"Of those immortal dead who live again / In minds made better by their presence" Next month starting May 2 in the Facebook Group we will read Silas Marner by George Eliot. George Eliot is the pen name for Mary Ann Evans ( 22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880 ) without which her career would not have taken off, in fact the pen name appears first on gravestone. Indeed, George Eliot's life could have been quite different if she HAD been a man. Today new definitions of gender are currently being reanalysed, but in the Victorian age a person's whole life was set out according to their sex. Women should marry and have a family. But Mary Ann was, quite unfairly I think, considered ugly ( Henry James said 'She is magnificently ugly - deliciously hideous'! ) because she was not typically beautiful. It was for this reason that her father ruled out the possibility of her marrying and educated her instead in the hope that she could be taken on as a governess. But Mary Ann was highly intelligent, learning foreign languages and translating religious texts. This does not mean that she didn't want to settle down. She moved in with George Henry Lewes, English philosopher and critic, and they lived together as a married couple despite the fact that he was already married.
This was highly scandalous and led her to be cut off by her family and caged up in her house for the shame. The shame was all hers however as her partner could go out freely. When Mary Ann published her first novel, Adam Beade, in 1859, she chose to use the pen name George Eliot to be taken more seriously as a writer and to protect her family from a public scandal of her 'living in sin'. When it came out that Mary Ann Evans was George Eliot, her work was denegrated because of her unacceptable lifestyle. What is more her stories did not speak of the romantic heros and heroines characteristic of women's literature ( that Mary Ann herself put down ) but of the ordinary lives of common people. But her popularity as a writer continued to grow. After the death of George Lewes she finally got married to John Walter Cross, normalizing her social status. Despite being one of the most important writers of the Victorian era, she was not given the honour of being buried in Westminster Abbey because she was a dissenter, so she was instead buried in Highgate Cemetery next to her comoon law husband. It's amazing to think how much society has changed
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What is this?When I started lostinclassics I looked for language lessons in the books I was reading, such as for example the use of phrasal verbs or inversion in conditionals and I explained them through examples found in the text. I also did reviews of the books I read and tried to give some advice on how to read classics using the various resources I know of. Then I switched to just reviews and lately I have been doing a bit of creative writing inspired by my reading. Who knows what I will come up with next! Archives
September 2020
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