Life & Background
Mary Ann Evans was born in Warwickshire in 1819 and given a strong evangelical education, which she repudiated in her early twenties after reading German biblical criticism — a break that estranged her from her father. She translated Strauss's Life of Jesus and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, and became assistant editor of the Westminster Review, moving in the most advanced intellectual circles in London. From 1854 she lived openly with George Henry Lewes, who could not divorce his wife; the relationship placed her outside respectable society for twenty years. She adopted a male pen name to have her fiction judged seriously and to protect her private life. After Lewes's death she married John Cross, twenty years younger, and died months later in 1880.
Middlemarch
Set in a Midlands town around the time of the 1832 Reform Bill, the novel interweaves several lives. Dorothea Brooke, intelligent and hungry for significant work, marries the desiccated scholar Casaubon in the belief that she can assist a great intellectual project, and discovers that his Key to All Mythologies is worthless. Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor with plans for medical reform, marries the beautiful and unyielding Rosamond Vincy and is gradually destroyed by debt and provincial opposition. Around them run the stories of Fred Vincy and Mary Garth, and of the banker Bulstrode, whose respectable standing collapses when his past is exposed. Ambitions shrink; the town absorbs them all.
Eliot's realism is analytic rather than merely descriptive: the narrator continually generalises from the particular case, and the novel's central metaphor of the web — pull one strand and the whole vibrates — makes interdependence a formal principle rather than a theme. Her moral scheme is post-religious but not relativist, grounded in Feuerbach's humanism, so that sympathy becomes the highest faculty and egotism the root failure; the famous image of the scratched mirror reflecting concentric circles around whichever candle is held to it is her definition of self-centred perception. Virginia Woolf's description of Middlemarch as one of the few English novels written for grown-up people registered its unusual intellectual seriousness.
Why George Eliot Matters
Eliot brought philosophy, science, and social theory into the English novel without abandoning realist narrative, and Middlemarch is routinely named the greatest English novel of the nineteenth century. Her handling of provincial life, of women's thwarted vocation, and of moral consequence set a template that runs to Henry James and beyond, and Leavis placed her at the centre of his great tradition. Her pen name and her social position also make her a standing case study in the conditions under which Victorian women wrote.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Scenes of Clerical Life1858
- Adam Bede1859
- The Mill on the Floss1860
- Silas Marner1861
- Romola1863
- Middlemarch1871–72
- Daniel Deronda1876