31 Facts About George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era.

George Eliot's works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.

George Eliot remained married to his wife and supported their children, even after she left him to live with another man and have children with him.

In May 1880, eighteen months after Lewes's death, George Eliot married her long-time friend, John Cross, a man much younger than she was, and she changed her name to Mary Ann Cross.

George Eliot was the third child of Robert Evans, manager of the Arbury Hall estate, and Christiana Evans, daughter of a local mill-owner.

George Eliot had a half-brother, Robert Evans, and half-sister, Frances "Fanny" Evans Houghton, from her father's previous marriage to Harriet Poynton.

George Eliot was brought up within a low church Anglican family, but at that time the Midlands was an area with a growing number of religious dissenters.

George Eliot decided to stay on in Geneva alone, living first on the lake at Plongeon and then on the second floor of a house owned by her friends Francois and Juliet d'Albert Durade on the rue de Chanoines.

George Eliot commented happily that "one feels in a downy nest high up in a good old tree".

George Eliot's stay is commemorated by a plaque on the building.

George Eliot stayed at the house of John Chapman, the radical publisher whom she had met earlier at Rosehill and who had published her Strauss translation.

George Eliot then joined Chapman's menage-a-trois along with his wife and mistress.

George Eliot was sympathetic to the lower classes and criticised organised religion throughout her articles and reviews and commented on contemporary ideas of the time.

George Eliot sympathized with the 1848 Revolutions throughout continental Europe, and even hoped that the Italians would chase the "odious Austrians" out of Lombardy and that "decayed monarchs" would be pensioned off, although she believed a gradual reformist approach to social problems was best for England.

Cross, George was Lewes's forename, and Eliot was "a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word".

George Eliot wanted to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as a translator, editor, and critic.

In 1857, when she was 37 years of age, "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton", the first of the three stories included in Scenes of Clerical Life, and the first work of "George Eliot", was published in Blackwood's Magazine.

George Eliot was profoundly influenced by the works of Thomas Carlyle.

George Eliot was influenced by the writings of John Stuart Mill and read all of his major works as they were published.

George Eliot spent the next six months editing Lewes's final work, Life and Mind, for publication, and found solace and companionship with longtime friend and financial adviser John Walter Cross, a Scottish commission agent 20 years her junior, whose mother had recently died.

On 16 May 1880, eighteen months after Lewes' death, George Eliot married John Walter Cross and again changed her name, this time to Mary Ann Cross.

George Eliot had broken off relations with her when she had begun to live with Lewes, and now sent congratulations.

George Eliot was instead interred in Highgate Cemetery, Highgate, London, in the area reserved for political and religious dissenters and agnostics, beside the love of her life, George Henry Lewes.

George Eliot was considered by contemporaries to be physically unattractive; she herself knew this and made jokes about her appearance in letters to friends.

From Adam Bede to The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, George Eliot presented the cases of social outsiders and small-town persecution.

George Eliot shared with Wordsworth the belief that there was much value and beauty to be found in the mundane details of ordinary country life.

George Eliot did not confine herself to stories of the English countryside.

George Eliot had taken particular notice of Feuerbach's conception of Christianity, positing that our understanding of the nature of the divine was to be found ultimately in the nature of humanity projected onto a divine figure.

George Eliot faced a quandary similar to that of Silas Marner, whose alienation from the church simultaneously meant his alienation from society.

George Eliot was at her most autobiographical in Looking Backwards, part of her final published work Impressions of Theophrastus Such.

The various film and television adaptations of George Eliot's books have reintroduced her to the wider reading public.