George Eliot

George Eliot: A Life is a 1996 biography of the Victorian author considered by many to be England’s greatest novelist, written by British academic Rosemary Ashton. Eliot’s novels include Daniel Deronda, The Mill on the Floss, and Middlemarch, which many critics believe to be the most important work of fiction written in English. Her life was also interesting in its own right: from a provincial and religiously conservative background, Eliot became one of the most controversial and metropolitan figures of her day.

As well as an academic specialist in Eliot’s life and work, Ashton—a former Professor of English at University College London—is the biographer of Eliot’s partner, George Henry Lewes. George Eliot: A Life sheds particular light on Eliot’s relationship with Lewes, whose encouragement and support were instrumental in launching Eliot’s writing career. Ashton also draws on her research on Eliot by including new material unknown to Haight and in some cases discovered by Ashton, such as a collection of letters between Eliot and John Chapman from the Huntington Library. George Eliot: A Life was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Prize in 1996.

Ashton introduces her biography by acknowledging her debt to Gordon S. Haight, author of a definitive biography of Eliot. Ashton describes the pleasure of working with Haight in the latter’s final years and explains that her biography is not intended to replace Haight’s but to supplement it. Hers is “a critical biography rather than a purely documentary one.”



The novelist known as George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans in Nuneaton in the English Midlands. Her father, Robert Evans, was the estate manager for a local noble family. Ashton notes that portraits of estate managers—as well as portraits of men who seem to share Robert’s practical turn of mind—recur in Eliot’s novels.

From a young age, Eliot read widely and proved herself extremely intelligent. She was also judged physically unattractive. These factors together encouraged Robert to send Eliot to school, to acquire a formal education. Eliot remained self-conscious about her appearance for her whole life, and it fed into the shyness and self-doubt that Ashton sees as crucial factors shaping Eliot’s life.

At school and in her family, Eliot was exposed to evangelical Christianity, and she became serious and devout, while still developing an inquiring mind. When her family moved to the town of Coventry, the teenage Eliot fell in with the circle of radical “free thinkers” which revolved around local manufacturing magnate Charles Bray and his wife Cara. Through the Brays, Eliot met the socialist Robert Owen and the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, amongst others, and read writers such as Strauss and Feuerbach, whose work questioned the literal truth of Christian teaching and scripture. Eliot began to question her faith, prompting her father to threaten to disown her. She continued to attend church and nursed her father until his death.



After Robert’s death, Eliot moved to London, altering her name to Marian Evans. She intended to make a living by writing. She moved in with publisher John Chapman, whom she had met through the Brays, and ran his magazine, the Westminster Review—something that was highly unusual for a woman at the time. Ashton observes that Eliot achieved her transformation from shy provincial girl to London intellectual almost entirely alone, not only without support but also with discouragement from her family and society. Eliot became a leading translator of European philosophical texts.

For many years, Eliot’s romantic life was an unhappy series of unrequited passions. In 1851, she met the philosopher and scientist George Henry Lewes, and the couple moved in together. They considered themselves married, although Lewes was officially married to another woman (who had left him for a friend of his; Lewes gallantly provided financial support to his first wife’s new family). However, their contemporaries saw their relationship as shocking, and Eliot’s brother Isaac (now the head of her family) publically disowned her. This experience hurt Eliot deeply.

With Lewes’s encouragement, Eliot began to pursue her long-held ambition to write fiction. She was inspired by her reading of European fiction, which she believed had advanced far beyond English-language writing. Ashton places Eliot in her European context by comparing Eliot’s work to that of Goethe, Balzac, George Sand, and Tolstoy.



Eliot’s first stories appeared when she was thirty-seven years old. Eliot was immediately hailed as an exciting talent, and her novels quickly found popular acclaim. Her pseudonym was uncovered, and although at first her “scandalous” lifestyle was an obstacle to some readers, Eliot’s fiction eventually earned her acceptance in “polite” society, with an introduction to Queen Victoria’s daughter. The publication of Middlemarch (serially from 1871-2), elevated Eliot to the status of Britain’s foremost living writer, regarded also as something of a moral sage. Ashton discusses each of Eliot’s novels in depth, tracing their development, describing the process of writing, and attempting to recover Eliot’s personal beliefs and perspectives from the plots and characters of her novels.

After Lewes’s death, Eliot married John Cross, who would become her first biographer. Less than a year later, Eliot died at the age of sixty-one.

Ashton’s biography is considered a standard text on Eliot’s life, and was well-received by non-specialist critics: according to Publisher’s Weekly, George Eliot: A Life “leaves the reader with a rich portrait of Marian Evans and a strong desire to return to George Eliot.”