Middlemarch (1871–1872)
'A Study of Provincial Life' in a Midlands town, centred on Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate
Literature · Novelists
George Eliot
1819–1880 · English
Victorian novel; psychological realism
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann (later Marian) Evans, a translator and editor of the Westminster Review who turned to fiction at 37. Her realist novels of provincial English life, above all Middlemarch (1871–1872), combine broad social panoramas with deep psychological and moral insight.
How to spot them
- ▸Real name Mary Ann (Marian) Evans; partner of George Henry Lewes
- ▸Middlemarch: Dorothea Brooke, Casaubon's 'Key to All Mythologies', Dr Lydgate, Will Ladislaw
- ▸Maggie and Tom Tulliver; the weaver Silas Marner and Eppie
- ▸Daniel Deronda; Adam Bede; Romola in Savonarola's Florence
- ▸Translator of Strauss's Life of Jesus and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity
Key works
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom at Dorlcote Mill, ending in a fatal flood
Silas Marner (1861)
A miserly linen weaver of Raveloe is redeemed by adopting the orphan Eppie
Adam Bede (1859)
Carpenter Adam, the seduced Hetty Sorrel and the Methodist preacher Dinah Morris; her first full-length novel
Daniel Deronda (1876)
Her last novel, pairing Gwendolen Harleth's marriage with Deronda's discovery of his Jewish identity
Romola (1862–1863)
Historical novel of Renaissance Florence in the time of Savonarola
Scenes of Clerical Life (1857–1858)
Three stories that were her first fiction, published under the name George Eliot
Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)
Political novel set around the 1832 Reform Act
Key ideas
- Realism as a moral force: fiction should extend readers' sympathies to ordinary lives
- The web of interconnected lives in a community, and the 'unhistoric acts' of people who 'rest in unvisited tombs' (Middlemarch finale)
- Attacked formulaic fiction in her essay 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' (1856)
Quick-fire facts
- •Born at South Farm on the Arbury estate, Chilvers Coton, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire
- •Lived openly with the married critic George Henry Lewes from 1854 until his death in 1878
- •Adopted a male pen name so her work would be taken seriously and kept separate from her scandalous private life
- •A man named Joseph Liggins was falsely rumoured to be the author of Adam Bede
- •Married John Walter Cross, about 20 years her junior, in May 1880, and died that December
- •Buried in Highgate Cemetery, London
- •Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'
- •Middlemarch opens: 'Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.'
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Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — George Eliot
- Rosemary Ashton — George Eliot: A Life