At the same time, however, there are some suggestions of social and political unrest. Ogg’s-a fictional town in Lincolnshire, a region in the northeast of England-feel confident about the British empire and its predominance in the world. In the wake of Britain’s triumph, many of the inhabitants of St. The Mill on the Floss is set in the 1820s, in the period following the Napoleonic wars. As a result, she was estranged from her brother Isaac for many years. Evans lived an unconventional life, openly living outside of marriage with George Henry Lewes, a married journalist. By her own account, Evans used a male pen name in order to be taken seriously by the literary establishment, which often associated women’s writing with “light” entertainment. Many of her best-known novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), center on the interior and private emotional lives of people in provincial communities. She became the assistant editor of The Westminster Review, a left-wing journal, in 1951, which was an uncommon role for a woman. After the age of sixteen, Evans continued her education independently, teaching herself from the wealth of books in the library of the estate where her father worked.

Worried that their daughter would have little success finding a husband, Mary Evans’s parents provided her with an education, which was uncommon for young girls to receive. Like Maggie in The Mill on The Floss, Evans didn’t meet the conventional beauty standards of her day. Mary Anne Evans (pen name George Eliot) was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, to Robert and Christiana Evans.

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