George Eliot
Sign in to saveEnglish novelist, essayist, poet and journalist (1819–1880)
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George Eliot was an English novelist, essayist, poet, and journalist who lived from 1819 to 1880 and is remembered as one of the major literary figures of the Victorian era. She matters because her novels explored complex human psychology and social issues with intellectual depth, making significant contributions to English literature during a time when few women achieved such literary prominence.
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Mary Anne (Mary Ann, Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist. She was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Her novels, largely set in provincial England, are well known for their realism and psychological insight. 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 mer
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Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively Mary Anne or Marian), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England, where most of her works are set. Her novels are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place, and detailed depiction of the countryside. Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.
Scandalously and unconventionally for the era, she lived with the married George Henry Lewes as his conjugal partner, from 1854 to 1878, and called him her husband. He remained married to his wife, Agnes Jervis, and supported their children, even after Jervis left him to live with another man and have children with him. In May 1880, 18 months after Lewes's death, Eliot married her longtime friend John Cross, a man much younger than she, and changed her name to Mary Ann Cross.
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1819 births1880 deaths19th-century British journalists19th-century British philosophers19th-century British translators19th-century English essayists19th-century English novelists19th-century English philosophers19th-century English women novelists19th-century pseudonymous women writers19th-century pseudonymous writersBurials at Highgate Cemetery