BRIEF HISTORY OF MARIAN
MARY ANN (MARIAN) EVANS was born in 1819 in Warwickshire. She attended schools in Nuneaton and Coventry, coming under the influence of evangelical teachers and clergymen. In 1836 her mother died and Marian became her father´s housekeeper, educating herself in her spare time. In 1841 she moved to Coventry, and met Charles and Caroline Bray, local progressive intellectuals. Trough them she was comissioned to translate Strauss´s Life of Jesus and met the radical publisher John Chapman, who, when he purchased the Westminster Review in 1851, made her his managing editor. Having lost her Christian faith and thereby alienated her family, she moved to London where she met Herbert Spencer and the versatile man-of-letters George Henry Lewes. Lewes was separated from his wife, but with no possibility of divorce. In 1854 he and Marian decided to live together, and did so until Lewe´s death in 1878.
It was he who encouraged her to turn from philosophy and journalism to fiction, and she subsequently wrote, under the name of George Eloit, Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, as well as numerous essays, articles and reviews. George Eliot died in 1880, only a few months after marrying J. W. Cross, an old friend and admirer, who became his first biographer. She was buried beside Lewes at Highgate. George Eliot combined a formidable intelligence with imaginative sympathy and acute powers of observation, and become one of the greatest and most influential of English novelists.
Her choice of material widened the horizons of the novel and her psychological insights radically changed the nature of fictional characterization. Evans was an enigmatic figure in English literature. She chose to use a pen name to disguise her gender and identity, but also altered her first real name on several occasions and took the last name of a man with whom she had an affair. As an author, Evans was adept at describing the impact of gossip on a community - especially in Middlemarch - because she dealt so much of it in her own life. One such episode, perhaps the most tumultous period of her life, occured when she elaped with George Henry Lewes, a married man. Her letters to family and friends portrayer her attitude that the relationship was nobody´s bussines and she made strong efforts to defend both Lewes and his wife from scandal.
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Creada: 08/10/2000 Última Actualización: 28/10/2000