George Eliot
George Eliot (1819-1880), original name Mary Ann Evans, was a distinguished English novelist. She is known for her portrayals of working and agrarian classes. She was born at Arbury, in Warwickshire and was bred on evangelical lines, but by-and-by lost faith in supernatural Christianity. She took charge of her household at the age of sixteen after her mother's death. She was educated at home. Mary traveled abroad after her father's death in 1849 and then returned to England and became a writer.She began her literary career by a translation of Strauss's "Life of Jesus" and became in 1851 a contributor to the Westminster Review and afterwards joined as assistant editor. She formed acquaintance with George Henry Lewes, whom she ere long lived with as his wife, though unmarried, and who it would seem discovered to her her latent faculty for fictional work. Her first work in that line was "Scenes from Clerical Life," contributed to Blackwood in 1856, which was published next year. The stories proved a signal success, and they were followed by a series of seven novels, beginning in 1858 with "Adam Bede," "the finest thing since Shakespeare," Charles Reade in his enthusiasm said, the whole winding up with the "Impressions of Theophrastus Such" in 1879. These, with two volumes of poems, make up her works.
Lewes died in 1878, and two years after she formally married an old friend, Mr. John Cross, and after a few months of wedded life died of inflammation of the heart. "She paints," says Edmond Scherer, "only ordinary life, but under these externals she makes us assist at the eternal tragedy of the human heart... with so much sympathy," he adds, "the smile on her face so near tears, that we cannot read her pages without feeling ourselves won to that lofty toleration of hers." Her other famous novels are "The Mill on the Floss", "Silas Marner", "Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda''.
Wisdom & Quotes
- Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.
- One touch of biliousness makes the whole world kin.
- Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
- I am not denyin' the women are foolish:
- Adam Bede
- It's them as take advantage that get advantage i'this world.
- Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving in words evidence of the fact.
- It is in the nature of foolish reasonings to seem good to the foolish reasoner.
- A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
- A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them.
- The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
- Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
- Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing.
- Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.
- Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life - the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it - can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing, soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
- What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
- Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
- Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.
- One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.
- Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.
- What novelty is worth the sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?
- It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.
- When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
- There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that - to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.
- Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.
Charles A Dana