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 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...
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...
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
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...
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 Margaret Atwood
She attended elementary school, and then from 1952 Leaside High School in Toronto, both in the Protestant public school system operating in Ontario alongside a Catholic one. She and her schoolmates got prayers and...
Education Frances Power Cobbe
Her continuing studies, particularly of theology, benefitted from access to Archbishop Marsh's Library in Dublin (though it was ostensibly open only to gentlemen and graduates). Her reading at this period may have included Marian Evans, later George Eliot
Education Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
She read voraciously, preferring writers with the geographical rootedness which she herself lacked: George Eliot , Thomas Hardy , Charles Dickens , and from beyond the English tradition Marcel Proust , James Joyce , Henry James
Education Emily Jane Pfeiffer
Her family's financial troubles prevented EJP from receiving a formal or thorough education. In her own words, education was not within the reach of the gently born who were also poor, therefore I had little...
Education Flora Macdonald Mayor
Although FMM 's father was, for the most part, more concerned with her fragile health than her academic development, the twin sisters received some home-schooling from their mother to quite a high level, since she...
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 Beryl Bainbridge
BB described her reading at nine years old as a mixture: George Eliot and children's writers like Richmal Crompton and Susan Coolidge (Sarah Woolsey ): Just William, What Katy Did, The Mill...
Education Louisa Baldwin
Following her marriage, she studied German, French, and Italian, as well as the works of Shakespeare and the novels of George Eliot .
Taylor, Ina. Victorian Sisters. Adler and Adler, 1987.
114-15, 127

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.