george eliot

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Recommended: Education in Victorian Britain

"What is remarkable, extraordinary – and the process remains inscrutable and mysterious – is that this quiet, anxious, sedentary, serious, invalidical English lady, without animal spirits, without adventures, without extravagance, assumption, or bravado, should have made us believe that nothing in the world was alien to her; should have produced such rich, deep, masterly pictures of the multifold life of man."
(Henry James in The Atlantic monthly, May 1885) (Liukkonen)
BIOGRAPHY
‘George Eliot’ was born Mary Ann Evans, to Christiana and Robert Evans, early on November 22, 1819 in Warwickshire, England. She received schooling first in a nearby village then boarded, for a time, first at Mrs. Wallington’s school at Neanton and later Miss Franklin’s school in Coventry. Her education instilled in her a strong sense of faith, based in Evangelistic Protestantism. As well as her formal schooling in the general subjects and multiple languages, Mary Ann’s propensity for reading was encouraged by the adults around her from a young age. By the age of nineteen, she had the following to say of her education: “My mind is an assemblage of disjointed specimens of history, ancient and modern; scraps of poetry picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Milton; newspaper topics; morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology, and chemistry; Reviews and metaphysics—all arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast-thickening everyday accession of actual events, relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations. How deplorably and unaccountably evanescent are our frames of mind, as various as forms and hues of the summer clouds!” (Stephen)

Though well-read, she had frustrations regarding her daily life, finding her vocation, and being informed on vast range of subjects. Robert Evans’ continued encouragement of his daughter’s passion for knowledge meant

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