GEORGE ELIOT. — 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 upbringing, she lost her faith following the reading of the works of Ch. Hemel and the early English positivists, among whom G. H. Lewes stood out, with whom she had a long illicit relationship, much criticised by Victorian society.
Her translations of Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1844–46) and Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1854), and her substantial collaboration with the Westminster Review, which grouped rationalist writers, led her to writing. She made her debut in fiction in 1858 with Scenes from Clerical Life, and immediately revealed herself as one of the finest English writers. Her novels Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner draw on impressions from her youth in Warwickshire and vividly depict 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 later novels, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, show a progressive hardening of her moral prejudices.
