27 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 was the third child of Robert Evans and Christiana Evans, the daughter of a local mill-owner.

George Eliot spelled her name differently at different times: Mary Anne was the spelling used by her father for the baptismal record and she uses this spelling in her earliest letters.

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's father Robert Evans, of Welsh ancestry, was the manager of the Arbury Hall Estate for the Newdigate family in Warwickshire, and Mary Ann was born on the estate at South Farm.

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

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 two years editing Lewes's final work, Life and Mind, for publication, and found solace and companionship with John Walter Cross, a Scottish commission agent 20 years her junior, whose mother had recently died.

On 16 May 1880 George Eliot married John Walter Cross and again changed her name, this time to Mary Ann Cross.

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.

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 re-introduced her to the wider reading public.