22 November: George Eliot

The author George Eliot was born on this date in 1819. Known for books such as Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede, here are some things you might not know about her.

1. Her real name was Mary Anne Evans and she was born in Warwickshire where her father worked as a rent collector for the owners of Arbury Hall and Estate. Hence, she was born on the estate.
2. She was better educated than most women of her time but not necessarily for the right reasons. Her father sent her to school, not only because of her intelligence, but also because of her looks. She wasn't physically beautiful, so her father didn't think she had much chance of attracting a husband, so he invested in her schooling instead.
3. She lived with her father untll he died when she was 30. By then, the family had moved to Coventry and her mother had died, so she acted as her father's housekeeper. She'd become friends with a family called the Brays, who were free-thinking radicals. Mary Anne was questioning her religious faith, which angered her father, who threatened to throw her out of his house, but never did. Five days after her father's funeral, she went to Switzerland with the Brays and stayed on alone after they went home, spending her time reading and going for long walks.
4. When she returned to London she got a job which was unusual for women of the time - editor of a literary magazine, although she was officially an assistant to the nominal editor, she did most of the work. She wrote essays for it using the name Marian Evans. She also translated foreign language books into English.
5. Despite not being beautiful in the conventional sense (Henry James described her as "magnificently ugly", "horse faced" with "a vast, penulous nose"), she didn't fail to attract men. There were a number of dalliances and a marriage proposal, which she turned down, before she met the love of her life, George Lewes. Even Henry James, for all his criticsism of her looks, ended up charmed by her. He went on to write, "In this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind" and said he ended up falling in love with her.
6. George Lewes was a married man, although his marriage was an open one, and his wife had several children by another man as well as the ones she'd had with him. Mary Anne and George lived together for 20 years, until he died. They never married officially but they considered themselves married. Mary Anne called herself Mary Anne Evans Lewes, and legally changed her name to that after he died. Her pen name of George was in homage to him. The Eliot part? "a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word" according to Eliot herself, although some say it was also inspired by her lover ("To L(ewes) I owe it").
7. She did marry, at the age of 60. Her husband was 20 years younger, her lawyer and accountant, John Cross. They remained married until Eliot died not long after. Something odd happened on their honeymoon, though. They were in Venice when Eliot noticed her new husband seemed unwell, losing weight, depressed and agitated, so she called a doctor. While she was talking to the doctor, Cross threw himself off the balcony of their room into the Grand Canal. He survived, rescued by a member of the hotel staff and a gondolier. Was it a suicide attempt? Was he suffering from mental illness? Was the heat getting to him? Nobody knows.
8. She invented some words which are in common use today. One was the word "pop" as in popular music. She wrote about a concert she attended, complaining that there was "too much pop" which spoiled her enjoyment of the more classical pieces. She was also the first to use the word "browser" as meaning someone who casually looks around, such as in a book shop. Before Eliot used the word in her novel Romola, it meant an animal that looked for leaves and twigs to eat.
9. She was critical of other female writers of her time. While she did like some novels by women, such as Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell, she lambasted others for their shallow characters, unrealistic plots and contrived romantic endings. She wrote an essay entiled "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" putting forward those views.
10. She died aged 61, following a throat infection exacerbated by the kidney disease she had suffered from for a number of years. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery.

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