremendous. Eliot was educated at good schools. After her father died, she travelled around Europe before settling in London. There, she worked as assistant editor of a magazine.
Eliot and George H. Lewes
At the age of 35, she went to Germany with the writer George Henry Lewes. He was married and could not get a divorce, but she still lived in London with him until his death twenty four years later. During those days, this was a shocking situation.
Eliot the Short-Story Writer
George Eliot was nearly 40 when her first short stories were published in a book called Scenes of Clerical Life. She used the pen name George Eliot, a man's name, because writing in those days was considered to be a male profession.
Eliot the Novelist
Eliot was forty years old when she published her first full-length novel, Adam Bede. The book is a tragic love story in which the model for the title character is Eliot's father, Robert Evans, a land agent with a strong character, and whose traits she transferred to some of her characters like Adam Bede and Caleb Garth in Middlemarch.
Adam Bede was an instant success, making her a leading writer. Two years later Silas Marner was published. It is the well-known story of a weaver of Raveloe, a miser saved from his lonely and selfish life by the love of a young girl, Eppie. Middlemarch, generally considered to be her greatest novel, came out few years later. It is a study of provincial life, noted for its realism. Eliot's novels are about lives of ordinary people and their day-to-day problems of survival.
Works by George Eliot
- Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858
- Adam Bede, 1859
- The Mill on the Floss, 1860
- Silas Marner, 1861
- Romola, 1863
- Felix Holt, the Radical, 1866
- The Spanish Gypsy, 1868, poetry
- Middlemarch, 1871-72
- Daniel Deronda, 1876
Sources:
Cambridge Guide to Literature in English by Ian Ousby (1993)
Larousse Dictionary of Writers, edited by Rosemary Goring (1994)
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