George Eliot

A carte-de-visite portrait of the English novelist George Eliot (1819-1880), who portrayed Victorian society, particularly its intellectual hypocrisy, with realism and irony. Her novels include Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861). Middlemarch (1872) is now considered one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century. Her final book Daniel Deronda (1876) was concerned with anti-Semitism.

Born Mary Anne Evans at Chilvers Coton in Warwickshire, she had a strict evangelical upbringing, but on moving to Coventry in 1841 was converted to free thought (a movement opposed to Christian dogma). As assistant editor of the Westminster Review under John Chapman, she made the acquaintance of Thomas Carlyle, Harriet Martineau, Herbert Spencer, and the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes. Lewes was married but separated from his wife, and from 1854 he and Eliot lived together in a relationship which she regarded as a true marriage and which continued until his death in 1878. In 1880 she married John Cross (1840-1924).

Photographed by the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company.