George Eliot
1819–1880
Biography
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, who was born in Warwickshire in 1819 and died in London in 1880. She was a widely read woman who learned several languages and worked as a translator, and she served as assistant editor of the Westminster Review in London. Her translations included David Strauss's Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, both of them difficult and controversial books for English readers of the time. In London she met the writer George Henry Lewes, and they lived together from 1854 until his death in 1878. Because his wife would not divorce him, they could not marry. She began to publish fiction under the name George Eliot in 1857, and in 1880 she married John Cross, a few months before her own death.
She wrote seven novels between 1859 and 1876: Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, the Radical, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Her work is marked by close observation of country life and small towns, by psychological insight into why people act as they do, and by a moral seriousness that never preaches for long. Silas Marner (1861) is a short, tight tale of a lonely weaver in a village who loses his savings and is then given the care of a small child. Middlemarch (1871–1872) is her largest and most admired book, a study of a Midlands town in the years before the Reform Act of 1832, following idealistic Dorothea Brooke and the young doctor Tertius Lydgate through marriage, ambition and disappointment. Many critics count it among the great English novels.
Two of her books are on this site. Silas Marner shows her gift for a simple story carrying a great deal of moral weight, and Middlemarch shows her at full scale, following many lives in one town and linking them through choice and chance. Readers who come to her through these two books find a novelist who took ordinary lives as seriously as heroic ones, and who asked her readers to do the same.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by English author George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. It appeared in eight paper-bound instalments from December 1871 to December 1872, with a book version in four volumes published in parallel (the first volume is…
Summary from Wikipedia: Middlemarch (CC BY-SA 4.0)Silas Marner
by George Eliot
Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe is the third novel by English author George Eliot; it was published on 2 April 1861. A seemingly simple story of a linen weaver, Silas Marner is notable for its strong realist bent, as well as its sophisticated treatment of a variety of issues…
Summary from Wikipedia: Silas Marner (CC BY-SA 4.0)