ELIOT

George, the a umed literary name of Mary Ann, or, as she preferred to write the name in later years, Marian Evans, English noveiist. She was the daughter of a War wicks hire land agent and surveyor, was born et Griff, near Nuneaton, on 22nd Nov., 1820, and died on 22nd Dec., 1880. She received at Coventry an excellent education, comprising the cla ical and modern languages, and shortly after her twenty-first year became a convert to Rationalism. Her first literary undertaking was the completion of Mrs. Henneli’s translation of Strau ’s Life of Jesus (1846). Towards the end of her task she seems, however, to have wearied of it, and when the work appeared she declared herself ‘Strau -sick.’ After spending two years abroad, she boarded at the house of John Chapman, editor of the HW est minster Revicw, of which she became sub-editor. It was not, however, until January, 1857, that she came prominently into public notice, when the first of a series of tales entitled Scenes from Clerical Life appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. The series came to an end in Nov., 1857, and in the following year the publication of ddam Bede placed her in the first rank of writers of fiction. It was succeeded by The Mill on the Flo (1860), Silas Jfarner (1861), Romola (1863), Felix Holt (1866), Middle march (1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876). In addition to those prose works she published three volumes of poems, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Agatha (1869), and The Legend of Jubal (1874). Her last work published during her life was the series of e ays entitled The Impre ions of Theophrastus Such (1879), but a volume of mixed e ays was i ued posthumously. For many years she was happily a ociated both in life and work with George Henry Lewes, though a legal union was impo ible during the lifetime of Mrs. Lewes. In May, 1880, after Lewes’s death, she married Mr. John Cro , but did not survive the marriage many months, dying rather suddenly at Chelsea.—BIBLIOGRAPHY: Haton, George Lliot in Derby shire; J. W. Cro (editor), George Iliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (3 vols.); O. Browning, Life | of George Eliot; Deakin, The Harly Life = 0. 126