5 things you didn't know about George Eliot
On 5 February 2020 we’ll be joined by artists and speakers at Warwick Arts Centre for EUROPEANS: GEORGE ELIOT, 7.15pm including BBC documentary producer Martina Hall, writers Anna Lawrence and Redell Olsen, Professor Ruth Livesey and musician Amy Kakoura.
Whether you’re an Eliot fan or a newcomer to her work, we’ve compiled some lesser-known facts about this fascinating and iconic writer to get you in the mood for the event.
1) George Eliot wasn’t her real name
George Eliot was a pen name, her real name was Mary Ann Evans. This was due to believing a man’s name would bring her greater success, and, as she explained to her biographer J. W. Cross (who became her husband), George was her lover George Lewes's forename, and Eliot was "a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word".
Writer Charles Dickens suspected that she was writing under a pen name, writing two letters to her addressing this. The first of which he told her that her collection of short stories in Scenes of a Clerical Life (1857) bore “such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me, even now.” In the second letter a year later he assured her that being a woman made no impact on her abilities as a writer, addressing her as “My Dear Madam” and expressing his delight with Adam Bede (1859).
2) She was a translator
Evans had incredible linguistic skills. She learnt Italian from a Joseph Henry Brezzi, a travelling language teacher based in Leamington Spa. Throughout her life, she translated books from German and other European languages, including the famous Ethics by Bernard Spinoza and David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus), a controversial book which suggested Jesus was a real person, but not divine. The Earl of Shaftesbury at the time called her translation "the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell." He wasn’t a fan, then.
3) She had a scandalous love life
Evans’ relationship with the married philosopher and critic George Lewes was scandalous for its time. Lewes had left his wife in 1852, and they had already been in an open marriage, but Victorian customs and law didn’t exactly approve of this sort of thing. As he had condoned his wife’s adultery by registering the births of her children by another man under his own name, he was unable divorce his wife on these grounds. Despite this, Evans and Lewes continued their relationship until his death in 1878 and considered themselves married, though largely concealed it. Evans’ brother was deeply disapproving and refused to meet her until she married.
She did marry eventually in May 1880 to a man 20 years her junior, John Cross, the age difference proving controversial. Their marriage was short-lived, as Cross became depressed on the honeymoon and fell (or as gossip had it, threw himself) from the balcony of their Venice hotel into the Grand Canal. Evans then died just seven months later due to a long battle with kidney disease.
4) She inspired Van Gogh
Her work celebrated the ordinary and the provincial, something that Van Gogh also found fascinating in his work.
When Van Gogh sent his iconic ‘Bedroom at Arles’ to his sister, he wrote that he was painting it to describe a working life in full colour like Eliot’s novel Felix Holt, the Radical (1866). Van Gogh clung to a line he took from Eliot’s hero Felix: ‘I’ve seen behind the word failure’.
5) She refused Christianity
In a bold move defying her religious family and conventions at that time, Evans’ study and translations of texts questioning Christianity led her to renounce her faith. This outraged her father, who threatened to kick her out. Out of respect, Evans continued to attend church with her father until his death in 1849. When she died she was buried in Poet’s Corner in Highgate Cemetery, due to her atheist beliefs.
