George Eliot is the pen name of Mary Anne Evans. She was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era and is known as a novelist, poet, essayist, editor, and translator.
Mary Anne Evans was born on 22 November 1819, on a Warwickshire estate where her father was the manager. She was the youngest child of his second marriage and had four older siblings.
Mary Anne was educated at boarding schools for girls, where she was strongly influenced by evangelical Christianity. At school she read widely, learned French and Italian, and was known as an excellent writer.
In 1836, when she was 16, her mother died and she left school to take care of her father and the family home. While helping her father, she took lessons in Latin and German and read extensively as she was allowed access to the library of the estate. During that time, she was also exposed to things that would later influence her writing, including the differences between the upper and lower classes, between urban and rural communities and the many religious opinions.
In 1841, at the age of 22, she moved with her father to the town of Coventry where she came under the influence of Charles and Cara Bray and their intellectual circle. Charles Bray was a rich manufacturer who used his wealth to build schools and support hospitals in order to improve the social conditions of the poor. Frequent
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Although George Eliot was in her youth a religious person, she lost her faith and didn't believe in the Biblical God; instead she believed, like the philosophers Ludwig Feuerbach and Augustue Comte that people have God-like virtues, and they should spend their day helping one another. She wrote: “The old religion said ‘Heaven help us!’ Our new one, from its very lack of that faith in a heaven, will teach us all the more to help one