www.woman-health.org Homepage Women's Health Gynecology Obstetrics Medline Women's health Guide
default
Search
May 19, 2012
Table of Contents

1 Introduction
[F] Women's Health / Women /
George Eliot

Wikipedia

  

Image:George Eliot 3.jpg|thumb|George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans, better known by the pen name George Eliot (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880), was an England|English novelist. She was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era, whose novels, largely set in provincial England, are well known for their realism and psychological perspicacity.

She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure that her works were taken seriously. Female authors published freely under their own names, but Eliot wanted to ensure that she was not seen as a writer of romances. An additional factor may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes.

Biography


Mary Ann Evans was the daughter of an estate agent in Warwickshire, born on a farm on the Arbury Hall Estate near Nuneaton. She was brought up with a narrowly low church religion. Charles Bray, a Coventry manufacturer, brought her into contact with more liberal theologies. She translated David Strauss|Strauss' Life of Jesus (1846) and began contributing to the Westminster Review in 1850 and became its assistant editor in 1851. The Westminster Review had been founded by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and was the leading journal for philosophical radicals. In 1854, she published a translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, and it was at that time that she began to live with George Henry Lewes in an extramarital cohabitation.

In 1857, she published "Amos Barton," the first of the "Scenes of Clerical Life" in Blackwood's Magazine. The collected "Scenes" were well received and launched Evans on a novelistic career. Evans' cohabitation with Lewes was a scandalous matter. Lewes' wife refused to be divorced, and so he remained married to her in name only, while he made house solely with Evans.
Image:4 Cheyne Walk GE ILN 1881.jpg|thumb|175px|George Eliot died at 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.
Two years after the death of Lewes, on May 6, 1880 she married a friend, John Cross, an United States|American banker, who was 20 years her junior. They honeymooned in Venice and, allegedly, Cross jumped from their hotel balcony into the Grand Canal on their wedding night; he survived. She died on 22 December 1880 at the age of 61 in Chelsea of a kidney ailment and was interred in Highgate Cemetery (East), Highgate, London.

Friend and author Henry James once wrote of her:
<blockquote>She had a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth and a chin and jawbone qui n'en finissent pas... Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end, as I ended, in falling in love with her. Yes behold me in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.</blockquote>

Literary assessment



Eliot's most famous work, Middlemarch, is a turning point in the history of the novel. Making masterful use of a counterpointed plot, Eliot presents the stories of a number of denizens of a small English town on the eve of the Reform Bill of 1832. The main characters, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, each long for exceptional lives but are powerfully constrained by their own unrealistic expectations as well as conservative society. The novel is notable for its deep psychological insight and sophisticated character portraits.

Throughout her career, Eliot wrote with a politically astute pen. From Adam Bede to The Mill on the Floss and the frequently-read Silas Marner, Eliot presented the cases of social outsiders and small town persecution of that which they consider alien. No author since Jane Austen had been as sharp in pointing out the hypocrisy of the country squires and socially conscious. Felix Holt, the Radical and The Legend of Jubal were overtly political novels, and political crisis is at the heart of Middlemarch. By the time of Daniel Deronda, Eliot's sales were falling off, and she faded from public view to some degree.

As an author, Eliot was not only very successful in sales, but she was, and remains, one of the most widely praised for her style and clarity of thought. Eliot's sentence structures are clear, patient, and well balanced, and she mixes plain statement and unsettling irony with rare poise. Her commentaries are never without sympathy for the characters, and she never stoops to being arch or flip with the emotions in her stories. Villains, heroines and bystanders are all presented with awareness and full motivation.

Select bibliography





Bibliography

  • Haight, Gordon S., George Eliot: A Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1968.


  • Haight, Gordon S., ed., George Eliot: Letters, New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1954.


  • Uglow, Jennifer, George Eliot, London, Virago, 1987.


Context and Background

  • Beer, Gillian, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.


  • Beer, Gillian, George Eliot, Brighton, Harvester, 1986.


  • Chapman, Raymond, The Sense of the Past in Victorian Literature, London, CroomHelm, 1986.


  • Cosslett, Tess, The 'Scientific Movement' and Victorian Literature, Brighton, Harvester, 1982.


  • Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1979.


  • Jay, Elisabeth, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979.


  • Pinney, Thomas, ed., Essays of George Eliot, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963.


  • Shuttleworth, Sally, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984.


  • Willey, Basil, Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold, London, Chatto & Windus, 1964.


  • Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City, London, Chatto & Windus, 1973.




Critical Studies

  • Ashton, Rosemary, George Eliot, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983.


  • Beaty, Jerome, Middlemarch'from Notebook to Novel: A Study of George Eliot's Creative Method, Champaign, Illinois, University of Illinois, 1960.


  • Carroll, David, ed., George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971.


  • David Daiches|Daiches, David, George Eliot: Middlemarch, London, Edward Arnold, 1963.


  • Dentith, Simon, George Eliot, Brighton, Harvester, 1986.


  • Garrett, Peter K., The Victorian Multiplot Novel: Studies in Dialogical Form, New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1980.


  • Graver, Suzanne, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form, Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 1984.


  • Harvey, W. J, The Art of George Eliot, London, Chatto & Windus, 1961.


  • Kettle, Arnold. An Introduction to the English Novel, vol. I, London, Hutchinson, 1951.


  • Leavis, F RThe Great Tradition, London, Chatto & Windus, 1948.


  • Neale, Catherine, Middlemarch: Penguin Critical Studies,London, Penguin, 1989


  • Swinden, Patrick, eel., George Eliot: Middlemarch, London, Macmillan, 1972.

External links


Wikisource author
wikiquote

  • http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/eliot/eliotov.html Biography and philosophy

  • http://35.1911encyclopedia.org/E/EL/ELIOT_GEORGE.htm George Eliot in LoveToKnow 1911 Encyclopdia

  • Gutenberg author|id=George_Eliot|name=George Eliot

  • http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/17172 The Ethics of George Eliot's Works by John Crombie Brown (First published in 1879)

  • http://www.litquotes.com/quote_author_resp.php?AName=George%20Eliot George Eliot Quotations


Category:1819 births|Eliot, George
Category:1880 deaths|Eliot, George
Category:English essayists|Eliot, George
Category:English novelists|Eliot, George
Category:Natives of Warwickshire|Eliot, George
Category:Women writers|Eliot, George
Category:Women of the Victorian era|Eliot, George
Category:Alumni of Royal Holloway, University of London|Eliot, George

da:George Eliot
de:George Eliot
eo:George ELIOT
he:??'??????' ??????????
nl:George Eliot
ja:??????????????????????????????
pl:George Eliot
pt:George Eliot
sr:???????? ??????????
sv:George Eliot
zh:?????????????????

Copyright & Resource Links
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "George Eliot".


Last Modified:   2005-12-19


Search
All informatin on the site is © www.woman-health.org 2002-2011. Last revised: January 2, 2011
Are you interested in our site or/and want to use our information? please read how to contact us and our copyrights.
To let us provide you with high quality information, you can help us by making a more or less donation: