George Eliot's Birthplace, South Farm, Arbury, Nuneaton[ToList]
Lewes and Marian Evans soon became all the world to each other, but Lewes had an insane wife, and the foolish law of England forbade him to get a divorce or to marry again. So the two decided to live together and to be man and wife in everything except the sanction of the law. The result was disastrous for a time to the woman. There is no question that the social isolation that resulted hurt her deeply. Her close friends like Spencer remained loyal, and her husband was always the devoted lover as well as the ideal companion.
Two years after this new connection Lewes induced his wife to try fiction. Her first story was The Sad Adventures of the Rev. Amos Barton which was followed by Janet's Repentance. These stories appeared under the pen name of George Eliot, which she never relinquished. Gathered into book form under the title Scenes From Clerical Life, these stories in a minor key made a profound impression on Charles Dickens, who divined they were the work of a woman of unusual gifts.
The praise of Lewes and the appreciation of Dickens and other experts gave great stimulus to her mind, and she produced Adam Bede, perhaps her best work, which had a great success. In the following year came The Mill on the Floss, an even greater success. Then in quick succession came the other early novels, Silas Marner, Romola and Felix Holt. A break of six years follows, and then came Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.
Lewes died in 1878, and two years later this woman, almost exhausted by her tremendous literary labors, married J.W. Cross, an old friend, but, like Charlotte Brontë, she had only short happiness, for she died in the following year. The nations praised her, but she never recovered from the shock of Lewes' death.
Of George Eliot's work the things that impress one most are her fine descriptions of natural scenes, her keen analyses of character and her many little moral sermons on life and conduct. With an abnormal conscience and a keen sense of duty, life proved very hard for her. This is reflected in the somberness of her stories and in the dread atmosphere of fate that hangs over her characters. But over against this must be placed her joy in depicting the rustic character and humor and her delight in reproducing the scenes of her childhood in one of the most beautiful counties of England.
Herbert Spencer, who was long associated with George Eliot, and for a time contemplated the possibility of a union with that remarkable woman, pays her a high tribute in The Study of Sociology. After explaining the origin in women of the ability to distinguish quickly the passing feelings of those around, he says: "Ordinarily, this feminine faculty, showing itself in an aptitude for guessing the state of mind through the external signs, ends simply in intuitions formed without assignable reasons; but when, as happens in rare cases, there is joined with it skill in psychological analysis, there results in extremely remarkable ability to interpret the mental states of others. Of this ability we have a living example (George Eliot) never hitherto paralleled among women, and in but few, if any, cases exceeded among men."
Perhaps the reader who does not know George Eliot would do well to begin with The Mill on the Floss, her finest work, which is full of humor, lovely pictures of English rural life and an analysis of soul in Maggie Tolliver that has never been surpassed. Yet the end is cruel and unnatural, as hard and as unsatisfying as the author's own religious creed. Next read Adam Bede, one of the saddest books in all literature, with comic relief in Mrs. Poyser, one of the most humorous characters in English fiction.
George Eliot drew Dinah Morris from her favorite aunt, who was a Methodist exhorter, and the power and spontaneity of this novel came from the sharpness and clearness of her early impressions, joined to her love of living over again her girlhood days, before doubt had clouded her sky. Also read Silas Marner with its perfect picture of Raveloe, "an English village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices." These descriptions are instinct with poetry, and they affect one like Wordsworth's best poems or like Tennyson's vignettes of rural life. The pale weaver of Raveloe will always remain as one of the great characters in English fiction.