George Eliot, real name: Mary Ann Evans. Born November 22, 1819 on the Arbury estate in Warwickshire - died December 22, 1880 in London. English writer.
In 1841 she moved with her father to Foleshill, near Coventry.
In 1854, her translation of “The Essence of Christianity” by L. Feuerbach was published. At the same time, her civil marriage began with J. G. Lewis, famous literary critic, who also wrote on scientific and philosophical topics. In their first months life together Mary Ann completed the translation of Spinoza's Ethics and in September 1856 turned to fiction.
Her first work was a series of three stories that appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857 under the general title "Scenes of Clerical Life" and under the pseudonym "George Eliot". Like many other writers of the 19th century (Marco Vovchok, the Brontë sisters - “Carrer, Ellis and Acton Bell”, Krestovsky-Khvoshchinskaya) - Mary Evans used a male pseudonym in order to evoke serious attitude to his writings and taking care of the privacy of his privacy. (In the 19th century, her works were translated into Russian without disclosing her pseudonym, which was interpreted as male name and surname: “a novel by George Eliot”). Nevertheless, Charles Dickens immediately guessed a woman in the mysterious “Eliot”.
Anticipating her future and best creations, “Scenes” are full of heartfelt memories of the former, who had not yet known railways England. Adam Bede, published in 1859, is an extremely popular and perhaps the best pastoral novel in history. English literature
, brought Eliot to the forefront of Victorian novelists. In Adam Bede, George Eliot wrote about her father's youth (England century), in “The Mill on the Floss” (English: The Mill on the Floss, 1860) turned to her own early impressions. The heroine of the novel, the passionate and spiritual Maggie Tulliver, has a lot in common with the young Mary Ann Evans. The most substantive of Eliot's "rural" novels is Silas Marner. The characters live lives that are convincing in the eyes of the reader; they are surrounded by a concrete, recognizable world. This is Eliot's last "autobiographical" novel.
“Romola” (English: Romola, 1863) tells the story of Florence in the 15th century, and the paintings of Renaissance Italy are just as read from books as they were fed by the memories of the “scene” of departing England. In the novel Felix Holt the Radical, 1866, returning to English life, Eliot revealed the temperament of a keen social critic.
Eliot's universally recognized masterpiece is the novel Middlemarch; published in parts in 1871-1872.
Eliot shows how a powerful desire for good can be ruined by hidden weakness, how complexities of character nullify the noblest aspirations, how moral degeneration befalls people who were not initially bad at all.
Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda, appeared in 1876. Lewis died two years later, and the writer devoted herself to preparing his manuscripts for publication.
In May 1880, she married an old family friend, D. W. Cross, but died on December 22, 1880.
Bibliography George Eliot:
1859 - "Adam Bede"
1860 - “Mill on the Floss”
1861 - "Silas Marner"
1863 - "Romola"
1866 - "Felix Holt, Radical"
1871-1872 - "Middlemarch"
1876 - "Daniel Deronda".
Eliot’s work is close in some ways to naturalism, which, however, did not prevent her from reproducing a typical picture of the life of the provincial philistinism in her novel “The Mill on the Floss” (Russian translation, 1860).
The works signed by the male name “George Eliot” are already a century and a half old. Life, way of life and traditions, against the backdrop of which the action of such novels as “Middlemarch”, “Siles Manner”, “The Mill on the Floss”, have long since receded into history, however, the concreteness and recognition of details, the psychological accuracy of the characters and relationships of the heroes, as well as masterfully the painted pictures of old England attract new and new generations of readers to them. Mary Evans, married to Cross, was not the only writer who preferred to publish her works under a man’s name - just remember such a famous one in literature XXI century name like Georges Sand. However, such a subtle connoisseur human souls, as Charles Dickens, not being familiar with the writer, immediately guessed that the woman called herself George Elliot.
Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans was born on November 22, 1819 in a house located in rural areas Derbyshire. Her father, Robert Evans, a native of Wales, was the manager of Arbury Hall, the family estate of the Barons of Newdigate, and her mother, Christina Pearson, was a farmer's daughter. Robert's two children from a previous marriage were already growing up in the family, as well as eldest daughter Chrissie and son Isaac. Mary was considered an ugly girl, but she was smart and loving.
la read. Robert Evans understood that neither external data nor a dowry could provide his daughter with a profitable marriage and a worthy place in society, so he decided to give her a good education. From five to sixteen years old, the girl studied in closed schools.
In 1836, Christina Evans died. Mary took control of the entire household; she did not part with her father until his death in 1849. The girl was allowed to use the magnificent library of Archery Hall, and she perfectly studied the books of the classics, including those in Latin and Greek. In 1840, after her brother's marriage, Mary Evans and her father moved to the town of Foleshill, near Coventry. There she met the manufacturer-philanthropist Charles Bray, who maintained wide contact with philosophers, writers, liberal religious figures, in particular, with Robert Owen, David Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach.
In 1846, Mary Evans anonymously published her first book, a translation of Strauss's Life of Christ. After her father's death, she traveled around Europe for some time, then came to London, where she settled in the house of her old friend from Coventry, the publisher John Chapman. He published the literary and philosophical magazine "Westminster Review", and after long
Chapman's hesitation and persuasion, Mary, who began to call herself Marian, took the position of assistant editor in the magazine without pay. Simultaneously with the enormous work that had to be done in the magazine, Marian was translating Feuerbach’s book “The Essence of Christianity.” This translation was published in 1854 and was the only work that Marian Evans published under her real name. In the same year, she met the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewis. Despite the fact that Lewis was married to Agnes Jervis and had three children, he entered into an agreement with his wife for mutual freedom; Agnes's four children, whose father was Daily Telegraph editor Thornton Hart, were formally considered Lewis's children, and dissolution of the marriage was practically impossible under the laws of that time. Although extramarital affairs were not uncommon in Victorian England, and among writers and journalists they were very common, open communication was considered a challenge to society. The romance between Marian Evans and George Lewis began in 1854 and marked new stage her literary creativity. During the first months of their trip to Weimar together, Marian completed a translation of Baruch Spinoza's Ethics and began writing fiction.
In 1857, in the Blackwood Magazine
Ezin" began publishing a series of stories entitled "Scenes from the Life of the Clergy", the author of which was George Elliot. The choice of a male pseudonym was not accidental - at that time, as to this day, "ladies' prose is a priori viewed as frivolous entertaining reading; except Moreover, Marian did not want to attract the attention of readers to her person and the peculiarities of her personal life. In 1859, Marian wrote her first big novel, entitled “Adam Bede.” The background for this book was the time familiar to her from her father’s stories - the end of the 18th century. enjoyed extraordinary popularity, and to this day is considered the best English novel in the “rural” style. This book was admired by Queen Victoria, who ordered a series of paintings based on “Adam Bede” from the artist Edward Corbould.
The next novel, “The Mill on the Floss” (1860), described the events that took place during the writer’s youth, and the heroine of this work, Maggie Tulliver, was in many ways reminiscent of the young Mary Evans. On title page"Mills on the Floss" bore the dedication: "To my beloved husband, George Henry Lewis, I dedicate my third book, written in the sixth year of our marriage." IN next year the writer published her latest “autobiographical” work
eating "Silas Marner". In 1863, Marian Evans wrote the historical novel Romola, set in Renaissance Florence, and in 1866, the incisive social-critical narrative Felix Holt, Radical. This was followed by the poem “The Spanish Gypsy,” written in blank verse, but it, like the poetic experiments of young Mary Evans, was not successful. But the novel "Middlemarch" (1870), showing the story of the moral degeneration of the heroes, became her best book and constituted the glory of English literature. The last work The writer became "Daniel Deronda", written in 1876.
The success of George Elliott's novels softened public reaction to the Lewis-Evans union, especially since their relationship has stood the test of time; in 1877, the writer was even introduced to Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Louise. Lewis died in 1877. For two years, Marian prepared his last work, Life and Mind, for publication, and in May 1880 she once again challenged society: she married an old family friend, John Cross, who was fifteen years younger than her and was depressed after the death of her mother. However, the marriage turned out to be short: in December 1880, the writer died. Her ashes are buried in Highgate Cemetery, next to the grave of Henry Lewis.
Mary Ann Evans(real name George Eliot) was born on November 22, 1819 in provincial England. Her father was a builder and part-time carpenter. The mother ran the household and was known as a woman of unbending character, practical and active.
Three children, Christina, Isaac and Mary Ann had little fun in a small, boring town. Twice a day a mail coach with a coachman in bright red livery passed by their house. Watching the passing carriage was the children's greatest entertainment. Mary Ann later described life in this way: hometown: “We lived here strong men When they returned from the coal mines in the morning, they immediately collapsed on a dirty bed and slept until dark. In the evening they woke up only to spend most of their money with friends in a pub. Here lived the workers from the textile factory, men and women, pale and exhausted from working long hours into the night. The houses were neglected, as were the small children, for their mothers devoted all their strength to the loom.”
However, Mary Ann's parents belonged to the middle class, and the children did not know hunger or cold. But they were oppressed by the life around them. Mary Ann since early childhood I didn’t want to put up with this routine. When she was only four years old, she sat down at the piano and played it as best she could. She could not distinguish one note from another, and did this only so that the servants could see what an important and sophisticated lady she was!
But her mother’s health suddenly began to deteriorate, and when the girl turned five, she and her sister were sent to boarding school, where they spent 4 years. At the age of 9 she was transferred to another, larger school. Mary Ann loved to study and soon surpassed the rest of her students. But most of all, the girl loved to read, and she kept her first book, “Lynette’s Life,” until the end of her days. Then she began to write books herself. She wrote her first book like this: her friend lost a book that Mary Ann did not have time to finish reading. Then Mary Ann decided to write the end for herself, and wrote a whole thick volume, which was subsequently read to the whole school.
When Mary Ann was 16 years old, her mother died. The elder sister soon got married. And Mary Ann had to take charge of everything household. So from a schoolgirl she turned into a housewife, whose life was limited to “four walls.” But the all-consuming love for books and thirst for knowledge remained. She read the most serious scientific works in history and philosophy. She even found good teacher, who began to teach her French, German and Italian at home. Another teacher taught her music. A little later, she began to learn Greek, Latin and Spanish. Later in one of her books she will write: “You will never be able to imagine what it means to have a male mentality and remain in slavery to a female body.”
Soon, largely under pressure from Mary Ann, the family moved to live in Big city, where Mary Ann finally had educated friends and an enlightened social circle. She was especially close friends with Bray's husband and wife, who influenced her intellectually and spiritual development considerable influence. After the death of her father, Mary Ann and the Bray family went to the Continent, where she visited Paris, Milan and Geneva, visited theaters and museums, and met famous people and listens to a course of lectures on experimental physics. After this long trip she has so little money left that, in order to continue taking music lessons, she decides to sell her Encyclopedia Britannica.
Soon after returning to England, Miss Evans meets Mr. Chapman, the editor of a major metropolitan magazine, who was so impressed by Mary Ann's erudition and abilities that he offered her the position of assistant editor - an unusual position for a woman at the time, which had previously been occupied exclusively by men. Mary Ann agreed and moved to London. How different life in the capital was from life in a provincial town! The doors of the best houses opened for Miss Evans, she met great people and the best minds of our time. Now she is immersed in work with her head. At that time she was 32 years old. Then she met George Lewis, a witty and versatile man, a brilliant intellectual, and a good actor, who wrote “The History of Philosophy,” two novels, and collaborated with many metropolitan magazines. Despite this, he was very unhappy in his personal and family life. That he fell in love with Mary Ann is not at all surprising. She, at first, only admired him, and, perhaps, felt sorry for him and his three sons because of family troubles. “Mr Lewis is kind and considerate and has gained my respect in many ways. Like few people in this world, he is much better than he seems. A man who has intelligence and soul, although he hides them behind a mask of frivolity.”
Meanwhile, Mary Ann's health began to deteriorate and she became very tired from permanent job, she is plagued by constant headaches. And in 1854, she left the magazine and left with Lewis and his three sons for Germany. Her many friends condemn this union, which was not sanctified by marriage, and consider it the biggest mistake in her life.
To earn a living, while Lewis was writing his great work, The Life of Goethe, Mary Ann wrote articles for various German magazines, and not a single article is published under her name - to preserve the reputation of the magazine, no one should know that these articles were written by a woman!
After returning to England, already at the age of 37, Mary Ann finally decides to write a novel, for the first time since her childhood experiences. "Write real romance“It was always my childhood dream,” said Mary Ann Evans, “But I never dared to do it, although I felt that I was strong in plot, dialogue and dramatic descriptions.” After she wrote the first part of Scenes from Clerical Life, she read it to Lewis. "We both cried over her and then he kissed me and told me he believed in me."
Lewis sent the novel to one of the publishers under the pseudonym "George Eliot" - the first name that came to mind - saying that it was a novel by one of his friends. The novel was accepted for publication and Mary Ann received a check for £250. This encouraged the writer so much that the next two novels were written in one breath. George Eliot's popularity began to grow, and even Thackeray himself (author of Vanity Fair) said of him: “This is great writer!” And Charles Dickens, noting the humor and pathos of the novels, guessed that the author must be a woman!
For her fourth book, Adam Bead, which received stunning success and was subsequently translated into many languages, Mary Ann Evans has already received 4 thousand pounds, poverty and deprivation are left behind. And since many contenders for the authorship of the novel began to appear, the real name of the writer had to be revealed.
With ever-increasing royalties from their books, Evans and Lewis acquired a large estate on which they quiet life, meeting only a few friends. Lewis's health deteriorated greatly and he died in 1878. For Mary Ann, this loss was irreparable. She lost his love and his support. After all, he idolized her all his life. And he wrote about her: “From the time I knew her (and to know her means to love her), my life received a new birth. It is to her that I owe my prosperity and my happiness.”
At that time, their family friend was John Walter Cross, a prosperous banker, many years younger than Mary Ann. He became an indispensable assistant in her affairs after Lewis's death. She was extremely depressed, and Cross did everything he could to bring her out of this state. In May 1880, a year and a half after Lewis's death, they married. Mary Ann wrote then: “Thanks to marriage, I seem to have been reborn again. But I would still willingly give up my life if it could bring Lewis back to life.”
One December day of the same year, Mary Ann caught a severe cold and died 2 days later. Her family life only lasted six months! She was buried in a London cemetery. On her gravestone is a quote from one of her poems:
"Oh, may I join the invisible chorus of those immortals who will live forever in better creatures."
Next to her grave is the grave of George Lewis.
Big Soviet Encyclopedia notes:
"...E.'s novels (including "Felix Holt, Radical", vol. 1-3, 1866, Russian translation 1867; "Middlemarch", vol. 1-4, 1871-72, Russian translation 1873) were popular in Russia, they were highly valued by N. G. Chernyshevsky, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, I. S. Turgenev, L. N. Tolstoy.”
Mary Ann Evans preferred to write realistic works, so the first and only genre work Mary Ann became the story “The Lifted Veil” (1859), about a man with the gift of foresight. This is one of classical works Victorian Gothic. In one of Evans's most significant novels, Silas Marner, The Weaver of Raveloe, 1961, published in the same year as Dickens's Great Expectations, despite the realism of what is happening, events develop according to the plan of one of our favorite fairy tales “Rumplestiltskin”. Main characters: Weaver Silas Marner, described by the villagers as possessing supernatural powers, small in stature, as if he belongs to a long-lost race. Rumpelstiltskin dreams of exchanging his gold for a child, and Silas Marner, having lost his wealth, gains a golden-haired foundling.
English writer
short biography
(eng. George Eliot; real name Mary Ann Evans, Mary Ann Evans; November 22, 1819, Arbury estate in Warwickshire - December 22, 1880, London) - English writer.
Mary Ann Evans was born into a poor but very respectable bourgeois family. English family. Her father worked as a manager on other people's estates and also ran a farm himself. Mary Ann was educated at a private boarding school, where Special attention devoted to religious instruction and for a long time was a Puritan, but over time she refused to attend church, having read many books by radical thinkers.
In 1841 she moved with her father to Foleshill, near Coventry.
In 1846, Mary Ann anonymously published a translation of The Life of Jesus by D. F. Strauss. After the death of her father (1849), she did not hesitate to accept the position of assistant editor at the Westminster Review and in 1851 she moved to London. In 1854, her translation of “The Essence of Christianity” by L. Feuerbach was published. At the same time, her civil marriage began with J. G. Lewis, a famous literary critic who also wrote on scientific and philosophical topics, whom Mary Ann met through the philosopher Herbert Spencer and the publisher Chapman. In the first months of their marriage, Mary Ann completed a translation of Spinoza's Ethics and in September 1856 turned to fiction.
Hugh Thomson. Frontispiece of Scenes from the Life of the Clergy, MacMillan, 1906
Her first work was a cycle of three stories, which appeared in Blackwoods Magazine in 1857 under the general title “Scenes of Clerical Life” and the pseudonym “ " Like many other writers of the 19th century (George Sand, Marco Vovchok, the Brontë sisters - “Carrer, Ellis and Acton Bell”, Krestovsky-Khvoshchinskaya) - Mary Evans used a male pseudonym in order to arouse in the public a serious attitude towards her writings and caring for the integrity of your personal life. (In the 19th century, her works were translated into Russian without disclosing her pseudonym, which was inflected like a man’s first and last name: “a novel by George Eliot”). Nevertheless, Charles Dickens immediately guessed a woman in the mysterious “Eliot”.
Anticipating her future and best creations, “Scenes” are full of sincere memories of the former England, which did not yet know the railways.
Published in 1859, the novel Adam Bede, an extremely popular and perhaps the best pastoral novel in English literature, brought Eliot to the forefront of Victorian novelists. In “Adam Beede” George Eliot wrote about the times of her father’s youth (England at the end of the 18th century), in “The Mill on the Floss” (English: The Mill on the Floss, 1860) she turned to her own early impressions. The heroine of the novel, the passionate and spiritual Maggie Tulliver, has a lot in common with the young Mary Ann Evans. The most substantive of Eliot's "rural" novels is Silas Marner. The characters live lives that are convincing in the eyes of the reader; they are surrounded by a concrete, recognizable world. This is Eliot's last "autobiographical" novel. “Romola” (English: Romola, 1863) tells the story of Florence in the 15th century, and the paintings of Renaissance Italy are just as read from books as they were fed by the memories of the “scene” of departing England. In Felix Holt the Radical (1866), returning to English life, Eliot revealed the temperament of an acute social critic.
Eliot's universally recognized masterpiece is the novel Middlemarch; published in parts in 1871-1872. Eliot shows how a powerful desire for good can be ruined by hidden weakness, how complexities of character nullify the noblest aspirations, how moral degeneration befalls people who were not initially bad at all. Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda, appeared in 1876. Lewis died two years later, and the writer devoted herself to preparing his manuscripts for publication. In May 1880, she married an old family friend, D. W. Cross, but died on December 22, 1880.
The real name of Mary Ann Evans (Ivens) is Magoo Ann Evans. The daughter of a farmer, raised on a wealthy estate, Eliot managed to get a good education and became one of the most educated and innovative women of her time - a kind of English George Sand. Having caused condemnation from her environment, she entered into a civil marriage with the philosopher and publicist J. G. Lewis, one of the moderate positivists, followers of G. Spencer. This step in the conditions of Victorian England required considerable courage and left a certain imprint on her worldview. An equally important problem for her was the religious problem. In her attitude towards Christianity she went through a long and hard way from acceptance through a break with its orthodox forms to the approval of the ideas of “religious humanism”. A certain role in the development of her views in this area was played by her translations into English language from the German book by D. Strauss “The Life of Jesus” (1846) and L. Feuerbach “The Essence of Christianity” (1854). Among her works of an “applied” nature, one should also mention her participation in editing the positivist magazine “Westminster Review”.
Artistic activity Eliot began in the late 50s, publishing her first book, Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858, which included several independent works and was a mixed type of essay novel.
Her programmatic work and at the same time a genuine literary debut was the novel “Adam Bede” (1859). This novel has an acute dramatic conflict.
Best novel Eliot, marked by maturity artistic manner, deep and subtle psychologism, became her next novel, “The Mill on the Floss”, 1860. Besides magnificent paintings nature, it attracts readers with the deep drama of the situation depicted in it. The Tulliver family, owners of a mill on the River Floss, connects two hereditary lines: the passionate, dreamy Tullivers, who live mainly from the heart (father's line), and the tenacious, rational-minded and therefore hard-hearted Dodsons (mother's line). The first line is inherited by the heroine of the novel Maggie Tulliver, the second is her brother Tom. Maggie's ardor and impracticality leave a dramatic imprint on her fate. Expelled from home by Tom (she “compromised” herself in his eyes by a careless walk alone with a young man), Maggie dies while saving her unworthy brother on the river during a flood.
The 1861 novel Silas Marner is the story of a weaver who is robbed by a landowner but remains warm-hearted. He raises his daughter Annie, abandoned by the brother of his abuser, who, having grown up, does not want to return to her father and remains among the people from the people who raised her and even marries an artisan.
If in your early work Eliot gravitated toward depicting the ordinary, the ordinary, while striving for extreme accuracy and objectivity; in her mature works she gives a socio-philosophical understanding of life phenomena, deeply explores the psychology of complex, contradictory characters, creates full-blooded images.
So in historical novel“Romola” (“Romola”, 1863), the setting of which is 15th-century Florence, the author focuses on the struggle of Savonarola against the Medici and Renaissance culture, to which the heroine sympathizes with the plight of the people. The novel “Felix Holt the Radical” (“Felix Holt the Radical”, 1866) takes the action to England in the 19th century. and provides a hard-hitting critique of the English electoral and parliamentary system.
Eliot's most significant creation of the late period was the novel "Middlemarch" (1871 - 1872). The events of the book take place in the 30s. XIX century in the fictional town of Middlemarch, which incorporates typical features of the English province. Two stand out in the story storylines– Dorothy Brooke and Tertius Lydgate. Dorothy, an extraordinary strong-willed girl, has been obsessed with the idea of devoting herself since childhood to important matter. Having married the elderly scientist Casaubon, Dorothy very soon becomes convinced that the man who seemed to her a great scientist, whose assistant and support she dreamed of becoming, is just a narrow-minded and unkind pedant who does not deserve her attention and participation. Equally dramatic is the second, parallel story in the novel - the life of the young doctor Lydgate, who strives to selflessly serve science and people. Succumbing to feelings, he makes a fatal mistake - he marries the daughter of the manufacturer Rosamond Vincey. The narrow-minded and selfish bourgeois woman paralyzes Lydgate's will and desires and constantly burdens him with financial worries. Having betrayed his ideals, Lydgate gradually turns into a fashionable, successful doctor, internally resisting his position, but no longer able to change it. The novel was conceived as philosophical work: the writer wanted to show how a person’s actions, the consequences of which he does not think about, determine both his own fate and the fate of those around him.
At the same time, Middlemarch is also a broad picture of morals, containing deep social generalizations. The last novel
Eliot wrote the highly dramatic novel “Daniel Deronda” (1876). In addition, she owns a number of plays, among which can be called “The Spanish Gypsy” (“The Spanish Gypsy”, 1868), as well as collections of essays and memoirs.
