George Eliot was born in Nuneaton on 22nd November 1819. Baptized
Mary Anne Evans, Eliot chose to write using a male pen name. She
was sent away to school but returned when her mother died in
1836.She later moved to Coventry with her father.After her father's
death she became the Assistant Editor of the Westminster Review in
1851. She also met George Henry Lewes this year and they became
partners for the rest of his life. Lewes was already married,
although he and his wife both considered their relationship to be
an open one, but he and Eliot set up home together, much to the
dismay of polite London society.
In 1857 Eliot published Amos Barton in Blackwood's Magazine and in
1859 her novel Adam Bede was published to great acclaim.Her first
attempt to write Middlemarch, her most famous novel, ended in
failure. Abandoning it, she began a short novella entitled Miss
Brooke which was eventually integrated into the final version of
Middlemarch. The novel was published serially in eight parts in
1871. Lewes died in 1878 and Eliot married again in 1880. Her
husband, John Walter Cross was an American who was twenty years her
junior. George Eliot died on 22nd December 1880 at 4 Cheyne Walk,
Chelsea and is buried in Highgate Cemetery next to Lewes.
Perhaps the greatest novel of them all... An enormous canvas and a
vast and poignant range of character...a marvellous portrait of
nineteenth-century provincial life
*Guardian*
In Middlemarch George Eliot's serious intelligence produced a novel
that no one else could have been capable of - a picture of society
as an organic, living, breathing synthesis - order and disorder,
hope and hopelessness, pride and humility, charity and greed
*Kate Atkinson*
Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections,
is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people
*Virginia Woolf*
Another great romantic story, in which the adorable intellectually
pretentious heroine makes a disastrous marriage to a desiccated
fossil before finding true love with a penniless somebody
*Jilly Cooper*
She had such power, and she knew she had. And such courage
*Guardian*
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