A short life of the author
Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), who wrote under the pen name George Eliot, was born on 22 November 1819 at Arbury Hall estate, Warwickshire, where her father, Robert Evans, was agent to the Newdigate family. Her father was a man of immense practical competence and conservative temperament; her mother, Christiana Pearson, died when Mary Ann was sixteen. The rural Midlands landscape of her childhood — the farms, canals, weaving villages, and provincial towns of Warwickshire — became the Loamshire of her fiction.
Life and Career
Eliot received an unusually thorough education for a Victorian woman, attending schools in Attleborough, Nuneaton, and Coventry, and studying languages, music, and theology with private tutors. She was intensely religious as a young woman, but in 1842, under the influence of the freethinking Charles and Cara Bray of Coventry, she underwent a crisis of faith and rejected Christianity — a rupture that devastated her father and that she explored, with extraordinary subtlety, throughout her fiction.
In 1851 she moved to London and became assistant editor of the Westminster Review, the leading liberal intellectual quarterly, under John Chapman. She was the review’s effective editor for several years and moved in the most advanced intellectual circles of Victorian London: Herbert Spencer, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, and — most consequentially — George Henry Lewes, a versatile writer, critic, and amateur scientist who became her life partner in 1854.
The Lewes relationship was scandalous: Lewes was married (though his wife Agnes had children by another man, and Lewes had condoned the adultery, making divorce impossible under Victorian law). Evans and Lewes lived together openly as man and wife for twenty-four years until his death in 1878 — an arrangement that required courage and cost her social standing. Lewes encouraged her to write fiction, and her first story, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” (published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1857), was the beginning of one of the most extraordinary creative careers in English literature.
She adopted the male pseudonym George Eliot to ensure that her work would be taken seriously and not dismissed as “women’s fiction.” Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Silas Marner (1861) established her as the foremost English novelist of her generation. Middlemarch (1871–1872), published in eight parts, was her masterpiece. Daniel Deronda (1876) was her last novel.
After Lewes’s death in 1878, she married John Walter Cross, a banker twenty years her junior, in May 1880. She died on 22 December 1880 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery beside Lewes.
Major Works and Themes
Eliot’s great subject is the moral life of ordinary people in provincial society — the choices they make, the consequences they bear, the ways in which individual desire collides with social constraint. Her novels are distinguished by a psychological realism that anticipates the twentieth century: she understood the complexity of motivation, the power of self-deception, and the irreversibility of moral choices with a depth no English novelist before her had achieved.
Middlemarch (1871–1872) is her supreme achievement and is regularly cited as the greatest novel in the English language. Its subtitle — “A Study of Provincial Life” — understates its ambition: it is nothing less than a complete anatomy of an English Midlands town in the years leading up to the Reform Bill of 1832, told through the interwoven stories of Dorothea Brooke (whose idealism is thwarted by a disastrous marriage), Tertius Lydgate (a brilliant young doctor destroyed by his wife’s materialism), and a dozen other vividly realised characters. Virginia Woolf called it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”
The Mill on the Floss (1860) is Eliot’s most autobiographical novel: Maggie Tulliver’s intellectual hunger, her painful relationship with her family, and her struggle between duty and desire draw directly on Eliot’s own experience.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Eliot was revered during her lifetime — contemporaries compared her to Shakespeare — and after a period of relative eclipse in the early twentieth century, her reputation was restored by F.R. Leavis, who placed her second only to Austen in “the great tradition.” She is now recognised as the greatest Victorian novelist and one of the three or four greatest novelists in the English language.
Her influence on the psychological novel is foundational: Henry James, Proust, and virtually every subsequent novelist of interiority owes a debt to her methods of representing consciousness.
Key Works
- Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)
- Adam Bede (1859)
- The Mill on the Floss (1860)
- Silas Marner (1861)
- Romola (1862–1863)
- Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)
- Middlemarch (1871–1872)
- Daniel Deronda (1876)
Collecting Eliot
George Eliot first editions are highly sought after, and the major titles — particularly Middlemarch — are significant rarities in fine condition.
Middlemarch (1871–1872, William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London) was published in eight parts (four books, each in two parts) in distinctive olive-green wrappers before being issued in the standard four-volume binding. The parts issue — complete with all the original wrappers and advertisements — is the most desirable form and is genuinely rare: complete sets in fine condition can bring $10,000–$40,000. The four-volume first edition in cloth brings $3,000–$10,000.
Adam Bede (1859, Blackwood, three volumes) was Eliot’s first novel and a bestseller. First editions in the original brown cloth bring $2,000–$8,000.
The Mill on the Floss (1860, Blackwood, three volumes) is available at $1,000–$5,000 in original cloth.
Scenes of Clerical Life (1858, Blackwood, two volumes) is the first book and the first publication under the George Eliot pseudonym. Fine copies bring $2,000–$8,000.
Silas Marner (1861, Blackwood) is one of the most accessible Eliot first editions, as it was published in a single volume: $1,000–$4,000.
Eliot autograph material is scarce. Her letters, many of them published in the comprehensive Yale edition, are of extraordinary literary and intellectual value. Manuscript material surfaces very rarely; significant items command high prices. The major Eliot archives are at Yale (Beinecke Library), the British Library, and the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery.