George Eliot Part I

George Eliot is not one of my favourite novelists. I like her best novel, Middlemarch.. but generally I find her work has a very heavy quality… overly moralistic and rather dull.  I have never much liked her as a person either.  She seems to have been an uneasy combination of a woman who was insecure and over sensitive, but also very egoistical.  She is also a  fore runner of the modern “social justice warriors”.

She was born in Nuneaton – in provincial Midlands England, in 1819... to Robert Evans, who was an estate manager to a landed family.  Her family were comfortably off but not rich or upper class.   She was named Mary Ann, which became Marian or sometimes Pollyann..

She was devoted to her father, who was a very conservative, old fashioned man.  However because his daughter was not very beautiful, he gave her a good education since her chances of marriage seemed slim. She was sent to a school where the prevailing atmosphere was Low Church Evangelical Anglican and she became very religious…

She also had access to her father’s employer’s library and read a good deal on her own.  At 16, she left school to keep house for her father.  At 21, she and Robert Evans moved to Coventry, where she came under the influence of more liberal thinkers.  She began to doubt the literal truth of the bible and to lose her religious belief which had been very important to her.  Her father was very angry with her over this, and they quarrelled.  However to placate him, she went on attending church and keeping house. She continued her studies especially about religious issues... studying the new Bible Criticism.

When she was 30, her father died and she was free to travel and to pursue her intellectual interests, and to become a free thinker.  The first thing she did was to travel to Switzerland with her friends the Brays who were the lynch pin of her group of intellectual friends in Coventry….