George Eliot

Abstract

Mary Ann Evans (later to adopt the pseudonym of ‘George Eliot’) was born at Arbury Farm, near Nuneaton, in 1819. She was the second daughter of Robert Evans, who managed the estates of the nearby prosperous Newdigate family. Mary Ann worshipped her father and idolised her brother Isaac (born 1816); she soon proved to be a child of precocious intellect, with a particular aptitude for languages and music, but her formative years saw the influence of her first teacher direct her into a narrow and somewhat sententious Evangelicalism. This yielded to a wider and more tolerant attitude after she had become friends with the freethinking Charles Bray, his wife Cara and the latter’s sister, Sara Hennell. Bray was a radical, interested in phrenology (the science which studies the faculties by the size and shape of the skull), while his brother-in-law, Charles Hennell, wrote a book which was to greatly influence Mary Ann’s cast of thought and faith, An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), in which he voiced his doubts of the biblical accounts of miracles and saw the life of Jesus as historically based.