In the nineteenth century England, there were three great novelists – Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and George Eliot. All were great in their own way.
Mary Ann Evans (1819 – 1880) was better known as George Eliot. She was a great novelist of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862), Felix Holt (1866), Middlemarch (1871), and Daniel Deronda (1876).
Earlier, poets were roaming in the vanguard of thoughts, but with George Eliot, novelists started roaming in the vanguard of thoughts. Novels became almost poetic. George Eliot was a master of it. She was well known for her realism and psychological insight. She had a sense of place and detailed description of the countryside.
Virginia Woolf said Middlemarch was one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. Readers in the Victorian era praised her novels for narration of rural society. She shared with William Wordsworth that there was much value and beauty to be found in mundane country life. But Romola was set in the late fifteenth century Florence.
Although George Eliot was herself not religious, she had respect for religious tradition which is able to maintain social order and morality. The experience of Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss shared many similarities with young Mary Ann Evans. Eliot also faced a similar fate to that of Silas Marner, whose alienation from the church meant alienation from society.
George Eliot was famous for her deep humanistic thoughts. The most famous quote is – It is never too late to be what you might have been.
The other famous quotes of George Eliot are as below:
- What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
- Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
- Hold up your head! You were not made for failure; you were made for victory.
- Dreamers have double souls.
- The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.
- Adventure is not outside man; it is within.
- What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity.
Above all, George Eliot was a great novelist. She was thoughtful to the core. So her ideas are unique. Her novel Middlemarch bears testimony to it. Middlemarch was her autobiographical novel. Unlike Charles Lamb, she was not a laughing philosopher, but a philosopher of life and novels.
(The views expressed are the writer’s own.)
Radhakanta Seth is a Former Income tax officer in Sambalpur. He is a Freelance writer and his articles have been published in some Oriya dailies like Sambad, Samaj, Dharitri and English dailies like The Telegraph and in a sociological journal ‘Folklore’ published from Kolkata.
(Photo has collected from net )