ELIOT, GEORGE. - Pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, English writer, b. at Arbury Farm (Warwickshire) on 22 Nov. 1819, d. at Chelsea on 22 Dec. 1880. After a strict religious education, she lost her faith following her reading of the works of Ch. Hennel and of the early English positivists, among whom G. H. Lewes stood out; with him she had a long illicit relationship, much criticized by Victorian society.
Her translations of Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1844–46) and Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1854), together with her demanding collaboration with the Westminster Review, which brought together rationalist writers, led her to writing. She made her debut in fiction in 1858 with Scenes from clerical life, and at once revealed herself as one of the finest English women writers. The novels Adam Bede, The mill on the floss, and Silas Marner gather the impressions of her youth in Warwickshire and portray with great effectiveness the life of the English middle class in small provincial settings. With Romola, a Florentine novel set in the time of Savonarola, E. attempted the historical novel. Her last novels, Middlemarch and Daniel Derondo, attest to a progressive hardening of her moral prejudices.