SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA
1) Although there were female authors in George Eliot's time, she used a pen name to escape the stereotype of women's writing being limited to light-hearted romances.
2) Eliot wanted her fiction to be taken seriously. As she already had her extensive work as an editor, translator and critic. She wanted her fiction to be judged separately. Another reason for using a pen name may have been her desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny. She wanted to avoid the scandal that would have arisen because of her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes.
3) 'Middlemarch' was described by Virginia Woolf as " one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in English novels.
4) The works of George Eliot are heavily influenced by the themes of Greek tragedy. Religion too had a big role to play. She was brought up within a low-church Anglican family, but at the time the Midlands was an area with a growing number of religious dissenters.
5) Her move to Coventry made her meet the Brays. Their home ‘ Rosehill’ became an important centre for free thinkers to discuss radical ideas. The people whom she met at the Brays were Robert Owen( a textile manufacturer), Herbert Spencer ( who coined the term survival of the fittest), Harriet Martineau ( perhaps the first female sociologist) and Ralph Waldo Emerson ( American transcendentalist, critical thinker and champion of individualism).
6) Exposed to more liberal and agnostic views and to writers such as David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, her first major work was Strauss’s ‘The Life of Jesus Critically Examined’ (1846). Later she translated Feuerbach’s ‘ The Essence of Christianity’ (1854)
7) As Eliot began to question her religious beliefs, her father threatened to throw her out of the house. Until he died in 1849, Eliot followed her father respectfully.
8) After coming back from Switzerland, she moved to London in 1850 and began referring to herself as Marian Evans.
9) She stayed with John Chapman( publisher of The Westminister Review(a left-wing journal) and she became an editor of the same in 1851) who published her Strauss translation.
10)She wrote openly about the Victorian way of life and commented on her views of society. She criticised organised religion and was sympathetic towards the lower classes.
11)The philosopher and critic, George Henry Lewes met Evans in 1851. Having openly lived with Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pen name George Eliot. They lived as soulmates and never married each other.
12)The first work of George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life was published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1857. Blackwood’s Magazine was printed between 1817 and 1980 and was founded by William Blackwood. It was originally called the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine and was published under the editorship of Thomas Pringle known as the father of South African poetry.
13)Heavily influenced by Thomas Carlyle, her thoughts were shaped by German thought, turn from Christian orthodoxy and evolution of the self. These themes were translated into her first complete novel, Adam Bede (1859). It was an instant success and this led to her public acknowledgment of her pseudonym George Eliot.
14)The chronological order of her seven novels are: Adam Bede ( 1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romila (1862-1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72) and Daniel Deronda (1876).
15) Sir Martin Louis Amis(1949-2023) was an English novelist and is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir ‘Experience’ and was twice listed for the Booker Prize (short-listed in 1991 for Time’s Arrow and long-listed in 2023 for Yellow Dog). He was inspired by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis.
15) Julian Patrick Barnes (1946) won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert’s Parrot, England and Arthur and George. Barnes wrote under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In 2004, he received the Order of France. The honours also include the Somerset Maugham Award and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was awarded the 2021 Jerusalem Prize.
16)Auguste Comte formulated the doctrine of positivism. Often regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term. He invented the term sociology. He sought to establish a new social doctrine based on science, which he labelled positivism. Comte’s social theories culminated in his ‘ Religion of Humanity’, which presaged the development of non-theistic religious humanist and secular humanist organisations in the 19th century. He may also have coined the term altruism.
17) Baruch (de) Spinoza(1632-1677) was a resident of Dutch Republic permanently expelled from the Jewish community. He challenged the divine origin of the Hebrew Bible and was one of the foremost thinkers of the Age of Reason.
18) Middlemarch is written against the backdrop of the Reform Bill of 1832. The roots of her realist philosophy can be found in her review of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters in Westminister Review in 1856. Eliot also expresses proto-Zionist ideas in Daniel Deronda.
19) Romola, a historical novel set in late fifteenth-century Florence, was based on the life of the Italian priest Girolamo Savonarola.
20) On 16 May 1880, Eliot married John Walter Cross ( 1840-1924) and changed her name to Mary Ann Cross.
21)Due to her denial of the Christian faith and her relationship with Lewes, Eliot was not buried in the Westminister Abbey.
22)Emily Bronte( 1818-1848) is best known for her only novel Wuthering Heights. She also published with her sisters- Charlotte and Anne- a book of poetry titled Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. She published under the pen name Ellis.
23)Charlotte Brontë- Jane Eyre (1847)
Anne Bronte -Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)
24) Wuthering Heights is the first and only novel by Emily Brontë published in 1847.
25) The imaginary world created by four children- Charlotte, Anne, Emily and their younger brother Branwell was Angria and Gondal.