ELIOT, GEORGE, the pen-name of the famous English writer, née Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans (5859-188o), after wards Mrs. J. W. Cross, born at Arbury farm, Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, on Nov. 22, 1819. Her father, Robert Evans, was the agent of Francis Newdigate, and the first 21 years of her life were spent on the Arbury estate. She received an ordinary educa tion till the age of 17, when her mother's death and the marriage of her elder sister called her home in the character of house keeper. She was thus able to work without pedantic interruptions at German, Italian and music, and to follow her own excellent taste in reading. Marian Evans was subdued all through her youth by a severe religious training which, while it pinched her mind and crushed her spirit, attracted her idealism by the very hardness of its counsels. But when her father moved to Coventry in 1841 she made new friends, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bray and Charles Hennell. Bray had written works on the Education of the Feelings, the Philosophy of Necessity, and the like. Hennell had published in 1838 An Enquiry Concerning the Origin of Christian ity. Miss Evans, then 22, absorbed immediately these unexpected and, at that time, daring habits of thought, and narrowly avoided a breach with her father, a churchman of the old school. George Eliot was never orthodox again; she remained throughout life a rationalist. But she had learnt the evangelical point of view; she knew—none better—the strength of religious motives; vulgar doubts of this fact were as distasteful to her as they were to Huxley. Her books abound in tributes to Christian virtue, and one of her own favourite characters was Dinah Morris in Adam Bede.
She began, in 1844, the translation of Strauss's Leben Jesu. On the death of her father in 1849 she went abroad for some time. In 1851 she accepted the assistant-editorship of the Westminster Review. For a while she had lodgings at the offices of the Review in the Strand, London. She wrote several notable papers, and became acquainted with Herbert Spencer, Carlyle, Harriet Marti neau, Francis Newman, George Henry Lewes and others. Her friendship with Lewes led to a closer relationship which she regarded as a marriage. Among the many criticisms passed upon this step (Lewes had a wife living at the time), no one has denied her courage or her tact in a difficult position. The union was a singularly happy one. Lewes was devoted to her, appreciated her genius and did his best to shield her from every kind of rough contact with the world. In later days he perhaps went too far in this direction, for she was never allowed to see adverse criticism which might have wounded her sensitive nature. She was over sensitive, liable to fits of depression and at no time robust in health. A woman of wide culture and masculine understanding, she yet had an excessively feminine temperament. The lovers made a delightful tour in Germany which Marian Evans thorough ly enjoyed. Lewes was preparing his Life of Goethe, and they saw many important people in Berlin and Weimar. This journey made the definite break with her former life, and undoubtedly gave her fresh inspiration. On their return to England, Lewes and she established joint housekeeping. They moved frequently, but always maintained a circle of friends. Many descriptions exist of George Eliot's receptions ; they became in course of time serious affairs, with Lewes as master of ceremonies. Admission was very highly prized and, in later days, not too easy. The house specially associated with the Leweses was 21 North Bank, Regent's Park, which they took in 1863.
But at this time fame had not been achieved. Marian Evans was occupied with translations—Feuerbach's Essence of Chris tianity (1854) ; Spinoza's Ethics (never published)—and with articles for the Westminster Review and the Saturday Review. Presently she confided to Lewes that she was seeking relaxation in writing fiction. The story was "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton," the first of the Scenes from Clerical Life (2 vols., 1858) ; it appeared in Blackwood's Magazine as the work of "George Eliot," and Marian Evans strictly hid her identity for many years. Scenes from Clerical Life won the praise of Dickens, but triumphant success only came with Adam Bede (1859), fol lowed in 186o by The Mill on the Floss, and in 1861 by Silas Marner. Neither of these met with the great immediate success of Adam Bede. This group of novels remains for most readers George Eliot's most valuable contribution to English literature and to English social history. She was writing of the Warwick shire countryside, of the impressions gathered in her early life when distractions were few and her mind and vision still unim peded by the theories and the philosophy of the Westminster Review circles. In the earlier and better half of The Mill on the Floss she drew, with little disguise, on her own life and her rela tions with her brother Isaac, and in Adam Bede and Caleb Garth there is something of her father. In the opinion of many good judges the first of the series, Scenes from Clerical Life, is George Eliot's most enduring work. Leslie Stephen (Diet. Nat. Biog. s.v. Cross) wrote : "In some respects, the Scenes from Clerical Life were never surpassed by their author. Their unforced power, their pathos, and the sympathetic appreciation of the old-fashioned life by a large intellect give them a singular charm." George Eliot was now famous. Smith and Elder offered her f i o,000 for the copyright of her next book; she accepted £7,000 for its appearance in the Cornhill Magazine. The book was Romola (1862-63), and with it begins her second period. She spent a month in Florence (May–June 1861) seeking material, and before she began to write in the autumn she had amassed an imposing pile of notes and memoranda on the history of Florence and the times of Savonarola. The book has perhaps been unduly disparaged ; the truth is that all her later work, with the possible exception of Middlemarch, suffers, for modern readers, by corn parison with the powerful and deeply felt earlier stories, when she was driven to write by an overpowering need for self expression. By her contemporaries they were eagerly looked for in a great age of the novel. The works following Romola are Felix Holt (1866), a political novel; The Spanish Gypsy (1868), a drama in blank verse, written under strong positivist influence ; The Legend of Jubal and other Poems (18 74) ; Middlemarch (1872), a long novel, which is a masterly psychological analysis of middle class life; Daniel Deronda (1876), a strong intellectual plea against anti-Jewish prejudice; and The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, a collection of essays (1879). This great body of work between 1866 and 1879, was the accomplishment of a powerful intellect and shows an extraordinarily acute perception of human nature.
George Eliot wrote for a serious public. She herself demanded too strenuously from the very beginning an aim, more or less altru istic, from every individual; and as she advanced in life this claim became the more imperative, till at last it overpowered her art, and transformed a great delineator of humanity into an elo quent observer with far too many personal prejudices. Joy was lost in the consuming desire for strict accuracy; her genius became more and more speculative, less and less emotional. The highly trained brain suppressed the impulsive heart. Little of her verse, beyond the famous lines "0, might I join the choir invisible," passed into current thought ; her best work was done in prose.
Throughout these years she was sustained and stimulated by the companionship of Lewes. At the end of 1876 they settled at Witley, near Godalming, and on Nov. 28, 1878, Lewes died. George Eliot wrote no more. She saw hardly anyone, and devoted herself to preparing Lewes's unfinished work for press. In her widowhood—it was a real widowhood—she was helped in her affairs by a friend of long standing, J. W. Cross, and married him, at St. George's, Hanover square, on May 6, 1880. Early in December they took a house in London, No. 4, Cheyne Walk. There she died on Dec. 22, 1880.
See the Life of George Eliot, edit. by J. W. Cross (3 vols., 1885-87) ; Sir Leslie Stephen, George Eliot, in the "English Men of Letters" series (1902) ; Oscar Browning, "Great Writers" series (18g0), with a bibliography by J. P. Anderson ; Mathilde Blind, "Eminent Women" series, a later edition of which also contains a bibliography (Boston, Mass., 1904) ; A. W. Ward in Camb. Hist., vol. xiii. (1916) ; Elizabeth Haldane, George Eliot and her Times (19a 7) ; and Arthur Paterson, George Eliot's Family Life and Letters (1928).