60 Fun Facts About George Eliot

What was George Eliot's real name?

Mary Ann Evans gave even her own publisher nothing but the pen name, offering it in an 1857 letter 'as a tub to throw to the whale in case of curious inquiries'.

George Eliot was born in 1819 in which Midlands county?

Warwickshire: cut off from her family there once she set up home with Lewes, Eliot turned to her early memories of the county and made her first stories out of them.

George Eliot's 1854 journey to Germany with her partner was partly research for his biography of which writer?

Goethe: the Life that Lewes published the next year became his best-known book, and the trip served the unmarried couple as a honeymoon.

The narrator of George Eliot's eerie 1859 novella The Lifted Veil is cursed with which unwanted power?

Clairvoyance: he foresees his own death and overhears other people's thoughts, and the tale ends with a blood transfusion briefly reviving a corpse, a world away from her usual realism.

What did George Eliot's father do for a living?

Managed a country estate: her Tory father threatened to turn her out when at 22 she refused to go to church, yet she kept house for him until the day he died.

Where did the 'George' in George Eliot's pen name come from?

Her partner's first name: she later explained that George was Lewes's Christian name, and that Eliot was simply 'a good, mouth-filling, easily pronounced word'.

George Eliot's first major work was a translation of a controversial German book about what?

The life of Jesus: David Strauss's book argued that the Gospel miracles were myths added later, and the pious schoolgirl of a decade before brought it into English without putting her name to it.

Which left-wing journal did George Eliot effectively run as assistant editor from 1851?

The Westminster Review: founded by Jeremy Bentham as the voice of the Radicals, it enjoyed under her, one biographer wrote, its most brilliant run since John Stuart Mill's day.

In which periodical did the first work of "George Eliot" appear in 1857?

Blackwood's Magazine took the tale blind: her partner sent it to the Edinburgh publisher without naming the writer, so its editor began printing a new author whose identity he did not know.

Adam Bede's narrator stops the story to praise the truthful, homely pictures of which nation's painters?

Dutch paintings, chapter 17 says, are ones 'lofty-minded people despise', yet an old woman bent over her flower-pot moved Eliot more than angels and heroes, and her own fiction set out to do the same.

Which admirer of Adam Bede commissioned paintings of two of its scenes?

Queen Victoria commissioned Edward Corbould to paint Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel for her, even though polite society was then shunning the author for living openly with a married man.

Which famous novelist wrote to "George Eliot, Esq." in 1858 to say he suspected the new author was a woman?

Charles Dickens had spotted 'womanly touches' in her first stories, and told her that if a man had written them, no man had ever made himself 'mentally so like a woman since the world began'.

Where is George Eliot buried?

Highgate Cemetery: friends proposed Westminster Abbey, but her rejection of Christianity and her years with a married man told against it. A memorial stone in the Abbey followed only in 1980.

Which comedian wrote and starred in A Simple Twist of Fate, a 1994 film updating Silas Marner to modern America?

Steve Martin plays a betrayed music teacher turned reclusive cabinetmaker, and his script ends in a courtroom, with a custody trial over the child he has raised.

Which American novelist called George Eliot "magnificently ugly — deliciously hideous" after their first meeting?

Henry James took it back in the same letter home: within minutes, he told his father, a 'most powerful beauty' stole out and charmed him, so that he ended 'in falling in love with her'.

George Eliot's 1856 essay attacking the trivial plots of contemporary women's fiction was called what?

She published it in the Westminster Review just before turning to fiction herself.

Which philosopher did George Eliot translate from Latin in the 1850s, in a version left unpublished until 1981?

Spinoza: she finished his Ethics in 1856, but her partner fell out with the publisher over terms, so the translation sat in manuscript and was not printed until 1981.

Which American essayist did the young George Eliot meet in 1848 at the home of her freethinking friends, the Brays?

Ralph Waldo Emerson called on the Brays that July and went with them and Eliot to Stratford, and she told a friend afterwards: 'I have seen Emerson, the first man I have ever seen.'

After her father's death in 1849, George Eliot spent months living alone in which European city?

Geneva: she went abroad with the Brays soon after the funeral, stayed on by herself when they turned for home, and lodged with the artist François D'Albert Durade, who painted her portrait there.

What finally moved George Eliot's estranged brother Isaac to write to her?

Her legal marriage: Isaac had cut her off when she set up home with a married man, and wrote only when she wed in 1880. She replied that their long silence had never broken her affection for him.

Which German philosopher sneered at Eliot's morality as that of "little moralistic females à la Eliot"?

Friedrich Nietzsche's complaint, in Twilight of the Idols, was that the English had got rid of the Christian God and so clung all the tighter to Christian morality, and he made her his example.

The Spanish Gypsy, which George Eliot published in 1868 after a research trip to Spain, is a book-length work of what?

Poetry: illness made her drop the first draft in 1865, and she went to Spain two years later to finish it. It sold well at first, but her verse never held readers the way her novels did.

What is the subtitle of Middlemarch?

A Study of Provincial Life is exact: the subject is a whole town, not one hero, with gentry, clergy, tradesmen and labourers caught up in several plots that echo one another.

In Middlemarch, Dorothea loses her husband's fortune by marrying whom?

Will Ladislaw, her husband's young cousin, is the one man the codicil names. The insult sets the town gossiping about the pair, and in the end she gives up the fortune and marries him anyway.

Middlemarch is set in the years immediately before which piece of legislation?

The 1832 Reform Act hangs over the plot: Dorothea's uncle stands for Parliament as a reformer and is pelted with eggs at the hustings while the crowd jeers at an effigy of him.

In Middlemarch, whom does Dorothea marry first?

Edward Casaubon is a dry clergyman-scholar far older than Dorothea. She marries him hoping to serve a great mind, and learns on their honeymoon in Rome how little warmth or greatness the marriage holds.

In Middlemarch, what scholarly work does Dorothea's first husband never finish?

The Key to All Mythologies is meant to trace every myth back to a single origin, but its author cannot read German, so the scholarship that has already overtaken him sits unread.

Which idealistic young doctor in Middlemarch ruins his ambitions by marrying the vain Rosamond Vincy?

Tertius Lydgate arrives hoping to reform medicine and find the primitive tissue of all life. Rosamond's spending sinks him in debt, and he ends as a fashionable doctor who calls himself a failure.

Which Middlemarch banker's sordid past is exposed by the arrival of the drunkard John Raffles?

Nicholas Bulstrode, the town's pious banker, built his fortune on a concealed inheritance. When the blackmailing Raffles falls ill under his roof he hastens the man's death, and the scandal ruins him anyway.

Who unexpectedly inherits Peter Featherstone's fortune in Middlemarch instead of Fred Vincy?

His illegitimate son Joshua Rigg turns up at the will-reading, a stranger to every hopeful relative in the room. He takes the Featherstone name, then sells the land to set up as a money-changer.

Middlemarch grew from two unfinished pieces; the one centred on Dorothea was called what?

Work on the original piece stopped when Lewes's son Thornie was dying of tuberculosis in 1869.

Which novelist called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people"?

Virginia Woolf called it a magnificent book 'with all its imperfections', and argued that Eliot's power was at its highest there, not in the readable early novels of fields and farms.

Who wrote the screenplay for the BBC's 1994 television serial of Middlemarch?

Andrew Davies's serial sent viewers back to the book: lectures and debates on the novel followed, and a Penguin paperback of Middlemarch climbed to the top of the best-seller lists.

What is Silas Marner's trade?

Linen weaver: Silas sits at his loom sixteen hours a day and spends almost nothing, so the guineas pile up under his floor and become, in his loneliness, the only thing he loves.

In Silas Marner, who steals Silas's hoard of gold?

Dunstan Cass, the squire's wastrel younger son, vanishes on the night of the theft. Sixteen years later the stone-pit beside Silas's cottage is drained, and his skeleton is found lying with the gold.

What is the full name of the golden-haired child Silas Marner adopts and calls Eppie?

Hephzibah was the name of Silas's mother and of his little sister. When a neighbour objects that it is a hard name for a child, he explains that the sister was always called Eppie.

Silas Marner is falsely accused of theft by his own congregation in a slum street called what?

Lantern Yard's brethren settle his guilt by praying and drawing lots, and the lots go against him. He loses his faith, his best friend and his fiancée at a stroke, and walks away to Raveloe.

The Mill on the Floss follows which pair of siblings?

Tom and Maggie Tulliver grow up at Dorlcote Mill. Eliot drew them from her own childhood with her brother Isaac, who had stopped speaking to her by the time she wrote the book.

How does The Mill on the Floss end for its two main characters?

They drown in a flood: the sister rows through the rising water to fetch her brother from the mill, they are reconciled in the boat, and drifting wreckage pulls them under in each other's arms.

In The Mill on the Floss, the heroine's reputation is ruined by an unplanned river trip with which man?

Stephen Guest, all but engaged to her cousin Lucy, lets their boat drift too far downriver to get back that day. She refuses to marry him to mend the scandal, and goes home to be shunned.

Which devotional classic inspires the heroine's religious renunciation in The Mill on the Floss?

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis reaches her in a bundle of second-hand books, its margins marked by a long-dead reader, and its creed of self-denial becomes her answer to the family's ruin.

What trade does the hero of George Eliot's Adam Bede follow?

Carpenter: Eliot gave Adam some of her own father's early life, and opens the story in a village workshop in June 1799, among men busy on doors and window-frames.

In Adam Bede, Hetty Sorrel is sentenced to hang for what crime?

Child murder: she abandons her newborn in a field and it dies. Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire who seduced her, gallops up to the scaffold with a reprieve, and she is transported instead.

George Eliot drew Adam Bede's Dinah Morris from memories of an aunt who, like Dinah, was what?

A Methodist preacher: the aunt had once sat up all night praying with a young woman condemned to hang, until she confessed, and her account of it, told to Eliot years earlier, became the germ of the novel.

In Romola, the heroine becomes a follower of which real figure in Florence?

Girolamo Savonarola took hold of Eliot as a subject on a visit to Florence in 1860. The book cost her such labour that she said she began it a young woman and finished it an old one.

Middlemarch begins and ends by measuring Dorothea against which saint?

Teresa of Ávila found her epic life in remaking a religious order. Born three centuries later, the Prelude warns, such a woman may be a 'foundress of nothing', her goodness scattered among hindrances.

Daniel Deronda opens with Daniel watching Gwendolen Harleth lose all her winnings at what?

Roulette: after news of her family's ruin she pawns a necklace, and it comes back to her hotel with an unsigned note. Deronda, the stranger who watched her lose, has redeemed it.

Daniel Deronda is noted for its sympathetic treatment of which political idea?

Proto-Zionism: the dying visionary Mordecai urges Daniel to work for a Jewish homeland. Daniel then learns that he was himself born Jewish, and at the end he prepares to leave for the East to take up the cause.

Which cold, manipulative man does Gwendolen Harleth marry in Daniel Deronda?

Henleigh Grandcourt marries her after she has learned of his mistress and their children. He later drowns on a sailing trip while Gwendolen, rope in hand, hesitates, and the guilt haunts her.

Which young singer does Daniel Deronda rescue from drowning herself in the Thames?

Mirah Lapidoth has fled the father who took her from her mother as a child and put her on the stage. Daniel's search for her lost mother and brother leads him into a London he has never known.

Which George Eliot novel turns on an election-day riot, modelled on one she saw as a girl in her home town?

Felix Holt, the Radical has its hero try to lead a drunken election mob away from the town, only to be charged with manslaughter. Eliot had watched just such a riot in Nuneaton as a schoolgirl.

The fictional silk-ribbon town of Middlemarch is thought to be based on which real English city?

Coventry was Eliot's home through her twenties, where she kept house for her father and mixed with its ribbon manufacturers and freethinkers. The novel, written twenty years after she left, draws on that world.

After Adam Bede became a bestseller, a Midlands man named Joseph Liggins was widely rumoured to be whom?

The books' true author, locals decided, must be Liggins, and George Eliot had to deny it in a letter to The Times. The fuss pushed her to give up her secret sooner than she had planned.

Before she lost her faith, the teenage George Eliot was a fervent follower of which strand of Christianity?

Evangelicalism: a governess, Maria Lewis, set her on that path at school, and at eighteen she doubted whether music was right outside worship. At twenty-two she refused to go to church at all.

Middlemarch's last sentence honours those who "lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in" what?

Unvisited tombs: the growing good of the world, that sentence says, is 'partly dependent on unhistoric acts', so an obscure, decent life like its heroine's is not wasted after all.

As a schoolgirl, George Eliot was her school's best performer on which instrument?

Piano: schoolfellows remembered her astonishing them at the keyboard. At her last school she was sent for to play to visitors, and obeyed in agonies of shyness.

Readers of Scenes of Clerical Life widely assumed 'George Eliot' was what?

The first story, about the Reverend Amos Barton, appeared in Blackwood's in 1857 when she was thirty-seven.

In which Italian city did George Eliot's new husband throw himself from their hotel on their 1880 honeymoon?

Venice: John Cross, twenty years her junior, leapt into the Grand Canal and survived what looked like a suicide attempt, and the newlyweds went home to England, where she died that December.

In Silas Marner, Eppie's mother collapses and dies in the snow after taking which drug?

Opium: she had set out on New Year's Eve to expose her secret marriage at the squire's party. While she lies in the snow, her toddler wanders towards a lit doorway and into Silas's cottage.

Which German philosopher's critique of Christianity did George Eliot translate into English in 1854?

Ludwig Feuerbach argued that God is human nature projected outward, an idea that runs through her novels. His Essence of Christianity came out in July 1854, the month she left England with a married man.