The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

Like many English novelists (Charles Dickens being an exception) George Eliot came

to novel writing relatively late in life. She was forty when her first novel, Adam Bede

(1859), an immensely popular work, was published. The lives of her characters are,

therefore, viewed from the vantage point of maturity and extensive experience; and

this perspective is accentuated by her practice of setting her stories back in time to

the period of her own childhood, or even earlier. In most of her novels, she evokes a

preindustrial rural scene or the small-town life of the English Midlands, which she views with a combination of nostalgia and candid awareness of its limitations.

The place Eliot looks back on is usually the Warwickshire countryside. There, under her real name, Marian Evans, she spent her childhood at Arbury Farm, of

which her father, Robert Evans, was supervisor and land agent. The time was the

1820s and 1830s (1819, the year of her birth, was an annus mirabilis for the nine

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GEORGE ELIOT / 1335

teenth century, for in the same year were born John Ruskin, Herman Melville, Walt

Whitman, and Queen Victoria). During these decades Evans read widely in and out

of school and was also strongly affected by Evangelicism; she even advocated, at one

point in her girlhood, giving up novelists such as Sir Walter Scott (who was later to

influence her own novel writing) on the grounds that fiction was frivolous and time

wasting. Her mother's death led to her leaving school at sixteen, and in the next four

or five years she seems to have experienced bouts of depression and self-doubt. In a

letter of 1871, looking back to the period, she likened her state of mind to that of

Mary Wollstonecraft at the time of the earlier writer's attempted suicide: "Hopeless

ness has been to me, all through my life, but especially in the painful years of my

youth, the chief source of wasted energy with all the consequent bitterness of regret.

Remember, it has happened to many to be glad they did not commit suicide, though

they once ran for the final leap, or as Mary Wollstonecraft did, wetted their garments

well in the rain hoping to sink the better when they plunged." At the age of twenty-one Evans moved with her father to the town of Coventry,

and in this new setting her intellectual horizons were extensively widened. As the

result of her association with a group of freethinking intellectuals, and her own stud

ies of theology, she reluctantly decided that she could no longer believe in the Chris

tian religion. Her decision created a painful break with her father, finally resolved

when she agreed to observe the formality of attending church with him and he agreed,

tacitly at least, that while there she could think what she liked. These preoccupations with theological issues led to her first book, a translation in

1846 of The Life of Jesus by D. F. Strauss, one of the leading figures of the Higher

Criticism in Germany. This criticism was the work of a group of scholars dedicated

to testing the historical authenticity of biblical narratives in the light of modern meth

ods of research. For the rest of her life, Evans continued to read extensively in English

and Continental philosophy; and when she moved to London in 1851, after her

father's death, her impressive intellectual credentials led to her appointment as an

assistant editor of the Westminster Review, a learned journal formerly edited by John

Stuart Mill. In the years in which she served as editor, she wrote a number of essays,

including "Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft" and "Silly Novels by Lady Nov

elists," which she contributed to various periodicals in addition to the Westminster

Review. Her work at the Review brought her into contact with many important writers and

thinkers. Among them was George Henry Lewes, a brilliant critic of literature and

philosophy, with whom she fell in love. Lewes, a married man and father of three

children, could not obtain a divorce. Evans therefore elected to live with him as a

common-law wife, and what they called their "marriage" lasted happily until his death

in 1878. In the last year of her life, she married an admirer and friend, J. W. Cross,

who became her biographer. Her earlier decision to live with Lewes was painfully made: "Light and easily broken

ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically. Women who

are satisfied with such ties do not act as I have done�they obtain what they desire

and are still invited to dinner." Mrs. Lewes, as she called herself, was not invited to

dinner; instead, those who wanted to see her had themselves to seek her company at

the house that she shared with Lewes, where she received visitors on Sunday after

noons. These Sunday afternoons became legendary occasions, over which she pre

sided almost like a sibyl. However, her decision to live with Lewes cost her a number

of social and family ties, including her relationship with her brother, Isaac, to whom