George Eliot (1819-1880)

Mary Ann Evans—later known under the pen name George Eliot—was born on November 22, 1819, at South Farm on the Arbury Hall estate near Nuneaton, Warwickshire. She was the youngest surviving child of Robert Evans, estate manager for Arbury Hall, and Christiana Evans. As a child, she was deeply attached to her brother Isaac and received her education at several boarding schools. When her mother died in 1836, Evans, then just sixteen, returned home to take charge of the household after her older sister married the following year.^[1]

Evans’s early religious life was shaped by evangelical fervor, deeply influenced by a Methodist aunt and a devout schoolteacher, Maria Lewis. But by the early 1840s, after relocating to Coventry with her father, she became associated with the Brays—a Unitarian family at the center of a radical intellectual circle. Through this circle she encountered freethinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Ralph Waldo Emerson and was introduced to new philosophical currents, including skepticism about orthodox Christianity. Although she temporarily reconciled with her father by resuming church attendance, she no longer accepted its tenets.^[2]

Throughout her life, Evans retained a sympathetic interest in religious feeling, even after departing from its institutions. Her fiction includes many complex and affectionate portrayals of clergymen and Dissenters, reflecting both the emotional roots of belief and the ethical dilemmas of Victorian faith.

She pursued her intellectual development with extraordinary discipline. After leaving school, she undertook intensive self-education in Latin, Greek, German, and Italian, and read widely in philosophy, history, and science. In 1850, Evans moved to London and began contributing to the Westminster Review. Within a year, she became its assistant editor, one of the few women in the period to hold such an editorial post in a major journal.^[3]

Evans also engaged deeply with continental thought. Her 1854 English translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity advanced his argument that religious belief arises from human needs and desires. Feuerbach viewed religion not as divine revelation but as an imaginative projection of humanity’s own capacities—an idea that would quietly shape the philosophical underpinnings of Eliot’s later fiction.^[4]

That same year, Evans began living in a de facto marriage with philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes. Although Lewes was legally married to another woman, his estranged relationship was effectively closed, and the couple remained devoted to each other until his death in 1878. Their unconventional union caused scandal, but over time, it gained acceptance among many of their literary and intellectual peers. Lewes was a steady and enthusiastic supporter of Evans’s literary career, encouraging her to begin writing fiction under the pseudonym “George Eliot.”

When Scenes of Clerical Life appeared in 1857, critics speculated that its author must be a clergyman or the wife of one. Evans’s decision to publish under a male pseudonym offered a layer of protection from gendered bias and allowed her fiction to be judged on its own terms. Her early anonymity also contributed to the mystery and authority of her voice, which combined deep psychological realism with moral inquiry.

In 1880, two years after Lewes’s death, Evans married John Walter Cross, a longtime friend and financial adviser twenty years her junior. Though the marriage unsettled some of her friends, it led to a reconciliation with her brother Isaac, who had ceased contact after she began living with Lewes in the 1850s. Eliot died later that year on December 22, 1880, and was buried at Highgate Cemetery in London.

Though her literary reputation declined somewhat after her death, twentieth-century critics helped restore her stature. Virginia Woolf famously called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,”^[5] and F. R. Leavis praised Eliot’s “traditional moral sensibility” and “luminous intelligence,” noting that while she “is not as transcendently great as Tolstoy,” she is “great, and great in the same way.”^[6]

Though best known for her novels, Eliot also wrote poetry that reveals the same ethical seriousness and psychological depth. Her long sonnet sequence “Brother and Sister”, published in 1874, is widely recognized as autobiographical, reflecting Eliot’s childhood relationship with her brother Isaac and expressing deep emotional intimacy and moral reflection.^[7] The poem blends formal sonnet structure with intimate narrative detail, meditating on childhood memory, sibling intimacy, and moral development in a style that parallels her fiction.^[8] Critics have noted how the sequence reframes Romantic legacies of recollection—such as Wordsworthian “spots of time”—into a Victorian context shaped by duty, loss, and the passage of time.^[9] While Eliot’s poetry has not endured in public popularity, its critical appreciation offers a rare opportunity to consider her poetics alongside her more widely studied fiction, illuminating the same moral intelligence and imaginative sympathy found in her novels.^[10]

Today, Eliot is recognized as one of the great ethical realists of English literature. Her legacy is not only rooted in the psychological depth of her novels, but also in her commitment to imaginative sympathy, rigorous moral vision, and a belief in the power of narrative to reveal the inner workings of human experience.

Works Cited

• Ashton, Rosemary. “Evans, Mary Ann (1819–1880).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 23 Sept. 2004. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/6794.
• Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Translated by George Eliot, Trübner & Co., 1854.

• Gruner, Elisabeth Rose. “‘Born and Made:’ Sisters, Brothers, and the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill.” SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 24, no. 2, 1999, pp. 423–447. University of Chicago Press.
• Haight, Gordon S. George Eliot: A Biography. Oxford University Press, 1968.
• Hughes, Kathryn. George Eliot: The Last Victorian. Fourth Estate, 1998.
• Sanders, Valerie. “‘My Father Shook My Soul Awake’: Salvaging Family Relationships in George Eliot’s Poetry.” George Eliot – George Henry Lewes Studies, vol. 60 – 61, 2011, pp. 77–90. Penn State University Press. https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/423547.
• Tucker, Herbert F. “Poetry: The Unappreciated Eliot.” In George Eliot and Her Critics, edited by George P. Landow, The Hudson Review, Penn State University Press, 2014.
• Woolf, Virginia. “George Eliot.” The Common Reader, Hogarth Press, 1925, pp. 153–174. Gutenberg Project, https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300031h.html.