Middlemarch

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) was born on November 22, 1819 in Nuneaton near Coventry. Her upbringing at home and at an all-girls boarding school was deeply religious. After the death of her mother in 1836, Mary moved to Foleshill, near Coventry, with her father. Influenced by their free-thinking neighbor, she left the church and declared herself an agnostic. However, her puritan upbringing stayed with her all her life and often expressed itself through self-doubt and self-blame. After her father’s death in 1849, Mary spent a year living in Geneva before moving to London. There she started work as an editor for the liberal Westminster Review. In 1851, she met the journalist George Henry Lewes. Despite him being married, they became partners and started living together in 1854 – a scandal in their time, which also led to a break with their families. Mary published her first novel Adam Bede (1859) under the pseudonym George Eliot. The novel came out to great acclaim and established her as an author. She chose to publish under a male pseudonym as there was heavy prejudice against female writers at the time. Also, she didn’t want the scandal of her private life to jeopardize the success of her books. Other novels followed, including The Mill on the Floss in 1860 and Silas Marner in 1861. She abandoned the initial draft of her most famous novel, Middlemarch, and instead started writing a novella entitled Miss Brooke, which she then incorporated into the final version of the novel. Lewes died in 1878. In 1880, Mary married the American banker John Walter Cross, who was 20 years younger than her. She died the same year in London, on December 22, 1880.