George Eliot
<Mary Anne Evans>
By: Ashley Rodriguez
Victorian Era
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England->Wealthiest Nation
Center of banking, insurance and shipping
Technology and scientific inventions
Living and working conditions in cities were terrible
Working class and lower class had no voting rights yet
Late 1870’s congress passed child labor laws and limited hours
of employment for the rest.
Childhood
• Born November 22, 1819
• 3rd child to Robert and Christina Evans
• Family were very religious
• Religious practices took over there life
• Working Class-> Her dad being a farmer
• Miss Latham’s Boarding School
• She started to read books
New Teachings
• Befriended, Charles Bray,
Robert Owens, and Herbert
Spencer
• All free thinkers w/ radical
views towards religion
• She began to think more
liberal thoughts which
contradicted her church
teachings
Family Troubles
• Stopped going to church
• Caused a split within her
family
• Even in her disbelief she
started to attend again
knowing her father was ill
• She stopped going to
church for good after her
father’s death in 1857
Scandalous
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Met George Henry Lewes
Open Marriage
Anges Jervis and children
Sin Under God’s eyes
Family disowned her
Town Shunned her From
Church and society
Open Marriage-Marriage in which
both partners agree that each
other may engage in outside
sexual relationships without
divorce
Later On…
• Evans got a job at the Westminster Review, which was
a public journal mainly for radical views, as Assistant
Editor in 1858
• Lady Novelist Writing Fairytales
“Silly Novels By Lady Novelist”
“The fair writers have evidently never talked to a
tradesmen’s except from a carriage window: they have
no notion of the working class except as
“dependents”… they have no idea of feeling interest
in any man who is not at least a great landed
proprietor, if not a prime minister.”
Westminster Review, October 1856
George Eliot
• After the chaos that her essay created Evans decided to take it upon
herself and write
• Also knowing that her private life was too scandalous for her readers she
wanted to keep a line from her profession and her home life also
knowing women didn’t get any recognition she wrote under a pen name>George Eliot!
Thesis
• Mary Anne Evans was one of the best writers in the
Victorian era because of her simplistic writing style
and how she was the first to write fictional stories
depicting issues and problems of society instead of
the everyday fairytale. She created a style in its own
called realism which changed literature forever.
Silas Marner-1861
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Banished from his town
Became a Weaver in a town named Raveloe / Outcast
Godfrey secretly marries opium addict Molly
Adopts Eppie
After 16 years later Godfrey admits that Eppie is his daughter
Will Eppie stay with silas or leave with her biological father?
Other Works…
• Adam Bede-1859
• Romola-1863
• The Mill on the Floss-1860
• Felix Holt, the Radical-1866
• Middlemarch-1871-72
• Daniel Deronda-1876
Writing Style
• Realistic Storytelling
• She made her sentence structures clear, patient and well
balanced for lower class readers
• Simplistic
• She depicted rural life society making people feel as though
there was someone who put interest and importance in the
simple details of ordinary people
• She also mirrored her own life within her novels
(Ex.Silas being shunned from town)
After Math
• Lewes died in 1878
• Afterward she married John
Water Cross in May 1880
• Even more controversy
• 7 months later now Mary
Anne Cross Died December
1880.