George Eliot

From Philosopedia

Eliot, George (pen name of Marian Mary Ann Evans) (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880)

Taking a masculine pseudonym in a time when women had problems in succeeding as writers, Evans wrote Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede (1859) and Silas Marner (1861). In the former, Eliot shows in three tales the hopelessness and helplessness of most private lives. In Chapter 17 of Adam Bede she reveals goals for humanity not unlike those of present-day secular humanists. She also demonstrated the demands of a secular morality that for her replaced, and in most respects duplicated, the demands of Christianity's revealed system of morality. Early on in life, she was favorably impressed by the sympathetic treatment of the atheist in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Devereaux (1829), and her philosophic outlook became that of a rationalist. At the age of twenty-two, she refused to accompany her father to church, which has been interpreted both as a sign of her individuality and also of her refusal to be dominated by a male. Evans was encouraged by the brother-in-law, Charles Hennell, of her friend, Charles Bray. Hennell wrote An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838).

"Human affection,"� she wrote, "is the only power for salvation on this earth."� For Evans, Christian dogmas were "dishonorable to God"� and pernicious to human happiness. She further showed her freethinking outlook by translating Strauss' famous Life of Jesus and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, the latter being the work of a profound atheist. George Foote tells that in a conversation Eliot had with a Mr. Myers, they talked of God, immortality, and duty: she gravely remarked, "How inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, and how peremptory and absolute the third."�

Germaine Greer, in The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause (1992), cites George Eliot as a woman who, without benefit of plastic surgery, found romance in mid-life and beyond. Eliot once wrote, "Christianity turned the clock of general progress back a thousand years, it turned back the clock two thousand years for women."�

As for her physical appearance, Moncure Conway said she was "a finely-shaped woman, and quite large, though not in the sense in which Hawthorne describes English female largeness. She is by no means corpulent, nor are there any suggestions of steaks and sirloins about her, but she is of large skeleton. She is not meager, either, but has the look of being made out of fine clay. She is blonde, with very light auburn hair; clear, serene, smiling eyes; beautiful teeth. She has also gracious and easy manners, with an undefinable air of unworldliness - of having been made for large and fine societies, but never entered them. In a word, she is a woman who, though not handsome, would personally satisfy her most ardent admirers."�

Underwood, however, mentions that Eliot was "nervously sensitive as to her lack of beauty and will not on that account consent to sit for any kind of picture." "The pseudonym of George Eliot,"� wrote Underwood, "under which she first appeared as a novelist, and the careful assumption of masculinity throughout the pages of Adam Bede, while it puzzled and led astray the public as to her identity, did not long deceive as to her sex. The woman's tender heart and keen sense of injustice made palpable the true woman's nature all through her book.

Theodore Parker, writing to Frances Power Cobbe in 1859, remarks: "I am reading Adam Bede, a quite extraordinary book. But I wonder that any one should have doubted that a woman wrote it. Strange is it that we tell the universal part of our history in all that we write!"�

When Eliot met George Henry Lewes, who wrote a biography of Goethe, he was married and unable to obtain a divorce, having given his name to his wife's child by another man. He encouraged her to write fiction and for twenty-five years was the person she considered her "husband" although not legally married to him, she even took his surname, adding Eliot because it "was a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word."�

Not even her publisher was told of the pseudonym, and one of the few who guessed that George Eliot might be a woman was Charles Dickens. The only work she published under her real name was her translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity (1854).

When Lewes died of cancer, and only eight months before her own death, Eliot married for the first time. Her husband, John Cross, was twenty years younger. On their honeymoon in Venice, Cross is said to have jumped out of the hotel window, landing in the Grand Canal. He was not injured. Neither ever explained the incident. Gossips, however, spread the rumor that his sixty-year-old wife made too many sexual demands on her husband. As readers of her Middlemarch will remember, gossip and rumor may be quite powerful forces but are not always to be trusted.

A 1994 television version of Eliot's Middlemarch, her penultimate novel, received excellent reviews both in Europe and in America. One of the few negative reviews came from Nicolas Walter, who regretted that as a convinced freethinker Eliot never gave freethought a proper place in any of her books.

Louis Menand, in a lengthy critique in The New York Review of Books (12 May 1944), wrote,

• Nietzsche thought that what George Eliot wanted was Christian morality without the Christianity. "They have got rid of the Christian God," he says of the English in Twilight of the Idols, with Eliot in mind, "and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality." He was being contemptuous, of course (and he probably hadn't read any of Eliot's novels); but many other commentators have assumed that Eliot did write her books in order to articulate a post-Christian moral and social philosophy, and they have devoted themselves to the business of deciphering it. It's this idea of Eliot as, in some systematic sense, a moralist that is responsible for the assumption that modern readers (and modern viewers) will find her preachy and dull."�

Nicolas Walter, commenting upon Rosemary Ashton's George Eliot: A Life (1996), termed Eliot "a thorough rationalist."� Although she treated religion sympathetically and understood when people turned to the "forms and ceremonies" for comfort, Colin McCall observed, "she preferred to do without opium." "My childhood,"� she wrote, "was full of deep sorrows colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plum-cake."� In death, she would no longer have sorrow or, as pointed out in her humanistic poem, "Oh, may I join the choir invisible."�

Eliot, who suffered from a kidney disease, fell ill with a throat infection and died at the age of 61. She is buried at Highgate in the northern part of London, not far from the grave of Karl Marx and next to the graves of George Jacob Holyoake, Charles Watts, and George Lewes - for a time, Eliot lived with the freethinking Lewes.

Eliot's biography, written by her second husband, states that "her long illness in the autumn had left her no power to rally. She passed away about ten o'clock at night on the 22nd of December, 1880. She died, as she would herself have chosen to die, without protracted pain, and with every faculty brightly vigorous. . . . Her body lies in the next grave to that of George Henry Lewes at Highgate Cemetery; her spirit, the product of her life has, in her own words, joined "the choir invisible, whose music is the gladness of the world."� Eliot'a grave is marked by a simple grey stone obelisk.

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