
The popular view of George Eliot is that she was a serious woman who wrote highly serious novels. George Eliot was highly critical of other female novelists.Eliot did however sign her name – Marian Evans – to the articles she wrote for the periodical, and became one of its best and most widely admired reviewers. Chapman was the nominal editor, while Eliot – from a mixture of diffidence, modesty, and fear of playing a public role – was happy to remain behind the scenes, doing the work and letting Chapman put his name to it. The same year Eliot moved to London, Chapman bought the great radical periodical, the Westminster Review, first set up in the 1820s to further the cause of political and social reform in the long run-up to the Reform Act of 1832. Before writing fiction, George Eliot was the editor of a radical left-wing journal.Īt the age of 30, Eliot moved to London, where she launched her career in journalism through John Chapman, who specialized in publishing works of a left-wing or sceptical tendency.To celebrate this esteemed writer, discover eight facts you may not know about George Eliot. Today marks George Eliot’s 200 th birthday.


Eliot has long been recognised as one of the greatest Victorian writers, in life and in death, having published seven acclaimed novels and a number of poems, in addition to her work as a translator and a journalist. Throughout her life, George Eliot was known by many names – from Mary Anne Evans at birth, to Marian Evans Lewes in her middle age, to George Eliot in her fiction – with the latter name prevailing in the years since her death through the continued popularity of her novels.
