George Eliot

Griff House, and losing her religion

She was born Mary Ann Evans at South Farm on the Arbury estate in Warwickshire on 22 November 1819, the youngest child of Robert Evans, the estate's land agent — a practical, capable man whose competence she gave to Adam Bede and Caleb Garth. Early in 1820 the family moved to Griff House, a big farmhouse between Nuneaton and Bedworth, and she lived there until she was twenty-one. The house is now a Beefeater restaurant and hotel; the George Eliot Fellowship has spent years converting the surviving outbuilding behind it into a visitor centre.

In 1841 she moved with her widowed father to Coventry and fell in with Charles and Cara Bray, freethinking manufacturers whose house at Rosehill collected sceptics. Within a year she had stopped going to church, which caused a serious breach with her father, and had taken on a job that shaped everything after: translating David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu, the German book that examined the Gospels as historical documents and treated the miracles as myth. It appeared in English in 1846. In 1854 she published a second translation, of Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, which argued that God is a projection of human qualities — the one book ever printed with her real name, Marian Evans, on the title page.

In 1849, three months after her father died, she went to the Continent with the Brays, travelling by way of Paris, Lyons and the Alps, and stayed on alone in Geneva for eight months while they went home. She came back through Paris in March 1850. Then she moved to London, lodged with the publisher John Chapman, and became — unpaid and unnamed on the masthead — the effective editor of the Westminster Review, the most serious radical quarterly in England.

The name, and the man it came from

George Henry Lewes was a critic, philosopher and biographer of Goethe, and he was already married. English divorce law of the 1850s gave him no way out of that marriage and gave her no way to enter it. On 20 July 1854 Mary Ann Evans boarded a steamer at London for Antwerp with him, bound for Weimar and Berlin, and from then on called herself Marian Evans Lewes. Victorian society had no category for what the arrangement was, and treated it as the worst thing it could be. Her own brother Isaac stopped writing to her for more than twenty years, and resumed only when she made a legal marriage in 1880.

It was Lewes who pushed her into fiction, and the disguise was practical. She was a woman, she was a scandal, and she wanted the stories judged as stories. Her first three appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857 as by 'George Eliot', a name her husband later explained without any romance at all: George was Lewes's Christian name, and Eliot was a good, mouth-filling, easily pronounced word. 'I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito,' she told her publisher, 'having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.'

The disguise nearly held. In January 1858 Charles Dickens wrote to Blackwood's mysterious author to say he had never seen the like of the truth and delicacy in those stories — and that, addressing the envelope to 'George Eliot, Esq.', he would have been strongly disposed to address the writer as a woman, because if no woman wrote them then no man ever before had the art of making himself mentally so like one. He dined with the Leweses for the first time in November 1859, by which point the secret was out: a Warwickshire clergyman named Joseph Liggins was going about claiming the books, and stopping him meant giving her name.

Comte's apartment, and Madame Mohl's dinner

On 9 July 1859, on the way to Switzerland, she and Lewes spent a day in Paris and went first to the Louvre, where Veronese's enormous Marriage at Cana — the largest painting in the museum — converted her, as she wrote in her journal, to high admiration of him. They came back through the city ten days later. It is a small entry, and it is the pattern of her Paris: a day, seized between trains, spent looking hard at something.

The visit of 15 to 25 January 1865 was different, and it explains what France meant to her. She and Lewes went to the theatre or the opera nearly every night and saw sights all day, but the sight she singled out was a private flat. Auguste Comte, the French philosopher who founded positivism — the doctrine that knowledge should rest on observable fact rather than theology or metaphysics, and that humanity itself should be the object of reverence — had died in 1857, and his followers had kept his rooms as he left them. Eliot, who subscribed to the English positivist fund and counted Comte's disciples among her closest friends, went to stand in them. 'Such places, that knew the great dead, always move me deeply,' she wrote afterwards. 'We thought the apartment very freundlich, and I flattered myself that I could have written better in the little study there than in my own.'

My gratitude increases continually for the illumination Comte has contributed to my life.

The last days of 1866 gave her the one Paris season that was social. On the way to Spain the Leweses stayed three days at the Hôtel du Helder and prolonged the stop to see Mary Clarke Mohl — 'Madame Mohl', an Englishwoman who had married the German orientalist Julius Mohl and kept, in the rue du Bac, one of the most durable salons in Paris. She gave a dinner for them on 29 December with the Protestant critic Edmond Scherer and his wife, the politician Jules Simon and other men of letters, and tempted them to stay until Monday the 31st by promising to produce Ernest Renan at breakfast — the scholar whose Vie de Jésus had scandalised Catholic France three years earlier by treating Christ as a historical man. She got him. Eliot's verdict is characteristically unimpressed and exact: Renan's appearance was something between the Catholic priest and the dissenting minister, his manners very amiable, his talk pleasant but not distinguished. On the last night of the year the couple had to walk back from the rue de Rivoli to their hotel in the rain, because every carriage in Paris was taken.

Middlemarch

Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861) made her one of the most successful novelists in England: the fourth edition of Adam Bede, five thousand copies, sold out in a fortnight. Middlemarch, begun on 2 August 1869 and published in eight instalments from 1 December 1871 to the end of 1872, is the book the rest built towards. It is subtitled 'A Study of Provincial Life' and set in a Midlands town around the Reform Bill of 1832. Dorothea Brooke, clever and desperate to do good, marries a dried-up scholar whose great book will never be written; Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor, means to change medicine and is destroyed by debt, gossip and an expensive wife. Nobody achieves what they set out to achieve. What the novel does that almost nothing before it had done is grant every one of its several dozen characters an inner life of the same weight as the heroine's, and then show them all colliding.

The reading behind it was Continental. Her journal for the Middlemarch summers records her working through Renouard's history of medicine while she built Lydgate, and the intellectual frame is French: the positivist idea that a society can be studied as a system whose parts act on one another is the organising principle of a novel whose governing image is a web.

Two marriages and Highgate

In 1869 a letter arrived from Connecticut. Harriet Beecher Stowe, whom she had never met, addressed her as 'dear friend'; Eliot wrote back that she valued very highly the warrant to call her friend, and confessed the paralysing despondency in which many days of her writing life had been passed. The two women exchanged letters for the rest of Eliot's life and never once saw each other.

Lewes died in 1878. Eighteen months later, on 6 May 1880, she married John Walter Cross, a banker twenty years younger who had been the couple's friend and financial adviser — a decision she made, she told a friend, only a fortnight before it happened. Her brother Isaac, who had not written to her since 1857, sent congratulations at once; she had become respectable by becoming a wife. The honeymoon went through Paris to Italy, and Cross's account of it is the last picture of her: at Paris they spent their mornings at the Louvre or the Luxembourg looking at pictures and sculpture, walked in the Bois in the afternoons and went to the theatre in the evenings, and from the day she set foot on the Continent to the day she came home she was never ill, and looked years younger.

The health did not survive the return to the English damp; her strength went from the week she got home. She died in London on 22 December 1880, aged sixty-one, and was buried on the 29th in Highgate Cemetery, in the grave next to Lewes, on a bitter day of sleet and snow, before a crowd of people who had known her and a larger crowd who had not.