Her 1872 work Middlemarch has been described by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.A love triangle roils the peaceful pastoral life of a rural English village. Her poem, 'O May I Join the Choir Invisible' expressed her views about non supernatural immortality: 'O may I join the choir invisible/ Of those immortal dead who live again/ In minds made better by their presence.' D. Themes included her humanist vision and strong heroines.

Renaming herself 'Marian' in private life and adopting the penname 'George Eliot,' she began her impressive fiction career, including: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), and Middlemarch (1871). She became salaried and began writing essays and reviews for The Westminster Review. They lived harmoniously together for the next 24 years, but suffered social ostracism and financial hardship. That year, the shy, respectable writer scandalized British society by sending notices to friends announcing she had entered a free 'union' with George Henry Lewes, editor of The Leader, who was unable to divorce his first wife. Despite a heavy workload, she translated The Essence of Christianity, the only book ever published under her real name. She translated Das Leben Jesu, a monumental task, without signing her name to the 1846 work.Īfter her father's death in 1849, Mary Ann traveled, then accepted an unpaid position with The Westminster Review. Her intellectual views did not, however, change. Her father shunned her, sending the broken-hearted young dependent to live with a sister until she promised to reexamine her feelings. Unable to believe, she conscientiously gave up religion and stopped attending church. Through a family friend, she was exposed to Charles Hennell's 'An Inquiry into the Origins of Christianity'. Her first published work was a religious poem. Influenced by a favorite governess, she became a religious evangelical as an adolescent. Mary Ann, the youngest child and a favorite of her father's, received a good education for a young woman of her day. She was born in 1819 at a farmstead in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, where her father was estate manager. Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era.

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