George Eliot as novelist

Born:	Mary Anne Evans 22 November 1819 South Farm, Arbury Hall,, Warwickshire, England
Died:	22 December 1880 (aged 61) 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London, England
Resting place:	Highgate Cemetery (East), Highgate, London
Pen name:	George Eliot
Occupation:	Novelist
Period:	Victorian
Notable work(s):	The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), Daniel Deronda (1876)

                               Mary Anne Evans known by her pen name George Eliot was an English novelist, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote many novels. We have questioned that why she used a male name as her pen name, because she want that everyone should take her as a serious novelist by her work.

Life of Eliot:

                          Mary Ann Evans was a third child of his father. The young Evans was obviously intelligent and a voracious reader. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years.

Writing style of George Eliot:

                             In Middlemarch and her other novel she used Erudite. . "Erudite" means extremely well educated. And this type we can see in her novel while we read. All the historical, scientific, cultural, and literary references the narrator makes contribute to the sense that you're reading a book by one heck of a smart woman – just check out the "Shout outs" section to see what a huge range of references Eliot makes. And that style is what earned George Eliot the reputation as a "Victorian Sage" – in other words, a writer who was educated and intelligent enough to comment on almost any aspect of contemporary life, from arts and literature to politics and science.

                          Eliot’s style has three facets. There is her use of startlingly original metaphors to encapsulate her characters and foreshadow their destinies. Thus, we get a vivid premonition of marital disaster, when Casaubon, the Dryasdust scholar in Middlemarch, is said to woo his bride with a “frigid rhetoric . . . as sincere as the bark of a dog, or the cawing of an amorous rook.” There is a similar sense of problems in store when, in the same novel, the superficially charming.

                        The general character of all her novel may be described in the author’s own term, a psychological realism. This means that George Eliot sought to do in her novels what browning attempted in his poetry that is to represent inner struggle of a soul and to reveal the motives, impulses and hereditary influences which govern human action. George Eliot is not content until she has minutely explained the motives of her character and the moral lesson to be learned from them. In George Eliot’s novels the character develops gradually as we come to know them.

                      Rosamond Vincy is described as someone who “acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.”

Her work:

She was famous for his seven novels. It’s contains as her famous work done by her. Her major works are:

·         Adam Bede, 1859

·         The Mill on the Floss, 1860

·         Silas Marner, 1861

·         Romola, 1863

·         Felix Holt, the Radical, 1866

·         Middlemarch, 1871–72

·         Daniel Deronda, 1876

Adam Bede

 According to the Oxford Companion to English Literature (1967),

"The plot is founded on a story told to George Eliot by her aunt Elizabeth Evans, a Methodist preacher, and the original of Dinah Morris of the novel, of a confession of child-murder, made to her by a girl in prison."

                        In this novel George Eliot made love rectangle between characters. Adam love Hetty but Hetty attracted to Arthur. When Adam interrupts between them, Adam and Arthur fight. Then Arthur leaves Hetty and Arthur and Hetty decide to marry but before their marriage Adam find that she is pregnant. So Hetty go to find Arthur but she not fined him. Then she tried to abandon her child but child already dead. So she caught and prisoner and sentenced to hang. She feel shame and guilty for her crime.

                  After some day Arthur came to know that he love Dinah very much so in the end they marry with each other and leave peaceful life. This is very good novel written by her.

The Mill on the Floss

  The mill of the floss is written by George Eliot published in three volume in 1860. This novel deals with historical themes in this novel we find many historical references. It includes autobiographical elements, and reflects the disgrace that George Eliot herself experienced while in a lengthy relationship with a married man.

                                    Maggie Tulliver is the central character of the book. The story begins when she is 9 years old. Tom and Maggie have a close yet complex bond which continues throughout the novel. Tom’s pragmatic and reserved nature clashes with Maggie’s idealism and fervor for intellectual gains and experienced. After some time Mr.Tulliver died. Maggie’s brief exile ends when the river floods. It criticized as a dues ex machina. Having struggled through the waters in a boat find Tom and old Mill. In a brief tender moment the brother and sister are reconciled from all past differences when their boat capsizes, the two drown in an embrace, thus giving the book its Biblical epigraph, "In their death they were not divided."

Silas Marner

 

Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe is the third novel by George Eliot, published in 1861. An outwardly simple tale of a linen weaver, it is notable for its strong realism and its sophisticated treatment of a variety of issues ranging from religion to industrialization to community.

                  In this novel George Eliot wrote the story of Silas Marner and his struggle as pick-pocketer and thief. He brought up a girl name Eppie child of Molly Farren. Eppie changed silas completely and make bond with him. Thus this story reaches its end.

                          The novel is set in the early years of the 19th century. Silas Marner, a weaver, is a member of a small Calvinist congregation in Lantern Yard, a slum street in an unnamed city in Northern England.

                            ‘Silas Marner’, Eliot combines symbolism with a historically precise setting to create a tale of love and hope. On one level, the book has a strong moral tract: the bad character, Dunstan Cass, gets his just deserts, while the pitiable character, Silas Marner, is ultimately richly rewarded, and his miserliness corrected. The novel explores the issues of redemptive love, the notion of community, the role of religion, the status of the gentry and family, and impacts of industrialization. While religion and religious devotion play a strong part in this text,

Romola

 Romola (1862–63) is a historical novel by George Eliot set in the fifteenth century, and is "a deep study of life in the city of Florence from an intellectual, artistic, religious, and social point of view".

                           The story of this novel taken from historical events during the Italian Renaissance, and includes in its plot several notable figures from Florentine history. Renaissance Florence and Victorian England were times of philosophical, religious and social turbulence. Romola is the female protagonist through whom the surrounding world is evaluated. The story also deals with the dilemma of where the duty of obedience for women ends and the duty of resistance begin.

Felix Holt, the Radical

 Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) is a social novel written by George Eliot about political disputes in a small English town at the time of the First Reform Act of 1832. Set during the time of the Reform Act of 1832, the story centers on an election contested by Harold Transom, a local landowner, in the "Radical cause" ("Radical" because Transom’s version of "radicalism" isn't radical at all, but rather an application of the term to his politically stagnate lifestyle), contrary to his family's Tory traditions. Contrasting with the opportunism of Transom is the sincere, but opinionated, Radical Felix Holt. A subplot concerns the stepdaughter of a Dissenting minister who is the true heir to the Transom estate, but who is unaware of the fact. She becomes the object of the affections of both Harold Transom and Felix Holt.

Middlemarch

  

 ‘Middlemarch’ is name of town in this novel. Its full title is “Middlemarch: A study of provincial life”. This novel starts with Quotation. It is about Italian life. In this novel present most character than other novel written by her. Middlemarch also showed one symbolic river of the flow.

                ‘Middlemarch’ is a novel of relations. A story of a young idealistic girl. Dorothea Brook is main character of this novel. Dorothea Brooke and Celia Brooke are sisters. In this novel George Eliot portrait both characters contradiction nature.

                In this novel some comical elements and comically named characters Mr. Brooke, the "tiny aunt" Miss Noble, Mrs. Dollop this is realistic novel. Realism present by George Eliot. Because of some characters voices and opinions of different characters we become aware of various issues of the day. The novel also known as the work of social criticism.’

            ‘Middlemarch’ has retained its popularity and status as one of the masterpieces of English fiction, although some reviewers have expressed dissatisfaction at the destiny recorded for Dorothea. In separate centuries, Florence Nightingale and Kate Millett both remarked on the eventual subordination of Dorothea's own dreams to those of her admirer, Ladislaw. However, in the epilogue George Eliot herself acknowledges the regrettable waste of Dorothea's potential, blaming social conditions. Virginia Woolf gave the book unstinting praise, describing Middlemarch as "the magnificent book that, with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people".

              The book examines the role of education in the lives of the character and how such education and study has affected them.

Daniel Deronda

 Daniel Deronda is last novel written by George Eliot completed by her .Its mixture of social satire and moral searching, along with a sympathetic rendering of Jewish proto-Zionist and Kabalistic ideas, has made it a controversial final statement of one of the greatest of Victorian novelists. In this novel George Eliot portrait a character Daniel Deronda main character of this novel struggle by Daniel Deronda shown by her.

 Conclusion:

Thus we can say that George Eliot was a famous and for most readable novelist of Victorian age. Her 1872 work Middlemarch has been described by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.