Mill On The Floss

6 Pages 1459 Words

The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot and The Mill on the Floss: Understanding the Woman and the Work
George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans in 1819. Mary Anne was one of seven children. Eliot often incorporated depictions of her siblings’ and father’s personal characteristics into her literary works. We see her brother Isaac appear as Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss; It is said that her relationship with her brother Isaac is unmatched, even by her father. They had a special bond. That bound was broken when she meets George Lewes in 1854.
Lewes was a married man. Eliot fell in love with him anyway. They eloped in 1854. Eliot was ostracized by her society and, perhaps more damaging, her brother refused to speak to her. This had a profound affect on Eliot’s works and her life.
The fact that Eliot was involved with Lewes is only one aspect of her life. When doing my research, I was pleased to see that she was an editor at the Westminster Review in 1851. She wanted to be independent, so she decided to take up journalism at the age of thirty-one. After writing critically, she decided to began writing her own work. She published three long stories, which were later published in volume form. These complied works became her first book Scenes from Clerical Life in 1958 (Ashton, 187).
Though she had been writing professionally, Mary Ann Evens wasn’t known by George Eliot until 1857. She came up with the pen name “George Eliot” to elude to the public that she was a clergyman friend of her boyfriend George Lewes. She was forced to come “out” when Dickens suspected thought she was really a woman. She reveals her true identity to the public in 1959. Her books were successful, but she was consistently aware that her professional work was being judged based on how she decided to live out her personal life. George Lewes dies in 1878. Two years later she marries John Cross who was a family friend. He was twenty years her junior. Ge...