George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans was born in Warwickshire in 1819, the daughter of a land agent. She was educated beyond what her social position would have predicted and became, in her twenties, a formidable intellectual — translating Strauss's Das Leben Jesu from German at twenty-three, losing her religious faith in the process, and later translating Spinoza's Ethics. She worked as a journalist and eventually as assistant editor of the Westminster Review, the leading journal of British intellectual life, where she wrote criticism of considerable acuity and breadth. She adopted the pen name George Eliot for her fiction — partly to protect her private life from scrutiny, partly to ensure her work was taken seriously in a literary culture that condescended to women writers.

The private life she was protecting was her relationship with George Henry Lewes, a philosopher and critic who was married to another woman. Under Victorian divorce law, Lewes could not remarry; Agnes Lewes had had children by another man with George's knowledge and agreement, which legally constituted condonation and prevented George from suing for divorce. Mary Ann and George Lewes began living together openly in 1854 and remained together until his death in 1878. She considered herself his wife. Society mostly considered her a scandal and refused to receive her — until her novels became impossible to ignore, at which point the Queen of England sent a complimentary message.

Her fiction began with Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), moved through Adam Bede (1859) and The Mill on the Floss (1860) — both drawing on her Midlands childhood — and reached its peak with Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72), published in eight installments. Middlemarch follows several interlocking plots in the fictional English town of Middlemarch in the years around the 1832 Reform Act: Dorothea Brooke, a woman of intellectual ambition who marries the wrong man and spends years finding out why; Tertius Lydgate, a doctor whose medical idealism is gradually consumed by a disastrous marriage to a shallow woman who doesn't understand what she has destroyed; Fred Vincy, who must grow up; Bulstrode, whose past is catching up with him. The novel is vast in its human sympathy and precise in its understanding of how character is formed and deformed by circumstance, self-deception, and social pressure. Virginia Woolf's assessment — "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" — has not been widely disputed.

Daniel Deronda (1876), her final and most ambitious novel, runs two parallel plots: one about a woman trapped in a miserable marriage, one about a young English gentleman who discovers his Jewish heritage and becomes committed to the Zionist project. The second plot has generally been found more interesting by critics as an intellectual achievement; contemporary readers sometimes find it harder going than the English social world that is her more natural territory.

Her narrative voice is distinctive: intellectual authority, moral seriousness, and a compassion that never tips into sentimentality or excuses what it observes. She disagrees with her characters constantly — understands why they are what they are, pities them, and still holds them accountable. After her death, her reputation contracted sharply. Modernism's reaction against Victorian earnestness hit her hard, and for decades she was considered a worthy relic rather than a living force. The recovery of the 20th century, led partly by feminist critics in the 1970s and 1980s who found in her work a serious account of women's intellectual constraints and possibilities, restored her to the first rank. The fair criticism that survives is that her plots sometimes strain toward resolution, and that her prose, at its least disciplined, can become heavy with qualification. These are minor charges against a large achievement.