Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch a rare English novel written for grown-ups
Mary Ann Evans (1819 to 1880), writing as George Eliot, became one of the great Victorian novelists, as well as a poet, translator and journalist. From 1854 to 1878 she lived openly with the married critic George Henry Lewes and called him her husband, a scandal in its day.
She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, published between 1859 and 1876. Readers prize their realism, psychological depth, sense of place and close portraits of rural life. Virginia Woolf praised Middlemarch as one of the few English novels meant for adult readers, and Martin Amis and Julian Barnes have both named it the finest novel in the language.
She was born at South Farm on the Arbury Hall estate near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, the third child of Robert Evans, the estate's manager, and Christiana Pearson, a mill-owner's daughter. Judged too plain to marry well yet obviously clever, she was given an education few girls received, boarding at schools in Attleborough, Nuneaton and Coventry. At one she was taught by the evangelical Maria Lewis, recipient of her earliest surviving letters. After sixteen her schooling was mostly her own, helped by access to the Arbury Hall library. Her Greek reading ran so deep that, as Christopher Stray noted, only one of her books can be typeset without Greek characters. Visits to the big house also showed her the gulf between the landowner's wealth and the tenants' poverty, a contrast of parallel lives that recurs in her fiction.
When her mother died in 1836 she came home to keep house, and when her brother Isaac married and took over, she and her father moved to Foleshill near Coventry. There she befriended Charles and Cara Bray, wealthy freethinkers whose home, Rosehill, welcomed radical visitors; among the guests she met there were Emerson, Harriet Martineau, Herbert Spencer and Robert Owen. Already wrestling with religious doubt, she encountered sceptical theologians such as Strauss and Feuerbach, and her first major work was an 1846 English translation of Strauss's Life of Jesus, finishing a version begun by Elizabeth Brabant.
Lewes never divorced his wife, Agnes Jervis, and went on supporting their children even after she left to live and have children with another man. In May 1880, eighteen months after Lewes died, Eliot married her much younger friend John Cross and became Mary Ann Cross. She died that December.
Source: George Eliot
