This week on Bookshelf, I turn to a writer who was way ahead of her time, perhaps even ahead of ours. George Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans in 1819 rejected every convention required of a woman of her century.
Eliot wrote under a man’s name, lived with a partner outside marriage, rejected the religious faith of her childhood, and became one of the most serious novelists of the 19th century.
In an age that prized conformity and deference to class, George Eliot defied convention. She stripped away social hierarchies and turned instead to the inner lives of ordinary people, finding in their struggles and affections the essential truths of what it means to be human.
Eliot grew up in the Warwickshire countryside, at Griff House near Nuneaton. Her father managed estates for local landowners, which gave her access to the libraries of Arbury Hall.
The land around her was unremarkable—flat fields, hedgerows, village chapels—but Eliot absorbed it closely. She saw how gossip travelled, how Methodists held meetings in barns, how minor grievances endured. It was a narrow, disciplined world, shaped by evangelical faith, and Eliot lived under that discipline until her early 20s, when she withdrew from the church altogether.
Later, she transformed those details into fiction: dissenting preachers in Scenes of Clerical Life, farmers and carpenters in Adam Bede.
After her father’s death, Eliot moved to Coventry, where she joined the circle around Charles Bray, a prosperous ribbon manufacturer.
Through Bray and his friends, Eliot was introduced to the radical theology of David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach. She took their books and ideas to London, where she worked as a translator and journalist.
Strauss’s Life of Jesus showed her how belief could be read as history, stories shaped by the needs of communities. Feuerbach, in The Essence of Christianity, argued that religion was human longing turned into doctrine. And when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, while Eliot was writing Adam Bede, she read his account of natural selection—how species survive or vanish depending on their fitness to the world around them. Darwin offered a natural explanation for change, stripping life of providence and placing it within circumstance.
Eliot began living with George Henry Lewes, who was already married, in a partnership that made her an outsider in polite society. To have her novels judged fairly, she adopted the name George Eliot.
The choice was practical. Eliot’s first success came with Scenes of Clerical Life. Adam Bede followed in 1859 and sold widely. Eliot then wrote The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, and Felix Holt. In 1871–72 Eliot published Middlemarch, a book critics still place at the centre of the English novel. Virginia Woolf called it “one of the few novels written for grown-up people.”
Silas Marner was a book I studied as a child and always loved. Its story is deceptively simple: a betrayed weaver lives in exile, hoarding his gold, until the coins are stolen and his life empties out. Then, one winter night, an orphaned child wanders into his cottage. He takes her in, names her Eppie, and through her finds renewal.
“He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life. Silas’s hand satisfied itself with throwing the shuttle, and his eye with seeing the little squares in the cloth complete themselves under his effort… all these immediate promptings helped, along with the weaving, to reduce his life to the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect. He hated the thought of the past… and the future was all dark, for there was no Unseen Love that cared for him. Thought was arrested by utter bewilderment; now its old narrow pathway was closed, and affection seemed to have died under the bruise that had fallen on its keenest nerves.”
That long, slow unfolding of loneliness shows Eliot’s insight into the mind of a man without hope. Redemption comes when Eppie restores Silas to the village and to life itself.
Loss, too, shapes much of her work. In The Mill on the Floss, the siblings Maggie and Tom Tulliver die together in a flood:
“The boat reappeared—but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted: living through again in one supreme moment the days when they had clasped their little hands in love and roamed the daisied fields together.”
That scene was my brother Varun’s favourite as a child. Like many boys, he struggled to express affection for his sister, but I knew he loved me. His choice of this passage, with its language of shared memory and reconciliation, was his way of saying: I see you, I know you see me. Now that my brother is gone, I hold on to that.
Eliot’s private life remained controversial. For nearly 25 years, she and Lewes lived together until he died in 1878. Because Lewes was already married and could not obtain a divorce, their union was condemned as immoral; Eliot was openly criticised in the press, excluded from polite society, and refused visits by friends and relatives who would not countenance her “living in sin.”
She married John Walter Cross in 1880 and died months later at 61, her health worn down by chronic kidney disease, worsened by years of public censure, social exclusion, financial strain, and the long anxieties of caring for Lewes through his illnesses.
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) was denied burial in Westminster Abbey because her long partnership with George Henry Lewes, who remained married to another woman, was still judged scandalous by the Church. Instead she was buried in Highgate Cemetery among dissenters. In 1980, a century later, a memorial stone was placed in Poets’ Corner—belated official recognition of her place in English letters.
Her work endures because Eliot treated ordinary people with dignity. In Adam Bede, Eliot gave weight to the carpenter, the dairymaid, and the village preacher. In Middlemarch, Eliot follows Victorian doctors, landowners, and clergymen whose lives are fractured. In Silas Marner, Eliot turned a story about a poor weaver into a parable of redemption through care. Eliot’s work endures as she rejects romantic, easy endings. Happiness, when it comes, is partial and precarious. The Mill on the Floss closes with the drowning of Tom and Maggie, their reconciliation arriving in death.
Eliot trusted her readers to think. She gave them characters like herself, who resist judgment. Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch is both idealistic and naïve. Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede is frightened, selfish—but never dismissed. By compelling us to weigh motives and consequences, Eliot insisted that serious art could emerge from compromise, contradiction, and ordinary life.
In T&T the question of faith still animates public life: Pentecostal churches rise beside Catholic ones, hymns fill the air in villages, the mosque call echoes on Fridays, and the puja on a Saturday evening.
Yet alongside this vitality runs a tension Eliot would have recognised—the pull between doctrine and the daily realities of people struggling to make sense of their lives. Eliot’s novels remind us that the real heart of a country lies not in its creeds or its institutions but in the lives of ordinary people in small communities. Everyone has a story. Everyone matters.
