George Eliot: Life In Relation To The Mill On The Floss

Abstract

Our author was christened Mary Ann in 1819 after two of her mother’s sisters and so was known officially as Mary Ann Evans through childhood and girlhood, and unofficially as Polly. Her baptismal certificate has ‘Mary Anne’ but her father‘s diary calls her ‘Ann’ and she used this form after 1837. No name at all appeared on her first published book, the 1846 translation of Strauss’s Life of Jesus, but when she translated The Essence of Christianity by Feuerbach in 1854, the name Marian Evans was on the title-page - the only time this happened. She had adopted the new form of her Christian name, Marian, in her letters, after her return in 1850 from an eight-month visit to Switzerland.