George Eliot <Mary Anne Evans>

1
George EliotltMary Anne Evansgt

• By Ashley Rodriguez

2
Victorian Era

• England-gtWealthiest Nation
• Center of banking, insurance and shipping
• Technology and scientific inventions
• Living and working conditions in cities were
  terrible
• Working class and lower class had no voting
  rights yet
• Late 1870s congress passed child labor laws and
  limited hours of employment for the rest.

3
Childhood

• Born November 22, 1819
• 3rd child to Robert and Christina Evans
• Family were very religious
• Religious practices took over there life
• Working Class-gt Her dad being a farmer
• Miss Lathams Boarding School
• She started to read books

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New Teachings

• Befriended, Charles Bray, Robert Owens, and
  Herbert Spencer
• All free thinkers w/ radical views towards
  religion
• She began to think more liberal thoughts which
  contradicted her church teachings

5
Family Troubles

• Stopped going to church
• Caused a split within her family
• Even in her disbelief she started to attend again
  knowing her father was ill
• She stopped going to church for good after her
  fathers death in 1857

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Scandalous

• Met George Henry Lewes
• Open Marriage
• Anges Jervis and children
• Sin Under Gods eyes
• Family disowned her
• Town Shunned her From Church and society

• Open Marriage-Marriage in which both partners
  agree that each other may engage in outside
  sexual relationships without divorce

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Later On

• Evans got a job at the Westminster Review, which
  was a public journal mainly for radical views, as
  Assistant Editor in 1858
• Lady Novelist Writing Fairytales

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Silly Novels By Lady Novelist

• The fair writers have evidently never talked to
  a tradesmens except from a carriage window they
  have no notion of the working class except as
  dependents they have no idea of feeling
  interest in any man who is not at least a great
  landed proprietor, if not a prime minister.
• Westminster Review, October 1856

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George Eliot

• After the chaos that her essay created Evans
  decided to take it upon herself and write
• Also knowing that her private life was too
  scandalous for her readers she wanted to keep a
  line from her profession and her home life also
  knowing women didnt get any recognition she
  wrote under a pen name-gtGeorge Eliot!

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Thesis

• Mary Anne Evans was one of the best writers in
  the Victorian era because of her simplistic
  writing style and how she was the first to write
  fictional stories depicting issues and problems
  of society instead of the everyday fairytale. She
  created a style in its own called realism which
  changed literature forever.

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Silas Marner-1861

• Banished from his town
• Became a Weaver in a town named Raveloe / Outcast
• Godfrey secretly marries opium addict Molly
• Adopts Eppie
• After 16 years later Godfrey admits that Eppie is
  his daughter
• Will Eppie stay with silas or leave with her
  biological father?

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Other Works

• Adam Bede-1859
• The Mill on the Floss-1860
• Middlemarch-1871-72

• Romola-1863
• Felix Holt, the Radical-1866
• Daniel Deronda-1876

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Writing Style

• Realistic Storytelling
• She made her sentence structures clear, patient
  and well balanced for lower class readers
• Simplistic
• She depicted rural life society making people
  feel as though there was someone who put interest
  and importance in the simple details of ordinary
  people
• She also mirrored her own life within her novels
• (Ex.Silas being shunned from town)

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After Math

• Lewes died in 1878
• Afterward she married John Water Cross in May
  1880
• Even more controversy
• 7 months later now Mary Anne Cross Died December
  1880.