George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
1 book analyzed
Biography
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), one of the most intellectually formidable novelists in the English language. She could not publish under her real name because Victorian literary culture dismissed women writers as capable only of light romance. Before writing fiction, she was a translator of heavyweight German philosophy (Feuerbach, Strauss), an editor of the Westminster Review, and a public intellectual who had lost her Christian faith through rigorous study. She lived openly with George Henry Lewes, a married man who could not obtain a divorce, and the relationship made her a social outcast among the very middle classes she wrote about. Silas Marner was written in a burst of inspiration in 1861, between the massive Adam Bede and the magisterial Middlemarch.