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GEORGE ELIOT

George Eliot was the published name of Mary Ann Evans (Marian Evans), an English writer. She was born in 1819 at Griff near Nuneaton and died in 1880. She was the daughter of a Warwickshire land-agent and surveyor, and received an excellent education at Coventry, comprising the classical and modern languages, and shortly after her twenty-first birthday she became a convert to Rationalism.

Her first literary undertaking was the completion of Mrs. Hennell's translation of Strauss's Life of Jesus (1846). After spending two years abroad she boarded at the house of John Chapman, editor of the Westminster Review, of which she became sub-editor. It was not, however, until January, 1857, that she came prominently into public notice, when the first of a series of tales entitled Scenes from Clerical Life appeared in Blackwood's Magazine. These were written anonymously, and when it was assumed to have been written by a man she adopted her nom de plume. The series came to an end in November, 1857, and in the following year the publication of Adam Bede placed her in the first rank of writers of fiction. It was succeeded by the Mill on the Floss published in 1860, Silas Marner published in 1861, Eomola (1863), Felix Holt (1866), Middlemarch (1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876). In addition to those prose works she published three volumes of poems, The Spanish Gypsy (1818), Agatha (1869), and the Legend of Jubal (1874). Her last work published during her life was the series of essays entitled The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), but a volume of mixed essays was issued posthumously. For many years she was happily associated both in life and work with George Henry Lewes, though marriage was impossible during the lifetime of Mrs. Lewes. In May, 1880, after Mr. Lewes' death, she married Mr. John Cross, but did not survive the marriage many months, dying rather suddenly at Chelsea on the 22nd of December of that year.
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