The Europeans, no 17: George Eliot

Mary Anne (sometimes Marian) Evans, better known as George Eliot, the name she felt necessary to adopt to publish her novels, was born in Warwickshire in 1819, daughter of a farm manager.

Making the pragmatic assessment that Mary Anne was endowed with remarkable intelligence but was no beauty and might flop on the marriage market, her father invested heavily in her education, which continued, under her own direction, after age 16 (university being out of the question) when she was given access to the library of Arbury Hall, the large estate that Robert Evans managed.

In her early 20s Evans was introduced into the circle of radicals and freethinkers gathered around the wealthy Coventry manufacturer Charles Bray and his wife, Caroline Hennell. As a project for the group she produced an English language version of David Strauss's Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus) . Strauss's work, the translation of which was published anonymously in 1846, was an attempt to demystify and historicise the New Testament story and to highlight its mythical elements. The Tory reformer Lord Shaftesbury called it "the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell".

Evans continued to keep house for her father until his death in 1849 and continued to attend church, in spite of her increasing scepticism about revealed religion. She also pursued her interest in theology and philosophy, translating Feuerbach and Spinoza.

After her father's death she travelled extensively abroad, in Switzerland, Germany, Italy and France. In 1850 she moved to London and soon became assistant editor and chief organiser of the progressive Westminster Review , a publication which would be the first to champion Charles Darwin.

'Irregular' relationship
In 1851 she met the writer George Henry Lewes. A few years later they instituted a sort of common law marriage (Lewes was already legally married).

What was unusual for the time was not the couple’s “irregular” relationship itself but the fact that they chose not to hide it; they were to stay together until Lewes’s death in 1878.

Evans was nearly 40 before she published any fiction. Her first novel, Adam Bede , published in 1859, was a huge success, and was followed up with, among others, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Daniel Deronda . Her masterwork, Middlemarch , thought by many to be the greatest English novel, was published in serial form in 1871 and 1872.

Middlemarch 's central story concerns the idealistic Dorothea Brooke, a young woman who wishes to do some good in the world and rejects the marriage proposal of the amiable squire Sir James Chettam in favour of aging scholar Edward Casaubon, who is engaged in assembling a great work of theological synthesis, The Key to all Mythologies .

Parallel to this story is that of the pretty, spoiled Rosamond Vincy and her husband, the idealistic Dr Lydgate, whom she manages to destroy.

Impressive panorama
Against that is an impressive, varied panorama of life in a provincial town (probably Coventry) just before Queen Victoria's accession.

The central irony of Middlemarch is that the desiccated Casaubon's life work, which he cannot quite bring to fruition but to which everything must be sacrificed, is a doomed labour, for German scholarship, of which he is unaware, has passed it out.

While Evans herself read Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, German and Italian, the modern languages – and the ideas they carry – are a closed book to Casaubon. In that sense the novel may at least partially be read as a critique of English intellectual isolationism.

Virginia Woolf thought it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”.