Mary Ann Evans was born in Nuneaton, England. From a young age, she was an avid reader, and because she was not considered beautiful, which reduced her potential to find a husband, her parents decided to nurture her education, a rare offer to girls at the time. At the age of five, she was sent to a boarding school in Attleborough and returned to Nuneaton at 13 to attend Mrs. Wallington’s school and later attended Miss Franklin’s school in Coventry.
At 16, after her mother died, she returned home to run her father’s household. She continued to educate herself by corresponding with her teacher and visiting the library of the local landowner in Arbury Hall.
At 21, she moved with her father to Coventry. There, she became friends with the Bray family, who were liberal philanthropists that campaigned for various social radical causes. Their home was a gathering place for freethinkers, and she became acquainted with agnostic theologies and writers. Questioning her faith, she translated David Strauss’ controversial theological work into English, published in 1846 as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. She also published essays and reviews in Bray’s newspaper, the Coventry Herald and Observer.
At the age of 30, right after her father’s funeral, she traveled with the Brays to Geneva, Switzerland, where she immersed herself in reading and writing. In the following year, she returned to England and settled in London with the intent of becoming a freelance writer while attending mathematics classes at Ladies College. She boarded at the house of John Chapman, the publisher of the left-wing journal The Westminster Review, and soon she began to work as his assistant editor. She contributed to the journal articles expressing her views on society and the gap between the classes.
That year, she met the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes, and within a few years, they lived together. Though he was married, the couple considered themselves husband and wife, while his legal wife had children with another man.
In 1857, at the age of 37, she published her first story in the book Scenes of Clerical Life, a collection of stories about the people of her childhood surroundings in Warwickshire. She used the male pen name George Eliot for the first time to ensure that her fiction writing would not be related to her previous work and to avoid the stereotype of contemporary women novelists who were not taken seriously.
Two years later, she published her first novel, Adam Bede. Its instant success prompted the interest in the author’s identity, and eventually, Eliot revealed that she was the woman behind the name. Eliot’s unusual relationship did not harm her popularity, and she continued to write and publish six more novels and dozens of poems in the next two decades.
In her writing, she presented political and social situations, particularly in Middlemarch, a novel about small-town life on the eve of the Reform Bill of 1832. Many of her characters were outsiders and misfits of rural society portrayed with a method she developed of psychological analysis.
In 1876, at the age of 57, Eliot published her last novel, Daniel Deronda. Afterward, she and Lewes moved to Witley, Surrey, where Lewes died two years later. Following his death, she spent her time and efforts editing his final work, Life, and Mind and founded the George Henry Lewes Studentship in Physiology at Cambridge.
In 1880, she married John Walter Cross, a Scottish commission agent 20 years her junior. They settled in Chelsea, and six months later, she died from a throat infection coupled with the kidney disease she had for several years. She was 61 years old.
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