Celebrity Graveland

November 22, 1819 – December 22, 1880

What’s in a name?

Born Mary Anne Evans – but known more prominently by her pen name – George Eliot was a Victorian novelist known for her depictions of rural English life and the intertwining themes of politics and humanism. Like contemporaries Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, Eliot became very popular thanks in part to her vivid accounts of Victorian life, specifically the countryside in which her books took place.

But, her writing was probably the most Victorian thing about Mary Anne Evans (who also went by “Mary Ann” and “Marian” at various points of her life). The rest of her life was anything but the buttoned-up ideal of the time.

Evans was widely considered unattractive. The only reason this is important is that her seeming lack of marriage prospects led her father to invest in her education. She was a prolific reader and talented writer. After her mother died, she moved with her father to Coventry where she began friendships with more progressive, left-leaning thinkers. She also worked as a translator and was exposed to German texts and thinking of the time. These ideas began to form her public voice and by the time she landed a job in London editing and writing for the left-wing publication, The Westminster Review, she had adopted many of the political and societal ideologies of the more radical left-wing.

If that wasn’t enough, she maintained a 24 year relationship with a man, George Lewes, who was in an open marriage to another woman. Evans and Lewes never married, but she often referred to him as her “husband.”

By the time she was 39, with an already successful career as an editor and writer (under her own name) in full swing, Evans published her first novel as “George Eliot.” She chose the pseudonym partially to distance the work from her content in Westminster Review, and partially to combat the idea that women only wrote light-hearted fiction at the time. The novel, Adam Bede, was a hit. A number of Eliot novels followed, including her most famous work, Middlemarch.

Shortly after Lewes died, Eliot married John Cross, a friend she had known for some time. A combination of kidney disease and a throat infection led to Eliot’s death in 1880 at the age of 61. Due to her rejection of the Christian faith and her long-standing public relationship with a married man, Eliot was not buried in Westminster Abbey alongside many of her peers. Fortunately, London’s other memorial landmark, Highgate Cemetery, had an entire section devoted to thinkers and political voices just like her.

Burial

Highgate Cemetery East – London, UK

Specific Location

Go west on the main road away from Karl Marx and turn right (north) on Eliot Path. This path is named for Eliot and her grave will be up the hill on your right (to the east).

This entry was posted on March 25, 2024 at 8:52 am and is filed under Highgate Cemetery with tags Highgate Cemetery East, Writers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.