Marian Evans George Eliot

Bodenheimer defines the personal paradoxes that helped to shape Eliot's fictional characters and narrative style. Bodenheimer revisits pivotal episodes in Mary Ann Evans's life and career, including the "Holy War" through which she asserted her youthful religious skepticism; her decision to elope with the married writer George Henry Lewes; and her marriage with John Cross after Lewes's death. Bodenheimer also discusses the rumor campaign that led to the discovery that "George Eliot" was a woman, and she traces the trajectory of Eliot's impassioned conflict between her ambition and her womanhood.

30th December 1852: After an unhappy Christmas, Marian Evans returns to London. Today will mark the first day of a bitter feud between Marian and her brother, Isaac. Indeed, the rift between them will become so great that Marian becomes trapped into an endless repeating-cycle in which she keeps returning to this moment, as many "alternate" futures are played out. In an "alternate" time-line, Marian Evans resigns her job as Editor of the Westminster Review in 1851. This version of history will remember Marian as a translator, journalist and philosopher - but not as novelist. She will disappear into obscurity following the publication of the second novel by Warwickshire writer, Joseph Liggins. Marian next finds herself on a railway platform at Nuneaton Station, some time in the early twenty first century of this "alternate" world. Here she befriends a young man whom claims he will have a major influence upon the direction of her life in the years to come.

Fionnuala Dillane revisits the first decade of Marian Evans's working life to explore the influence of the periodical press on her emergence as George Eliot and on her subsequent responses to fame. This interdisciplinary study discusses the significance of Evans's work as a journalist, editor and serial-fiction writer in the periodical press from the late 1840s to the late 1850s and positions this early career against critical responses to Evans's later literary persona, George Eliot. Dillane argues that Evans's association with the nineteenth-century periodical industry, that dominant cultural force of the age, is important for its illumination of Evans's understanding of the formation of reading audiences, the development of literary genres and the cultivation of literary celebrity.

In this literary life, the fiction of George Eliot (Marian Evans) is placed in a biographical and literary-historical context. It details her views on other novels and novelists and examines her aesthetic thinking as it developed from the faithful representing of commonplace things towards more complex considerations.