60 Fun Facts About George Eliot

What was George Eliot's real name?

She was also known as Mary Anne or Marian, and died as Mary Ann Cross.

In which English county was George Eliot born?

She was born at South Farm on the Arbury Hall estate near Nuneaton, where her father managed the estate.

How many novels did George Eliot write?

They run from Adam Bede in 1859 to Daniel Deronda in 1876.

Which married philosopher and critic lived with Eliot as her partner from 1854 to 1878?

He stayed legally married to Agnes Jervis, and Eliot signed herself Mary Ann Evans Lewes.

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

Robert Evans ran the Arbury Hall estate, which gave his daughter access to the hall's library.

Where did George Eliot get the first name of her pen name?

She told J. W. Cross 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 Earl of Shaftesbury called her Strauss translation "the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell".

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

John Chapman was officially the editor, but she did most of the work of producing it.

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

Readers assumed the author of Scenes of Clerical Life was a country parson, or perhaps a parson's wife.

Eliot's first complete novel has a realist aesthetic inspired by which country's visual art?

Its success brought a pretender, Joseph Liggins, who claimed to be the author, which pushed Eliot to reveal herself.

Which reigning monarch was so impressed with Adam Bede that she commissioned paintings of scenes from it?

The artist was Edward Henry Corbould; the queen read all of Eliot's novels.

Whom did George Eliot marry in May 1880, seven months before her death?

He was twenty years her junior, and on their Venice honeymoon he jumped from a hotel balcony into the Grand Canal.

Where is George Eliot buried?

She was denied the Abbey because of her agnosticism and her life with Lewes; she lies beside him near Karl Marx.

A memorial stone to George Eliot was placed in Poets' Corner in 1980, between which two poets?

It was set on the centenary of her death and quotes Scenes of Clerical Life.

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

He went on to say that within minutes her personality charmed him and he ended by "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.

George Eliot translated the Ethics of which philosopher, a version not published in her lifetime?

She finished it in 1856, but the publisher refused to pay the requested 75 pounds; it finally appeared in 1981.

Which ribbon manufacturer and his wife drew the young Eliot into a circle of radical freethinkers?

Their home Rosehill hosted Robert Owen, Herbert Spencer, Harriet Martineau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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

She lived on the second floor of a house on the rue de Chanoines, where a plaque now marks her stay.

Which brother cut off George Eliot when she began living with Lewes, reconciling only after she married Cross?

Isaac had married and taken over the family home when she was twenty-one, sending her and her father to Foleshill.

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

He read Middlemarch in a translation owned by his mother and sister.

George Eliot's foray into verse, published in 1868, was a dramatic poem set in Spain called what?

Its initial popularity did not last, and she is remembered almost entirely for the novels.

What is the subtitle of Middlemarch?

The fictional town of Middlemarch, a silk-ribbon manufacturing town, is probably based on Coventry.

In how many paper-bound instalments was Middlemarch first published in 1871-72?

The two-monthly format was borrowed from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables to avoid slicing the novel into small parts.

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

The action runs from September 1829 to May 1832, forty years before the book appeared.

In Middlemarch, whom does Dorothea Brooke marry first?

She hopes to help with his research, The Key to All Mythologies, which is hopelessly out of date because he cannot read German.

What is the name of Casaubon's never-finished scholarly work in Middlemarch?

He resents Dorothea's youth partly because her help would expose how stale his research has become.

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

The Finale has him prosper in a conventional career and die at 50.

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

He hastens Raffles's death, and the disgrace spreads to Lydgate, who had accepted his money.

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

Rigg is also the stepson of John Raffles, which is how Raffles first comes to town.

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.

Whose Great Tradition (1948) is credited with "rediscovering" Middlemarch for modern critics?

V. S. Pritchett had already written in 1946 that no Victorian novel approached its width of reference.

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

The novel has never been made into a cinema film, though Sam Mendes toyed with the idea.

What is Silas Marner's trade?

The novel's subtitle is The Weaver of Raveloe, and he hoards the gold coins his weaving earns.

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

His skeleton is found years later with the money at the bottom of a drained stone quarry.

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

He names her after his dead mother and sister; her real father is Godfrey Cass.

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

When he returns decades later, the whole neighbourhood has been swept away for a large factory.

The Mill on the Floss follows which pair of siblings?

They grow up at Dorlcote Mill and drown together in an embrace when the river floods.

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

Brother and sister are reconciled moments before their boat capsizes.

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

He was assumed to be engaged to her cousin Lucy Deane; Maggie refuses to marry him and returns to St Ogg's as an outcast.

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

Thomas a Kempis's book leads her to renounce the world until Philip Wakem tests that resolve.

Adam Bede is set in the fictional community of Hayslope in which year?

Eliot called it "a country story full of the breath of cows and scent of hay".

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

Arthur Donnithorne, who seduced her, gets the sentence commuted to transportation at the last moment.

Dinah Morris in Adam Bede was modelled on Eliot's aunt Elizabeth Evans, who was what?

The aunt told Eliot of a child-murder confession made to her by a girl in prison, which seeded the plot.

Which historical Florentine preacher looms over Eliot's novel Romola?

The novel opens in 1492, just after the death of Lorenzo de' Medici.

Romola was serialised in which periodical before its 1863 book publication?

It ran in fourteen parts and was published as a book by Smith, Elder & Co., not her usual publisher Blackwood.

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

It was Eliot's last completed novel and the only one set in the Victorian society of her own day.

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

The dying visionary Mordecai wants Daniel to carry on his dream of restoring the Jewish people to the Promised Land.

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

Lydia Glasher, who has several children by him, curses Gwendolen on her wedding day.

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

Searching for her family leads him to her brother Ezra, the visionary known as Mordecai.

Which of Eliot's novels, set in the same pre-Reform period as Middlemarch, sold poorly and lost its publisher money?

That loss is why Blackwood was persuaded to try Middlemarch as an eight-part serial.

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

Eliot lived at Foleshill nearby before moving to London, and never went home again after her family cut her off.

On which estate's South Farm was Mary Ann Evans born in 1819?

Her father Robert managed the estate; the family soon moved to Griff House between Nuneaton and Bedworth.

Which evangelical teacher at Mrs Wallington's school received Eliot's earliest surviving letters?

She then boarded at Miss Franklin's school in Coventry from thirteen to sixteen, in a quieter religious atmosphere.

Which peer called Eliot's translation of Strauss 'the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell'?

The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined argued the New Testament miracles were mythical additions.

Which radical publisher's London household did Eliot join in 1850, in a ménage-à-trois?

Chapman had published her Strauss translation, and she began calling herself Marian Evans on moving to London.

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.

What did Eliot's husband John Cross do on their Venice honeymoon in 1880?

He survived the apparent suicide attempt; Eliot died in Chelsea seven months after the wedding.

Which long-standing illness, combined with a throat infection, caused Eliot's death at 61?

Because she had rejected Christian faith, she was buried at Highgate rather than in Westminster Abbey.

Which philosopher's The Essence of Christianity did Eliot translate in 1854?

At the Brays' Rosehill home she had met Robert Owen, Herbert Spencer and Emerson and drifted toward agnostic theology.