George_Eliot
учебно-методический материал по английскому языку
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George Eliot was the pen name used by the English novelist Mary Ann Evans, one of the most important writers of European fiction .
Mary Ann Evans was born November 22, 1819, in Warwickshire, England, to Robert Evans, an estate agent, or manager, and Christiana Pearson. She was the youngest of three children. When she was five years old, she and her sister were sent to boarding school at Attleborough , Warwickshire, and when she was nine she was transferred to a boarding school at Nuneaton . It was during these years that Mary discovered her passion for reading. At thirteen years of age, Mary went to school at Coventry. Her education was conservative (one that held with the traditions of the day), dominated by Christian teachings.
In her twenties Mary Ann came into contact with a circle of people whose thinking did not coincide with the opinions of most people and underwent an extreme change of her beliefs. She devoted herself to translating religious works from the German language to English for the English public. She published her translation of David Strauss's Life of Jesus in 1846 and her translation of Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity in 1854.
In 1851 Evans became an editor of the Westminster Review, a sensible and open-minded journal. Here, she came into contact with a group known as the positivists. They were followers of the doctrines of the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who were interested in applying scientific knowledge to the problems of society.
In the same period Evans turned her powerful mind from scholarly and critical writing to creative work. In 1857 she published a short story, "Amos Barton," and took the pen name "George Eliot" in order to prevent the discrimination that women of her era faced. After collecting her short stories in Scenes of Clerical Life (2 vols., 1858), Eliot published her first novel, Adam Bede (1859). The plot was drawn from a memory of Eliot's aunt, a Methodist preacher, whom she used as a model for a character in the novel.
Since then she published few novels, but after p ublishing Felix Holt (1866) Eliot did not publish any novels for some years , and it might have appeared that her creative thread was gone. After traveling in Spain in 1867, she produced a dramatic poem, The Spanish Gipsy, in the following year, but neither this poem nor the other poems of the period are as good as her nonpoetic writing.
Eliot's last novel was Daniel Deronda (1874–1876). It is perhaps her least-read work, although recent critical attention has revealed its high value in at least one half of its plot, while raising still unanswered questions about its less successful half. She d ied in London, December 22, 1880.