The British novelist we know as George Eliot was born as Marian Evans in 1819. She grew up on a farm in rural Warwickshire, the area often referred to as the Midlands (if, say, you're listening to a weather report in London). The biggest town in the county is Nuneaton and the most famous is Stratford-on-Avon, where Shakespeare was born in 1564. The farm on which her father, Robert Evans, worked as supervisor and land agent was outside Nuneaton, about 20 miles east of Birmingham and 100 miles north-northwest of London.
The major influences on her youth appear to have been evangelical Christianity and her own wide reading, which was augmented by the formal education she received at the school her parents sent her to at Nuneaton. The Wikipedia article on her indicates that her homeliness caused her parents to take more care for her education than was common with girls, possibly a mere supposition arising from the fact that she was encouraged to study and learn and was also in her maturity not a very physically attractive woman: Henry James, on having made her acquaintance, told his father that he'd been favorably impressed by "this great horse-faced blue-stocking." (I had thought that "blue-stocking" was just a variation of "silk-stocking," as in "silk-stocking law firm," but it actually means a literary or intellectual woman; "horse-faced" needs no explanation). My impulse to be skeptical of those making much of her appearance is mitigated a little by the suspicion that I've done it myself. A few years ago, after I'd read her greatest work, Middlemarch, I suggested that the character Rosamond Vincy—well, I might as well just quote myself:
I have one bit of amateurish psychology regarding Eliot. She doesn't go in much for villains. . . . But is she not hard on Rosamond Vincy? And isn't beautiful, spoiled Rosamond, who marries the admirable Dr Lydgate and then almost destroys him with her bitchy egocentrism, just the sort of woman that a homely genius like Marian Evans might especially despise? About the only thing to be said against Lydgate is that he was fool enough to marry Rosamond. I wonder whether Eliot wasn't in her fiction working out some bitterness—exercising her prerogative to take authorly revenge.
Maybe true (which means maybe false), but, Middlemarch having been written when she was about 50, I've skipped pretty far ahead in her life. She quit school at 16, when her mother died, and her late adolescence was marred by psychological distresses that she compared to those of Mary Wollstonecraft, who attempted suicide. A crisis of faith must have been some part of this struggle. In 1846, the year she turned 27, Evans published her first book, a translation of David Friedrich Strauss's The Life of Jesus. This was a work of the so-called Higher Criticism of the New Testament that, by subjecting biblical texts to the methods of modern scholarship, subverted traditional understandings that are now often denoted by the term "fundamentalist"—previously, they were just orthodox. Strauss, for example, assigned the miracles described in the gospel narratives to the category of myth rather than to history. It was Evans's translation that brought this book to the attention of the English, and the reaction of the Earl of Shaftesbury was, roughly speaking, representative of the views of religious conservatives—he called The Life of Jesus "the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell." In another few years it would be supplanted by On the Origin of Species.
So: At 16, Eliot's mother dies and she quits school. Then at 27 she publishes her translation of Strauss. For most of the first half of this span of years, she suffers intermittent bouts of debilitating depression. It seems when healthy she is reading voraciously works of theology and philosophy. She teaches herself German in order to pursue these interests and to become familiar with the current scholarship, an effort that culminates with her translation of Strauss's Life of Jesus. The religious faith to which she'd been devoted, and which she'd breathed in with the air in her childhood home, crumbles. We know she informs her father of this when she's about 22, and he is so upset that, to cheer him, she agrees nevertheless to accompany him to church each Sunday—a promise she keeps until his death in 1849, the year she turns 30. In 1851 she moves to London and becomes an assistant editor of Westminster Review, the most liberal of the 19th-century British journals devoted to politics, philosophy, and literature.
The loss-of-faith narrative is so common in the field of Victorian studies that it tends to arouse one's satiric impulses. But who is going to make fun of Marian Evans, the intellectual voyager who accompanied her father to church on Sundays? Literary reputations rise and fall, and hers is now so high—on the same rung as Dickens and Austen among the English novelists, if my sense of current fashions can be trusted—that it's easy to forget how by her late 20s she had established herself as a formidable and entirely self-made giant of the Victorian Age intelligentsia. A woman who quit attending school at 16! Her first novel, Scenes from Clerical Life, was published in magazine installments in 1857 under the pen name George Eliot. It was followed by Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862-63), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876). Considering what is known about the first half of her life, one might have expected the novels that she wrote to be philosophical, hortatory, and didactic, and to involve the problems of thinkers of big thoughts in the metropolis of London. Something like the opposite is more nearly true. The subtitle of Middlemarch is "A Study of Provincial Life," but the phrase could be applied to other of her books as well, and it would be dead wrong to think she intended any satiric import. The author's learning is worn lightly and shows itself mainly in her mastery of the whole human scene in Warwickshire at the approximate time of her birth—the politics, the religion, the economics, the flora and fauna of the fields and meadows, the tricks of every trade and occupation, the sociology, including for example courtship customs of which she would have had herself little or no direct experience, and, most of all, acute psychological insight that, while hardheaded about human beings, is also slow to judge or condemn. The literary scholar George H. Ford, trying to account for the effect made by her fiction, has suggested that it is as if the author of Madame Bovary had taken pity on humankind. Perhaps because she grew up less than 30 miles from Shakespeare's home, I'm inclined to endow her with what Keats, in a letter, called "negative capability":
I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—
Only, he shouldn't have limited it to men of achievement. Before Keats invented the phrase negative capability, people had tried to get at the same, or related, Shakespearean trait by calling him "many-minded," which I take to mean something like "capable of holding opposites in his head without casting one or the other aside." Though she seems to have spent the first half of her life "reaching after fact and reason," the novels Eliot composed in the second half exhibit this opposing quality that is somewhat difficult to describe. Her own mind wasn't the only one she knew or regarded with sympathy.
The preeminent event of her mature private life was her common-law marriage to the critic and scholar George Henry Lewes. When she met him in the early 1850s, Lewes was married with three children. Since he could not obtain a divorce, they lived together as husband and wife for more than twenty years, until he died in 1878. A brother whom she loved, Isaac Evans, never spoke to her after she took up with Lewes. She wrote herself:
Light and easily broken ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically. Women who are satisfied with such ties do not act as I have done—they obtain what they desire and are still invited to dinner.
Though her life with Lewes was happy, she acknowledges the painful consequences of her choice, and one forms the idea that the many-sided ambiguities of experience with which her novels are suffused had a correlative in her life. She died of kidney disease in 1880. Her rejection of Christianity and affair with Lewes precluded the honor of internment at Westminster Abbey and she was buried instead at Highgate Cemetery, next to Lewes, in an area reserved for outcasts, heretics, and other dissidents—the graves of Karl Marx and her friend Herbert Spencer are nearby.