| dc.description.abstract | Mary Ann Evans, known to us by her pen name of George Eliot, was born
November 22, 1819, in Warwickshire, England, to Robert Evans, an estate agent, or
manager, and Christiana Pearson. She lived in a comfortable home, the youngest of
three children. When she was five years old, she and her sister were sent to boarding
school at Attleborough, Warwickshire, and when she was nine years old, she was
transferred to a boarding school at Nuneaton. It was during these years that Mary
discovered her passion for reading. At thirteen years of age, Mary went to school at
Coventry. Her education was conservative (one that held with the traditions of the
day), dominated by Christian teachings. Mary Ann completed her schooling when she
was sixteen years old. In her twenties, she came into contact with a circle of people
whose thinking did not coincide with the opinions of most people and underwent an
extreme change of her beliefs. Influenced by the so-called Higher Criticism—a
largely German school that studied the Bible and that attempted to treat sacred
writings as human and historical documents—she devoted herself to translating these
works from the German language to English for the English public. In 1851 Evans
became an editor of the Westminster Review, a sensible and open-minded journal.
In the same period, Evans turned her powerful mind from scholarly and
critical writing to creative work. In 1857, she published a short story, "Amos Barton,"
and took the pen name "George Eliot" in order to prevent the discrimination (unfair
treatment because of gender or race) that women of her era faced. After collecting her
short stories in Scenes of Clerical Life (2 vols., 1858), Eliot published her first novel,
Adam Bede (1859). Eliot's next novel, The Mill on the Floss (1860), shows even
stronger traces of her childhood and youth in small-town and rural England. In 1861
Eliot published a short novel, Silas Marner, which through use as a school textbook is
her best-known work. In 1860 and 1861 Eliot lived abroad in Florence, Italy, and studied Renaissance. She wrote a historical novel, Romola (published 1862–1863),
set in Renaissance Florence. Eliot aimed at creating confidence in her readers by her
honesty in describing human beings. In her next novel, Felix Holt (1866), she came as
close as she ever did to setting up her fiction in order to convey her beliefs. Then in
1871 and 1872, Eliot published her masterpiece, Middlemarch, a broad understanding
of human life. Eliot's last novel was Daniel Deronda (1874–1876). It is perhaps her
least-read work, although recent critical attention has revealed its high value in at
least one-half of its plot, while raising still unanswered questions about its less
successful half. Her novels focus on the transmission from moment to moment and
from mind to mind because these points of contact are where historical continuities,
and the realistic agreements that support them, are made or broken. In George Eliot‘s
novels the institution of a culture, its language, and its unspoken codes provide a
matrix for individual consciousness, a system within which lies its only possibility of
definition and outside of which is only inhuman darkness. In 1880, after the death of
Lewes, Eliot married a friend of long standing, John Walter Cross. She died in
London on December 22, 1880 | en_US |
