George Eliot

Legacy: the Artists Behind the Legends

Mary Anne Evans, aka Marian, or better yet George Eliot, was a Victorian Era novelist, poet, journalist, and translator, known best for her seven novels including her masterpiece, entitled Middlemarch. Now, for the podcast, I am not going to be referring to Marian as George Eliot because she really only went by George Eliot on paper, so I’ll do my best to establish that early and avoid confusion. After a week of research, I am obsessed with this woman for so many reasons, every one of which I will get to within our allotted timeframe covering Marian’s life, and just to really get you hooked for this week, you should know that she was a true pioneer for female writers. Not only did she write novels that portrayed the multifaceted nature of real life in provincial England, but also threw convention out the door when it came to love no matter how many dinner parties she was shunned from. Her life was a proverbial middle finger to the tight collars of the day, and from an early age she lived her life the way she saw fit, not how others thought it ought to be. Her pen name was adopted for the sole reason of wanting her work to be judged on equal footing with ALL writers, not just her female contemporaries, who already were finding their writing marginalized into a 19th century chick lit genre. There is a reason why the name George Eliot is still as resonating of a force amongst the literary community as it was one hundred and fifty years ago, and that is because Marian was an absurdly gifted, honest, and intriguing author. So let’s just get right into it.