George Eliot

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Standard Name: Eliot, George
Birth Name: Mary Anne Evans
Nickname: Polly
Nickname: Pollian
Self-constructed Name: Mary Ann Evans
Self-constructed Name: Marian Evans
Self-constructed Name: Marian Evans Lewes
Pseudonym: George Eliot
Pseudonym: Felix Holt
Married Name: Mary Anne Cross
GE , one of the major novelists of the nineteenth century and a leading practitioner of fictional realism, was a professional woman of letters who also worked as an editor and journalist, and left a substantial body of essays, reviews, translations on controversial topics, and poetry.
Portrait of George Eliot, seated, after the 1881 painting of Francois Albert Durade.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
By December 1860 BLSB was sufficiently interested in Roman Catholicism (to which Bessie Rayner Parkes later converted) to write about her interest to George Eliot , who responded with sympathy but a clear statement of...
Cultural formation Rose Macaulay
Over the course of her life, RM 's religious practices ranged between Anglican and Anglo-agnostic. She was initially given instruction in the Anglican faith by her mother. As an early adolescent (like George Eliot 's...
death Augusta Webster
Theodore Watts-Dunton 's tribute in the Athenæum recalled a noble band of women represented by George Eliot , Mrs. Webster, and Miss Cobbe , who, in virtue of lofty purpose, purity of soul, and deep...
death Edith J. Simcox
Her ashes were buried with her mother at Aspley Guise, nine miles south of Bedford. The remains of her friend Elma Stuart lie beside those of George Eliot , an honour which she...
death George Henry Lewes
GHL , writer and partner of George Eliot , died at The Priory, near Regent's Park.
Ashton, Rosemary. G. H. Lewes: A Life. Clarendon Press, 1991.
277
Dedications Jane Hume Clapperton
She dedicated the book to the memory of my early teachers, George Eliot and James Cranbrook , as well as her friend the author George Arthur Gaskell .
Clapperton, Jane Hume. Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness. Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. , 1885.
v
Education Susan Tweedsmuir
She was, however, always reading as a child: she and her sister had few books, but knew by heart whole chapters of the ones they did have. As a child Susan hated Mrs Mortimer 's...
Education Kate Clanchy
As a child KC loved Victorian stories for girls—Frances Hodgson Burnett 's A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, Sarah Chauncey Woolsey (or Susan Coolidge)'s What Katy Did, and Louisa May Alcott
Education Bernice Rubens
At university, she was President of both the student Music and Socialist societies, as well as a member of the Students' Union Council.
Gilbert, Sarah. “Bernice Rubens”. Cardiff University Magazine, No. 1.
BR later found that her education slowed her development as a writer...
Education Simone de Beauvoir
SB knew her alphabet at three, and learned to read quickly once she suddenly perceived that the letters were symbols.
Beauvoir, Simone de. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Kirkup, JamesTranslator , Penguin, 2001.
20
Later, the scanty resources of my city childhood could not compete with the riches...
Education Mary Lavin
It was, she said later, through reading that I passed from childhood to adulthood, first through a chance encounter with Eliot 's Adam Bede (and that was the end of the school stories)...
Education Alison Uttley
Alice Jane Taylor (later AU ) was a strong-willed child who set her own agenda. She later remembered a trial of wills, at the age of two, with her godmother, which ended not in her...
Education C. E. Plumptre
Though nothing is know of CEP 's early education, in later life she kept an extensive library. On visiting her, Frederick James Gould noted that it was selected and arranged in an impressive order which...
Education L. M. Montgomery
LMM attended a one-room schoolhouse across the road from her grandparents' farmhouse, completing her time there in 1892. The following year, she went to the Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown for teacher training. Her...
Education Pearl S. Buck
Mr Kung despised fiction and the Sydenstricker library contained only the supposedly factual Plutarch 's Lives and Foxe 's Book of Martyrs, but Pearl read fiction avidly in both Chinese and English, devouring Shakespeare

Timeline

About 1349-1351
Giovanni Boccaccio worked at his cycle of tales entitled (from the fact that the stories are told over the course of ten days) the Decameron. It was first translated into English in 1620.
1495
In a bonfire of the vanities in Florence, Italy, Girolamo Savonarola destroyed texts by Ovid , Dante , Boccaccio and others.
1677
Baruch or Benedictus de Spinoza 's Ethics, probably his most important text, was published shortly after his death at the age of forty-four.
January 1802
The Christian Observer was launched, as a journalConducted by members of the established church with the aim of combating Methodism and other Dissenting sects as well as radicalism and scepticism.
April 1817
The first issue of Blackwood's EdinburghMagazine appeared; founder William Blackwood intended to offer Tory competition to the liberal Edinburgh Review.
1826
The English Gypsy, or Roma, population was grouped by authorities with all nomadic or vagrant peoples, who were estimated by William Cobbett to number around 30,000.
1828
The first issue of the successful annual gift bookThe Keepsake appeared; lavish production and distinguished contributors raised the price of this and other such publications to a guinea.
22 March 1832
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died at Weimar in Germany in his early eighties.
Chisholm, Hugh, editor. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Cambridge University Press, 1911.
20 March 1839
The Anti-Corn Law League was founded.
1841
Ludwig Feuerbach published Das Wesen des Christentums, an influential philosophical work demythologising Christianity.
1843
Charles Edward Mudie opened his first circulating library .
March 1848
Chartist uprisings took place in London, Glasgow, and Manchester.
1851
French medical researcher Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard experimented with the effects of blood transfusion on the responsiveness of nerves in human corpses.
January 1852
Publisher John Chapman purchased the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly and began issuing it as the Westminster Review (which, twenty-eight years and several mergers back, had been its original name).
July 1855
Alfred Tennyson published Maud and Other Poems.