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
Friends, Associates Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
Barbara Leigh Smith was introduced to George Eliot by Bessie Rayner Parkes ; they soon became close.
Herstein, Sheila R. A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Yale University Press, 1985.
106
Friends, Associates Henry James
HJ met George Eliot in May 1869 and wrote memorably to his father of the most powerful beauty residing in her vast ugliness, which had made him end . . . in falling in...
Friends, Associates Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
In July that year her friendship with George Eliot had been cemented and her opinion of G. H. Lewes radically improved by a seaside visit to this unconventional couple at Tenby in Wales. (By...
Friends, Associates Eliza Lynn Linton
People she met at the Laurences' house included Thornton Leigh Hunt (who, with his wife, lived at the Laurences'); Smith Williams , reader for Smith and Elder ; Robert Owen , socialist; Frank Stone ...
Friends, Associates Eliza Lynn Linton
Eliza Lynn met a number of women authors who were once applauded but later complacently forgotten . . . . as literary fossils.
Linton, Eliza Lynn, and Beatrice Harraden. My Literary Life. Hodder and Stoughton, 1899.
85
She contended that Women who wrote were then few and far...
Friends, Associates Jessie White Mario
About this time JWM was introduced to Thomas Adolphus Trollope (another long-term English resident of Italy). She also knew George Henry Lewes and later met his partner George Eliot .
Daniels, Elizabeth Adams. Jessie White Mario: Risorgimento Revolutionary. Ohio University Press, 1972.
104, 112
Friends, Associates Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
In May 1869 George Eliot recorded in her diary Bodichon's steady friendship at the time when G. H. Lewes 's son Thornie was dying of tuberculosis of the spine. Bodichon visited twice a week and...
Friends, Associates Jane Ellen Harrison
Distinguished guests at Newnham at this time included Ruskin and Turgenev ; JEH recalls giving them tours of the college in her Reminiscences of a Student's Life.
Harrison, Jane Ellen. Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. Hogarth Press, 1925.
44
A great admirer of George Eliot
Friends, Associates Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR lived with the Stephens after their marriage, and while there became a friend of such literary figures as George Meredith , Henry James (who described her after an early encounter as exquisitely irrational)...
Friends, Associates Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
Marks (later Ayrton) was the daughter of impoverished Jewish Polish immigrants and was a brilliant mathematician. BLSB interviewed her for a Girton scholarship, and subsequently became deeply involved with her life and family. Marks spent...
Friends, Associates Frances Eleanor Trollope
In addition to her supportive professional relationship with her husband, FET was also close to other writers such as Charles Dickens , her brother-in-law Anthony Trollope , her mother-in-law Frances Trollope , and George Eliot
Friends, Associates Anthony Trollope
Trollope was a friend of William Thackeray , G. H. Lewes , Richard Monckton Milnes , George Eliot , William Russell , and John Everett Millais .
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Of Eliot he wrote: this gifted woman was...
Friends, Associates Julia Wedgwood
This friendship was cemented during visits to Linlathen in Forfarshire, the home of Thomas Erskine , who was himself a major spiritual influence on JW . Her letters to Gurney mention meetings with Darwin
Friends, Associates Harriet Martineau
Marian Evans , later George Eliot, visited HM at her home in Ambleside.
Martineau, Harriet. “Introduction and Editorial Materials”. Selected Letters, edited by Valerie Sanders, Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. vii - xxxiii, 235.
xxiii
Friends, Associates Constance Naden
CN was a friend of the two poets who shared the name Michael Field (who also came from Birmingham) and of the medical doctor Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (who presumably did not hold against her the...

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