Introduction beginning of George Eliot’s literary career

PLAN
INTRODUCTION
1. Beginning of George Eliot’s literary career
1.2. An overview of Eliot’s most famous books
3. Depiction of moral issues and the life of ordinary people
4. Analysis of “The Mill on the floss” by G.Eliot
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Throughout history, it has been important to learn literature. In today’s world, the demand to learn a foreign language is increasing day by day and the study of foreign languages is of great importance in strengthening international relations and diplomatic relations. The role of literature in the process of language learning is unique. Through literary texts it is possible to study not only the language, but also the culture of other countries.
The actuality of the course work. Eliot’s novels contain characters who embody a “divine” compassion as they enter into the suffering lives of others, and who are, for her, incarnational. In her novels, Eliot enfleshes but a solitary aspect of the Incarnation—God’s sharing in the suffering of humanity. After an introductory chapter tracing Eliot’s own religious journey, I address the “incarnations” in selected Eliot novels—Dinah Morris in Adam Bede, Romola (title character) and Dorthea Brooke in Middlemarch. The sixth chapter addresses the theology of the Maurice who, like Eliot, was cognizant of the Enlightenment criticisms of Christianity yet remained orthodox in his treatment of the Incarnation.
The aim of the course work. This course work aims at analyzing the life and literary career of the Victorian writer, novelist George Eliot. George Eliot continues to develop this aesthetic practice throughout her career, as she continues to learn through her writing what it means that it is her holy calling to sanctify the ordinary. Such paradoxes abound in the mystical way of thinking, and it is this mystical practice that takes her aesthetic to a deeper level as she comes to question the distinction between the sacred and the secular and to experiment further with mystical ideas, particularly the holiness of everything and the ubiquitous presence of the sacred.
The practical value of the course work. This course work aims at analyzing the major works of George Eliot especially “The Mill on the Floss” , which is a work that will be analysed in 2.2 of Chapter II in this work. Characterization of George Eliot in novels is unforgettable for reader due to its realism and tragic effect. When we discuss and analyse most of the novels of George Eliot in detail, we come to know the fact that it is her power of depicting a character which makes any character life-like and real. For example, when we have a deep analysis, of her famous tragic novel “A Mill on the Floss” in which we come across Mary Evans in the character of Maggie, same like matter is here; when we read or discuss this novel, we also meet a very towering and overwhelming personality that is the father of Maggie in “A Mill on the Floss” named as Robert Evans.
The structure of the course work. In this course paper, I will explain a brief overview about the life and career of George Eliot and inform about his major works. I will especially analyse “The Mill on the Floss”. The paper consists of an introduction, 2 main chapters with 2 sub branches and conclusion and a list of references at the end.
George Eliot, pseudonym of Mary Ann, or Marian, Cross, née Evans, (born November 22, 1819, Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, England—died December 22, 1880, London), English Victorian novelist who developed the method of psychological analysis characteristic of modern fiction. Her major works include Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876).
Evans was born on an estate of her father’s employer. She went as a boarder to Mrs. Wallington’s School at Nuneaton (1828–32), where she came under the influence of Maria Lewis, the principal governess, who inculcated a strong evangelical piety in the young girl. At her last school (1832–35), conducted by the daughters of the Baptist minister at Coventry, her religious ardour increased. She dressed severely and engaged earnestly in good works. The school gave her a reading knowledge of French and Italian, and, after her mother’s death had compelled her to return home to keep house for her father, he let her have lessons in Latin and German. In 1841 she moved with her father to Coventry.
There she became acquainted with a prosperous ribbon manufacturer, Charles Bray, a self-taught freethinker who campaigned for radical causes. His brother-in-law, Charles Hennell, was the author of An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), a book that precipitated Evans’s break with orthodoxy that had been long in preparation. Various books on the relation between the Bible and science had instilled in her keen mind the very doubts they were written to dispel. In 1842 she told her father that she could no longer go to church. The ensuing storm raged for several months before they reached a compromise, leaving her free to think what she pleased so long as she appeared respectably at church, and she lived with him until his death in 1849.
The Brays and the Hennells quickly drew her from extreme provincialism, introducing her to many ideas in violent disagreement with her Tory father’s religious and political views. When Charles Hennell married in 1843, she took over from his wife the translating of D.F. Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, which was published anonymously as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, 3 vol. (1846), and had a profound influence on English rationalism. After the wedding Mrs. Hennell’s father, R.H. Brabant, invited Evans to visit at Devizes. A rather silly man, he had worked for years on a book (never completed), which was to dispose of the supernatural elements in religion. They read German and Greek together and discussed theology on long walks; soon Mrs. Brabant became jealous of their intimacy, and, before the term of her visit, Evans was forced to leave. Mrs. Hennell felt that her father had acted ungenerously. Out of the humiliation of this episode George Eliot drew the horrible vividness of Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch.
She spent the winter of 1849–50 at Geneva, reading extensively while living with the family of François D’Albert Durade, who painted a portrait of her. Like those by Mrs. Bray (1842) and Sir Frederic Burton (1865), all in the National Portrait Gallery, it shows her with light brown hair, gray-blue eyes, and a very fair complexion. Returning to Coventry, she spent the rest of 1850 with the Brays, pondering how to live on the £100 a year left by her father. After John Chapman, the publisher of The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, got her a chance to review R.W. Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect in The Westminster Review (January 1851), she decided to settle in London as a freelance writer, and in January 1851 she went to board with the Chapmans at 142, Strand.
Soon after her arrival in London, Mrs. Chapman and the children’s governess, who was also John Chapman’s mistress, became jealous of Marian, as she now signed her name, and after 10 weeks she returned to Coventry in tears. Doubtless her feelings were strongly attracted to the magnetic Chapman, whose diary supplies this information, but there is no evidence that she was ever his mistress. A few months later he bought The Westminster Review, and Evans, contrite at the domestic complications she had unwittingly caused, returned to London. For three years, until 1854, she served as subeditor of The Westminster, which under her influence enjoyed its most brilliant run since the days of John Stuart Mill. At the Chapmans’ evening parties she met many notable literary figures in an atmosphere of political and religious radicalism. Across the Strand lived the subeditor of The Economist, Herbert Spencer, whose Social Statics (1851) Chapman had just published. Evans shared many of Spencer’s interests and saw so much of him that it was soon rumoured that they were engaged. Though he did not become her husband, he introduced her to the two men who did.
George Henry Lewes was the most versatile of Victorian journalists. In 1841 he had married Agnes Jervis, by whom he had four sons. In 1850 Lewes and a friend, the journalist Thornton Leigh Hunt, founded a radical weekly called The Leader, for which he wrote the literary and theatrical sections. In April 1850, two weeks after the first number appeared, Agnes Lewes gave birth to a son whose father was Thornton Hunt. Lewes, being a man of liberal views, had the child registered as Edmund Lewes and remained on friendly terms with his wife and Hunt. But after she bore Hunt a second child in October 1851, Lewes ceased to regard her as his wife, though, having condoned the adultery, he was precluded from suing for divorce. At this moment of dejection, his home hopelessly broken, he met Marian Evans. They consulted about articles and went to plays and operas that Lewes reviewed for The Leader. Convinced that his break with Agnes was irrevocable, Evans determined to live openly with Lewes, as his wife. In July 1854, after the publication of her translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, they went to Germany together. In all but the legal form it was a marriage, and it continued happily until Lewes’s death in 1878. “Women who are content with light and easily broken ties,” she told Mrs. Bray, “do not act as I have done. They obtain what they desire and are still invited to dinner.”
At Weimar and Berlin she wrote some of her best essays for The Westminster and translated Spinoza’s Ethics (published in 1981), while Lewes worked on his groundbreaking life of Goethe. By his pen alone he had to support his three surviving sons at school in Switzerland as well as Agnes, whom he gave £100 a year, which was continued until her death in 1902. She had four children by Hunt, the last born in 1857, all registered under Lewes’s name. The few friends who knew the facts agreed that toward Agnes his conduct was more than generous, but there was a good deal of malicious gossip about the “strong-minded woman” who had “run off with” her husband. Evans’s deepest regret was that her act isolated her from her family in Warwickshire. She turned to early memories and, encouraged by Lewes, wrote a story about a childhood episode in Chilvers Coton parish. Published in Blackwood’s Magazine (1857) as The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, it was an instant success. Two more tales, Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story and Janet’s Repentance, also based on local events, appeared serially in the same year, and Blackwood republished all three as Scenes of Clerical Life, 2 vol. (1858), under the pseudonym George Eliot.
Adam Bede, 3 vol. (1859), her first long novel, she described as “a country story—full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay.” Its masterly realism—“the faithful representing of commonplace things”—brought to English fiction the same truthful observation of minute detail that John Ruskin was commending in the Pre-Raphaelites. The book is rich in humour. The germ of the plot was an anecdote her Methodist aunt told of visiting a girl condemned for child murder. The dialect of the Bedes she had heard in the conversations of her Derbyshire uncles with her father, some of whose early experiences she assigned to Adam. But what was new in English fiction was the combination of deep human sympathy and rigorous moral judgment. Adam Bede went through eight printings within a year, and Blackwood doubled the £800 paid for it and returned the copyright.
In The Mill on the Floss, 3 vol. (1860), she returned again to the scenes of her early life. The first half of the book, with its remarkable portrayal of childhood, is irresistibly appealing, and throughout there are scenes that reach a new level of psychological subtlety.
At this time historical novels were in vogue, and during their visit to Florence in 1860 Lewes suggested Girolamo Savonarola as a good subject, George Eliot grasped it enthusiastically and began to plan Romola (1862–63). First, however, she wrote Silas Marner (1861), which had thrust itself between her and the Italian material. Its brevity and perfection of form made this story of the weaver whose lost gold is replaced by a strayed child the best known of her books, though it has suffered unfairly from being forced on generations of schoolchildren. Romola was planned as a serial for Blackwood’s, until an offer of £10,000 from The Cornhill Magazine induced George Eliot to desert her old publisher; but rather than divide the book into the 16 installments the editor wanted, she accepted £3,000 less, an evidence of artistic integrity few writers would have shown. Details of Florentine history, setting, costume, and dialogue were scrupulously studied at the British Museum and during a second trip to Italy in 1861. It was published in 14 parts between July 1862 and August 1863. Though the book lacks the spontaneity of the English stories, it has been unduly disparaged.
George Eliot’s next two novels are laid in England at the time of agitation for passage of the Reform Bill. In Felix Holt, the Radical, 3 vol. (1866), she drew the election riot from recollection of one she saw at Nuneaton in December 1832. The initial impulse of the book was not the political theme but the tragic character of Mrs. Transome, who was one of her greatest triumphs. The intricate plot popular taste then demanded now tells against the novel. Middlemarch (8 parts, 1871–72) is by general consent George Eliot’s masterpiece. Under her hand the novel had developed from a mere entertainment into a highly intellectual form of art. Every class of Middlemarch society is depicted from the landed gentry and clergy to the manufacturers and professional men, the shopkeepers, publicans, farmers, and labourers. Several strands of plot are interwoven to reinforce each other by contrast and parallel. Yet the story depends not on close-knit intrigue but on showing the incalculably diffusive effect of the unhistoric acts of those who “lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Daniel Deronda (8 parts, 1876), in which George Eliot comes nearest the contemporary scene, is built on the contrast between Mirah Cohen, a poor Jewish girl, and the upper class Gwendolen Harleth, who marries for money and regrets it. The less convincingly realized hero, Daniel, after discovering that he is Jewish, marries Mirah and departs for Palestine to establish a home for his nation. The picture of the Cohen family evoked grateful praise from Jewish readers. But the best part of Daniel Deronda is the keen analysis of Gwendolen’s character, which seems to many critics the peak of George Eliot’s achievement.
In 1863 the Leweses bought the Priory, 21, North Bank, Regent’s Park, where their Sunday afternoons became a brilliant feature of Victorian life. There on November 30, 1878, Lewes died. For nearly 25 years he had fostered her genius and managed all the practical details of life, which now fell upon her. Most of all she missed the encouragement that alone made it possible for her to write. For months she saw no one but his son Charles Lee Lewes; she devoted herself to completing the last volume of his Problems of Life and Mind (1873–79) and founded the George Henry Lewes Studentship in Physiology at Cambridge. For some years her investments had been in the hands of John Walter Cross (1840–1924), a banker introduced to the Leweses by Herbert Spencer. Cross’s mother had died a week after Lewes. Drawn by sympathy and the need for advice, George Eliot soon began to lean on him for affection too. On May 6, 1880, they were married in St. George’s, Hanover Square. Cross was 40; she was in her 61st year. After a wedding trip in Italy they returned to her country house at Witley before moving to 4, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where she died in December. She was buried at Highgate Cemetery.
1.2. An overview of Eliot’s most famous books
Eliot wrote several works of fiction under her pen name. Eliot’s best-known works are The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876). Lewes died in 1878, and in 1880 Eliot married a banker named John Walter Cross, who was twenty-one years her junior. Eliot died the same year from a throat infection and is buried in London.
Novels
George Eliot is a nom de plume that is well known for realistic novels in the Victorian era. The name is inscribed as the author on the cover of seven novels and a collection of short stories. Mary Ann Evans, the woman behind the pen name George Eliot, has gifted the world poems, reviews, and novels so rich in themes that they remain relevant even after tens of decades. Let’s take a look at some of the most famous novels by George Eliot.
Adam Bede
Eliot’s very first fiction gave her an encouraging debut. Adam Bede is about a twenty-six-year-old carpenter, loved and admired by many. Adam begins to court a beautiful but shallow girl called Hetty but Hetty secretly has an affair with a dashing soldier from the gentry named Arthur Donnithorne. The love triangle results in complications that would lead to a crime, exile, death, and heartbreak.
Mill on the Floss
Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s second fiction novel published in 1860. It was preceded by Adam Bede the first of the George Eliot novels. Mill on the Floss narrates the story of Maggie Tulliver and the challenges of balancing her familial ties with her romantic relationships. The heart of the story lies in her love-hate relationship with her brother Tom Tulliver whose composition of character is entirely different from Maggie’s.
The story is set in the fictional village of St Ogg’s as nine-year-old Maggie relishes her childhood in her family mill Dolcote Mill which is located at a junction between the River Floss and River Ripple. The dynamics of their relationship get complicated as they face several family crises such as bankruptcy, the loss of the Dolcote Mill, and the death of their father.
Some of the complications arise as Maggie comes of age and begins to form romantic relationships. First, Maggie forms a friendship with Philip Wakem and this bond gives her an avenue to escape the austerity of her own life, but eventually, Tom who despises Philip finds out about the friendship and forces Maggie to renounce Philip. Tom and Maggie’s relationship takes a turn for the worse when Maggie elopes with her cousin’s suitor Steven Guest, although Maggie refuses to marry Steven after the elopement, Tom refuses to forgive her upon her return and harshly sends her away.
In the end, Maggie and Tom reconcile as they both drown to their death in a flood.
The novel has themes of gender discrimination and family relationships. Critics suggest the author, Mary Ann Evans might have been projecting her relationship with her brother Isaac Evans in The Mill on the Floss.
Silas Marner
Silas Marner is a melancholic story but with a happy ending. It is George Eliot’s third novel published in 1861. The novel is centered on the protagonist Silas Marner, who losses faith in humanity and in God due to a betrayal and an unjust treatment that leaves him heartbroken and in despair, and how fate smiles on him with time and restores his lost faith.
Silas Marner is a linen weaver and a member of a Calvinist congregation in a fictional town called Lantern Yard. He is accused of stealing the church money while watching over their ill deacon. Silas pleads his innocence but is implicated in the case by his pocket knife which was found at the scene of the theft and the discovery of the empty bags that once contained the money in Silas Marner’s house.
Silas maintains his innocent plea and suspects his best friend, William Dane has framed him up because William had borrowed Silas’ pocket knife shortly before the discovery of the theft. The congregation agree to cast a lot to determine whether Silas would be proven innocent and Silas agrees to this, hoping that God would vindicate him and direct the lot to result in his favor. But the lot turns out against Silas’ innocence. Silas Marner’s fiancee breaks off their engagement and marries William Dane instead.
Betrayed and shattered, Silas Marner moves to the Midland village of Raveloe where he begins a new life, continuing in his craft as a linen weaver but isolating himself from the villagers. The villagers of Raveloe see Silas as a miserly recluse while Silas finds comfort in the gold coins he accumulates.
On a foggy night, Dunstan Cass, the son of a wealthy landowner in Raveloe, steals all of Silas’ gold coins but falls into a stone quarry as he makes away with the money. Silas is heartbroken again when he discovers that his gold coins have been stolen. The villagers help him search for it but it yields no success. Duncan Cass disappears around the same time but no one makes a connection between the two incidents because Dunstan is a prodigal son that is known to disappear on occasion.
Meanwhile, Godfrey Cass, the older brother to Dunstan hides a big secret. He is married to Molly, an opium addict from another town. Godfrey hopes no one discovers this secret as he intends to marry Nancy Lammeter a respectable girl from a middle-class family. Molly comes to Raveloe with her little daughter, intent on revealing Godfrey’s secret to his family but falls unconscious in the snow while her toddler daughter strays off to Silas’ hut.
Silas finds the little girl in his hut and at first mistakes her gold curls for his lost gold. When he realizes she is a little girl, he follows her trail and it takes him to where Molly is lying dead. He reports the incident and Godfrey on recognizing Molly thinks it is convenient for his secret and does not identify her. In the absence of any claim on the little girl, Silas adopts her and names her Eppie.
Silas begins to care for Eppie and grows to love her. Dolly Winthrop, Silas’ neighbor helps him in taking care of Eppie while Godfrey Cass occasionally supports him with money.
Sixteen years go by and Eppie blossoms into the belle of Raveloe while Godfrey Cass, who had succeeded in marrying Nancy Lammeter, remains childless in the marriage. Construction commences at the stone quarry and Dunstan Cass’ skeleton along with Silas bags of Gold coins are found in the stone quarry. The bags of gold are returned to Silas but shortly after, Godfrey Cass confesses to being Eppie’s biological father and begs Eppie to return to him. This makes Silas Marner’s gold lose value to him because he cannot imagine a happy life without Eppie as his daughter. Eppie refuses to leave Silas and it makes him overjoyed.
Silas revisits Lantern Yard but finds none of the milestones or people he once knew. The town has been taken over by a factory. Therefore, he never gets to know the fate of all those that had treated him unjustly.
Eppie marries Aaron Winthrop and they all live together happily in Raveloe.
The most important theme in this novel is the value of love among humans over material wealth and it is one of the most enjoyable reads from George Eliot.
Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life
Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life is one of the most acclaimed novels by George Eliot. It was published between 1871 and 1872 in eight volumes. The story is set in a fictional English village called Middlemarch between 1829-1832.
The plot centers around Dorothea Brooke, an idealistic, intelligent nineteen-year-old who marries a much older man with hopes of joining in his research and getting intellectual mentorship from him; Tertius Lydgate, a medical doctor whose career is threatened by his idealism and progressive ideas; Fred Vincy and his sister Rosamund, children of the mayor who languish in the hope of finding fortune in inheritance or marriage; Mary Garth a plain but kind young lady whom Fred Vincy is in love with; and Nicholas Bulstrode, a wealthy banker who is hypocritic in his religiosity and hides an unsavory past.
The novel follows their lives as it explores the themes of idealism, religion, and social stratification among others.
Daniel Deronda
Published in 1876, it is the last of George Eliot’s novels. The plot of Daniel Deronda intertwines the stories of two characters–the eponymous character Daniel Deronda and Gwendolyn Harleth. The story is set across various countries in Europe including Germany, England, and Italy in the years 1865 and 1866.
The novel begins in 1866 with Daniel observing Gwendolyn as she loses all her money in a game. The next day, Daniel redeems Gwendolyn’s necklace which she pawned for money and sends someone to return the necklace to her. Gwendolyn is grateful to Daniel as she needs the money to return home to her family.
From there, the story splits into flashbacks to 1865 detailing Gwendolyn’s family struggles and Daniel Deronda’s ambiguous family history.
Daniel Deronda gets introduced to the Jewish community through Mirah Lapidoth who he rescues from a suicide attempt. While helping Mirah trace her lost family members, Daniel meets Mordecai, a Jewish visionary passionate about the Jewish people and their identity. Mordecai tries to make Daniel join in his vision and cause but Daniel has reservations about joining a cause he believes he has no connection with.
Eventually, Daniel traces his ancestry and discovers he is Jewish and that motivates him to follow Mordecai’s cause fully.
George Eliot addresses her recurring theme of family, gender, and social stratification then a novel theme of Semitism in Daniel Deronda.

George Eliot only discovered her bent for fiction when well into the middle years of her life. Her first works consisted of three short stories, published in Blackwood's Magazine during 1857, and reissued under the title of Scenes of Clerical Life in the following year. Like her later novels they deal with the tragedy or ordinary lives, unfolded with an intense sympathy and deep insight into the truth of character. Adam Bede (1859) was a full-length novel, which announced the arrival of a new writer of the highest calibre. It gives an excellent picture of English country life among the humbler classes. The story of Hetty and the murder of her child is movingly told, and the book is notable for its fine characters, outstanding among whom are Mrs Poyser, Hetty, and Adam Bede himself. Her next work, considered by many her best, was The Mill on the Floss (1860). The partly autobiographical story of Maggie and Tom Tulliver is a moving tragedy set in an authentic rural background, and the character of Maggie is probably her most profound study of the inner recesses of human personality. As yet her novel is not overloaded by the ethical interests which direct the course of her later works. In style it is simple, often almost poetical. Silas Marner: the Weaver of Raveloe (1861) is a shorter novel, which again gives excellent pictures of village life; it is less earnest in tone, and has scenes of a rich humour, which are skilfully blended with the tragedy. Like The Mill on the Floss, it is somewhat marred by its melodramatic ending. With the publication of Romola (1863) begins a new phase of George Eliot's writing. The ethical interests which had underlain all her previous works now become more and more the dominating factor in her novels. The story, of Romola is set in medieval Florence, but, in spite of the thorough research which lay behind it, the historical setting never really lives. Indeed, the note of spontaneity is lacking in this novel, which is most memor able for its study of degeneracy in the character of Tito Melema. Felix Holt the Radical (1866), probably the least important of her novels, is set in the period of the Reform Bill. Next came Middle march, a Study of Provincial Life (1871-72), in which George Eliot built up, from the lives of a great number of deeply studied characters, the complex picture of the life of a small town. Her characters suffer through their own blindness and folly, and the theme is treated with a powerful and inexorable realism. Her last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), is still more strongly coloured by her preoccupation with moral problems: it is more of a dissertation than a novel. It is grimly earnest in tone and almost completely lacking in the lighter touches of her earlier work, though it has some fine scenes: In 1879 she published a collection of miscellaneous essays under the title of Impressions of Theophrastus Such.

Features of her Novels : (a) Her Choice of Subject: George Eliot carries still further that preoccupation, with the individual personality which we have seen to be the prime concern of the Brontës. For her the development of the human soul, or the study of its relationship to the greater things beyond itself, is the all-important theme. There is relatively little striking incident in her novels, but her plots are skilfully managed. Behind all her writing there lies a sense of the tragedy of life, in which sin or folly brings its own retribution. Her preoccupation with this theme gives to her later work some of the features of the moral treatise.
(b) Her characters: are usually drawn from the lower classes of society, and her studies of the English countryman show great understanding and insight. An adept at the development of character, she excels in the deep and minute analysis of the motives and reactions of ordinary folk. She brings to bear upon her study of the soul the knowledge of the student of psychology, and her characterization makes no concessions to sentiment. Her sinners, and she is particularly interested in self-deceivers and stupid people are portrayed with an unswerving truthfulness.
(c) The tone of her novels is one of moral earnestness, and at times in her later work of an austere grimness. But almost always it is lightened by her humour. In the earlier novels this is rich and genial, though even there it has some of the irony which appears more frequently and more caustically in the later books.
(d) George Eliot's style is lucid, and, to begin with, simple, but later, in reflective passages, it is often overweighted with abstractions. Her dialogue is excellent for the revelation of character, and her command of the idioms of ordinary speech enables her to achieve a fine naturalness. Only rarely does she rise to the impassioned poetical heights of the Brontës, but her earlier novels, particularly The Mill on the Floss, are full of fine descriptions of the English countryside, and her faculty for natural description she never lost entirely.
Her Place in the History of the English Novel : She is of great importance in the history of fiction. Her serious concern with the problems of the human personality and its relationship with forces outside itself, her interest in detailed psychological analysis of the realms of the inner consciousness, did much to determine the future course of the English novel. The twentieth century has seen the rapid development of these interests, and it is significant that the reputation of George Eliot, which suffered a temporary eclipse after her death, has recovered during the last ten or twenty years to a surprising degree. The Victorian writer George Eliot, whose true name was Mary Ann Evans, was the subject of much gossip during her lifetime, and after her death. She, the daughter of a land agent who rose to literary prominence in the 1850s and 60s, scandalously maintained a domestic partnership, and cohabitated, with the (married) writer George Henry Lewes for twenty-one years, until his death. This was after she had refused a marriage proposal and had begun several relationships with married men. Lewes died in 1878, and afterwards, in 1880, she married for the first time, to a banker twenty years younger, named John Walter Cross, who had previously called her “Aunt,” given the closeness between their families. She was sixty-one. While on their honeymoon in Venice, he mysteriously jumped out of a window into the Grand Canal, which many have interpreted as reflecting a knee-jerk panic at the realization of what Rebecca Mead slyly terms “a grotesque inequity of desire.” Eliot died eleven months later, of kidney failure. The literary world mourned. But many years later, circa 1907, according to the great historian Kathryn Hughes in her wonderful book Victorians Undone, rumors began to circulate that she had been rather unevenly-bodied in life, with two very different-sized hands. This was not the first time Eliot’s looks had been the scuttlebutt of London; her face, which had a larger than average nose and not a full set of teeth, had been enthusiastically excoriated by many of the era’s literary taste-makers, from William Michael Rossetti (Christina’s brother) to the nasty Henry James, who meanly called her “magnificently ugly, deliciously hideous.” But after her death, a descendant eager to show how his side of the family’s ancestors had given inspiration for some of Eliot’s best characters wrote in an unofficial biography that her hands were lopsided, with her right, dominant hand significantly bigger than her left.
This was, apparently, due to Eliot’s roots as a farm girl. Her right hand was evidently larger because she had pounded a large quantity of butter and cheese with it in her early years. The descendant, Reverend William Mottram, had gotten the information while doing research for his biography, using material that Eliot’s first biographer, Mathilde Blind, had gathered. She had completed an interview with Cara Bray, who had known Eliot back on the farm. Bray had said Eliot had been proud of her large right hand when she showed it to her. Blind had included this detail in her final manuscript. This detail horrified Eliot’s family (well, both the Evans family and the Lewes family), and they insisted that this detail was a falsehood. Dairy work was solidly working-class, and this reassertion of Eliot’s humble roots seemed poised to wobble her status as one of the greatest writers and intellectuals of the age. Additionally (though this is a bit of an anachronistic point, but may also have factored in the family’s anxiety), continuously discussing George Eliot’s body as captivatingly ungainly boils her accomplishments down to physical features, which were not her fault, no one’s business, and which caused her pain throughout her lifetime. Furthermore, “It wasn’t just that the story of George Eliot’s large right hand gave her the clumsy body of a working-class country girl,” Hughes writes, “it hinted that she had the sexual morals of one too.” After all, mashing buttermilk alone wasn’t, in all likelihood, enough to cause her hand to grow so large. But Hughes, the historian writing more than a century later, solves the mystery for us. Acquiring George Eliot’s right-hand glove, she determines that Eliot’s glove size was a 6.5. In Victorian England, the smallest possible glove size a woman could have was a size 6. Eliot’s hands were downright tiny. Even if, somehow, the right was larger than the left, it could not have been by a discernible amount.
Eliot's most famous work, Middlemarch, is a turning point in the history of the novel. Making masterful use of a counterpointed plot, Eliot presents the stories of a number of denizens of a small English town on the eve of the Reform Bill of 1832. The main characters, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, long for exceptional lives but are powerfully constrained both by their own unrealistic expectations and by a conservative society. The novel is notable for its deep psychological insight and sophisticated character portraits.
Throughout her career, Eliot wrote with a politically astute pen. From Adam Bede to The Mill on the Floss and the frequently-read Silas Marner, Eliot presented the cases of social outsiders and small-town persecution. No author since Jane Austen had been as socially conscious and as sharp in pointing out the hypocrisy of the country squires. Felix Holt, the Radical and The Legend of Jubal were overtly political novels, and political crisis is at the heart of Middlemarch. Readers in the Victorian era particularly praised her books for their depictions of rural society, for which she drew on her own early experiences, sharing with Wordsworth the belief that there was much interest and importance in the mundane details of ordinary country lives.
Eliot did not, however, confine herself to her bucolic roots. Romola, an historical novel set in late fifteenth-century Florence and touching on the lives of several real persons such as the priest Girolamo Savonarola, displays her wider reading and interests. In The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot made a foray into verse, creating a work whose initial popularity has not endured.
The religious elements in her fiction also owe much to her upbringing, with the experiences of Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss sharing many similarities with the young Mary Anne Evans' own development. When Silas Marner is persuaded that his alienation from the church means also his alienation from society, the author's life is again mirrored with her refusal to attend church. She was at her most autobiographical in Looking Backwards, part of her final printed work Impressions of Theophrastus Such. By the time of Daniel Deronda, Eliot's sales were falling off, and she faded from public view to some degree. This was not helped by the biography written by her husband after her death, which portrayed a wonderful, almost saintly woman totally at odds with scandalous life they knew she had led. In the twentieth century she was championed by a new breed of critics; most notably by Virginia Woolf, who called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." The various film and television adaptations of Eliot's books have re-introduced her to the wider-reading public.
As an author, Eliot was not only very successful in sales, but she was, and remains, one of the most widely praised for her style and clarity of thought. Eliot's sentence structures are clear, patient, and well balanced, and she mixes plain statement and unsettling irony with rare poise. Her commentaries are never without sympathy for the characters, and she never stoops to being arch or flippant with the emotions in her stories. Villains, heroines and bystanders are all presented with awareness and full motivation.
2.2. Analysis of “The Mill on the floss” by G.Eliot
Maggie Tulliver is the impetuous, clever younger daughter of the Tullivers of Dorlcote Mill in St. Ogg's. Maggie frustrates her superficial mother with her unconventional dark coloring and unnatural activeness and intelligence. Maggie's father often takes Maggie's side, but it is Maggie's older brother Tom upon whom she is emotionally dependent. Maggie's greatest happiness is Tom's affection, and his disapproval creates dramatic despair in Maggie, whose view of the world, as all children's, lacks perspective.
Though Tom is less studious than Maggie appears to be, Mr. Tulliver decides to pay for Tom to have additional education rather than have him take over the mill. This decision provokes a family quarrel between Mr. Tulliver and his wife's sisters, the Dodsons. Mr. Tulliver is frustrated by the snobbish contrariness of the Dodsons, led by Mrs. Tulliver's sister Mrs. Glegg, and vows to repay money that Mrs. Glegg had lent him, thereby weakening her hold on him. He has lent almost an equal sum to his sister and her husband, the Mosses, but he feels affectionately toward his sister and decides not to ask for money back, which they cannot pay.
Mr. Stelling, a clergyman, takes Tom on as a student, and Maggie visits him at school several times. On one of these visits, she befriends Mr. Stelling's other student—the sensitive, crippled Philip Wakem, son of her father's enemy, Lawyer Wakem. Maggie herself is sent to school along with her cousin, Lucy, but is called home when she is thirteen when her father finally loses his extended lawsuit with Lawyer Wakem over the use of the river Floss. Mr. Tulliver is rendered bankrupt and ill. Tom returns home as well to support the family, as the Dodson's offer little help. The mill itself is up for auction, and Lawyer Wakem, based on an idea inadvertently furnished to him by Mrs. Tulliver, buys Dorlcote Mill and retains Mr. Tulliver as a manager in an act of humiliating patronage.
Even after Mr. Tulliver's recovery, the atmosphere at the Tullivers' is grim. One bright spot is the return of Bob Jakin, a childhood friend of Tom's, into Tom and Maggie's life. Bob, a trader, kindly buys books for Maggie and one of them—Thomas a Kempis's The Imitation of Christ—influences a spiritual awakening in her that leads to many months of pious self-denial. It is only after Maggie reencounters Philip Wakem on one of her walks in the woods that she is persuaded to leave her martyrish dullness in favor of the richness of literature and human interaction. Philip and Maggie meet clandestinely for a year, since Maggie's father would be hurt by their friendship as he has sworn to hold Lawyer Wakem as his life-long enemy. Philip finally confesses to Maggie that he loves her, and Maggie, at first surprised, says she loves him back. Soon thereafter, Tom discovers their meetings, cruelly upbraids Philip, and makes Maggie swear not to see Philip again.
On a business venture with Bob Jakin, Tom has amassed enough money to pay off Mr. Tulliver's debts to the family's surprise and relief. On the way home from the official repayment of the debts, Mr. Tulliver meets Lawyer Wakem and attacks him, but then Mr. Tulliver falls ill himself and dies the next day.
Several years later, Maggie has been teaching in another village. Now a tall, striking woman, she returns to St. Ogg's to visit her cousin Lucy, who has taken in Mrs. Tulliver. Lucy has a handsome and rich suitor named Stephen Guest, and they are friends with Philip Wakem. Maggie asks Tom for permission to see Philip, which Tom grudgingly gives her. Maggie and Philip renew their close friendship, and Maggie would consider marriage to Philip, if only his father approved. Lucy realizes that Tom wishes to purchase back Dorlcote Mill, and she asks Philip to speak to his father, Lawyer Wakem. Philip speaks to his father about selling the mill and about his love for Maggie, and Lawyer Wakem is eventually responsive to both propositions.
Meanwhile, however, Stephen and Maggie have gradually become helplessly attracted to each other, against both of their expectations and wishes. Maggie plans for their attraction to come to nothing, as she will take another teaching post away from St. Ogg's soon. Stephen pursues her, though, and Philip quickly becomes aware of the situation. Feeling ill and jealous, Philip cancels a boat- ride with Maggie and Lucy, sending Stephen instead. As Lucy has proceeded down river, meaning to leave Philip and Maggie alone, Stephen and Maggie find themselves inadvertently alone together. Stephen rows Maggie past their planned meeting point with Lucy and begs her to marry him. The weather changes and they are far down the river. Maggie complacently boards a larger boat with Philip, which is headed for Mudport. They sleep over night on the boat's deck and when they reach Mudport, Maggie holds firm in her decision to part with Stephen and return to St. Ogg's.
On her return to St. Ogg's, Maggie is treated in town as a fallen woman and a social outcast. Tom, now back in Dorlcote Mill, renounces her, and Maggie, accompanied by her mother, goes to lodge with Bob Jakin and his wife. Despite public knowledge of Stephen's letter, which acknowledges all the blame upon himself, Maggie is befriended only by the Jakins and the clergyman Dr. Kenn. Lucy, who has been prostrate with grief, becomes well again and secretly visits Maggie to show her forgiveness. Philip, as well, sends a letter of forgiveness and faithfulness.
Stephen sends Maggie a letter renewing his pleas for her hand in marriage and protesting the pain she has caused him. Maggie vows to bear the burden of the pain she has caused others and must endure herself until death but wonders to herself how long this trial, her life, will be. At this moment, water begins rushing under the Jakin's door from the nearby river Floss, which is flooding. Maggie wakes the Jakins' and takes one of their boats, rowing it down river in a feat of miraculous strength toward Dorlcote Mill. Maggie rescues Tom, who is trapped in the house, and they row down river towards Lucy. Before they can reach Lucy's house, the boat is capsized by debris in the river, and Maggie and Tom drown in each other's arms. Years go by and Philip, and Stephen and Lucy together, visit the grave.
Both characters and places in The Mill on the Floss are presented as the current products of multi-generational gestation. The very architecture of St. Ogg's bears its hundreds of years of history within it. Similarly, Maggie and Tom are the hereditary products of two competing family lines—the Tullivers and the Dodsons—that have long histories and tendencies. In the novel, the past holds a cumulative presence and has a determining effect upon characters who are open to its influence. The first, carefully sketched out book about Maggie and Tom's childhood becomes the past of the rest of the novel. Maggie holds the memory of her childhood sacred and her connection to that time comes to affects her future behavior. Here, the past is not something to be escaped nor is it something that will rise again to threaten, but it is instead an inherent part of Maggie's (and her father's) character, making fidelity to it a necessity. Book First clearly demonstrates the painfulness of life without a past—the depths of Maggie's childhood emotions are nearly unbearable to her because she has no past of conquered troubles to look back upon with which to put her present situation in perspective. Stephen is held up as an example of the dangers of neglecting the past. Dr. Kenn, a sort of moral yardstick within the novel, complains of this neglect of the past of which Stephen is a part and Maggie has worked against: "At present everything seems tending toward the relaxation of ties—toward the substitution of wayward choice for the adherence to obligation which has its roots in the past." Thus, without a recognition of the past with which to form one's character, one is left only to the whims of the moment and subject to emotional extremes and eventual loneliness.
The Mill on the Floss is not a religious novel, but it is highly concerned with a morality that should function among all people and should aspire to a compassionate connection with others through sympathy. The parable of St. Ogg rewards the ferryman's unquestioning sympathy with another, and Maggie, in her final recreation of the St. Ogg scene during the flood, is vindicated on the grounds of her deep sympathy with others. The opposite of this sympathy within the novel finds the form of variations of egoism. Tom has not the capability of sympathizing with Maggie. He is aligned with the narrow, self-serving ethic of the rising entrepreneur: Tom explains to Mr. Deane that he cares about his own standing, and Mr. Deane compliments him, "That's the right spirit, and I never refuse to help anybody if they've a mind to do themselves justice." Stephen, too, is seen as a figure that puts himself before others. His arguments in favor of his and Maggie's elopement all revolve around the privileging of his own emotion over that of others', even Maggie's. In contrast, Maggie's, Philip's, and Lucy's mutual sympathy is upheld as the moral triumph within the tragedy of the last book. Eliot herself believed that the purpose of art is to present the reader with realistic circumstances and characters that will ultimately enlarge the reader's capacity for sympathy with others. We can see this logic working against Maggie's young asceticism. Maggie's self-denial becomes morally injurious to her because she is denying herself the very intellectual and artistic experiences that would help her understand her own plight and have pity for the plight of others.
CONCLUSION
Like many authors, Eliot drew from her own life and observations in her writing. Many of her works depicted rural society, both the positives and the negatives. On the one hand, she believed in the literary worth of even the smallest, most mundane details of ordinary country life, which shows up in the settings of many of her novels, including Middlemarch. She wrote in the realist school of fiction, attempting to depict her subjects as naturally as possible and avoid flowery artifice; she specifically reacted against the feather-light, ornamental, and trite writing style preferred by some of her contemporaries, especially by fellow female authors.
Eliot’s depictions of country life were not all positive, though. Several of her novels, such as Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, examine what happens to outsiders in the close-knit rural communities that were so easily admired or even idealized. Her sympathy for the persecuted and marginalized bled into her more overtly political prose, such as Felix Holt, the Radical and Middlemarch, which dealt with the influence of politics on “normal” life and characters.
Because of her Rosehill-era interest in translation, Eliot was gradually influenced by German philosophers. This manifested itself in her novels in a largely humanistic approach to social and religious topics. Her own sense of social alienation due to religious reasons (her dislike of organized religion and her affair with Lewes scandalized the devout in her communities) made its way into her novels as well. Although she retained some of her religiously based ideas (such as the concept of atoning for sin through penance and suffering), her novels reflected her own worldview that was more spiritual or agnostic than traditionally religious.
It is said that George Eliot 's style of writing deals with much realism. Eliot, herself meant by a "realist" to be "an artist who values the truth of observation above the imaginative fancies of writers of "romance" or fashionable melodramatic fiction." (Ashton 19) This technique is artfully utilized in her writings in a way which human character and relationships are dissected and analyzed. In the novel The Mill on the Floss, Eliot uses the relationships of the protagonist of the story, Miss Maggie Tulliver, as a medium in which to convey various aspects of human social associations. It seems that as a result of Maggie 's nature and of circumstances presented around her, that she is never able to have a connection with one person that satisfies her multifaceted needs and desires. Maggie is able, to some extent, to explore the various and occasionally conflicting aspects of her person with her relationships between other characters presented in the novel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Alley, Henry. The Quest for Anonymity: The Novels of George Eliot. University of Delaware Press, 1997.
2. Ashton, Rosemary. George Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 (original 1983).
3. Beaty, Jerome. 'Middlemarch' from Notebook to Novel: A Study of George Eliot's Creative Method. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981 (original 1960)
4. Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 2000 (original 1983).
5. Beer, Gillian. George Eliot. Prentice Hall / Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1986.
6. Chapman, Raymond. The Sense of the Past in Victorian Literature. London: CroomHelm, 1986.
7. Cosslett, Tess. The 'Scientific Movement' and Victorian Literature. Brighton: Harvester, 1982.
8. Carroll, David (ed.). George Eliot: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971.
9. Daiches, David. George Eliot: Middlemarch. London: Edward Arnold, 1963.
10. Dentith, Simon. George Eliot. Brighton: Harvester, 1986.
11. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000 (original 1979).
12. Hughes, Kathryn. George Eliot: The Last Victorian. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998.
13. Jay, Elisabeth. The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
14. Pinney, Thomas (ed.). Essays of George Eliot. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963.
15. Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.