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George Eliot: Life
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George Eliot is among the foremost writers of her time. In spite of her gender, her looks, and her eccentric beliefs, she earned a prominent place within the Victorian literary canon. Middlemarch falls near the end of her life and career, and it clinched her financial and popular success.
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George Eliot presents her views on "old leisure," pertaining to life many years ago, and new leisure, pertaining to life as it is in her time. Through her use of personification, diction and imagery, Eliot contrasts the simple lifestyle of the past with the complex lifestyle of the present, and reveals her nostalgia towards Old Leisure.
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George Eliot, pseudonym of Mary Anne or Marian Evans, captured life with a sensitivity that encompassed an understanding of human behaviour and relationships. She was sent to boarding school from the age of five and was influenced by the strict views expressed there. She became markedly self-critical.
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Eliot is not one for indirection or delay, or for obscurity. If anything, she makes things uncomfortably lucid, like a too-bright light that permits no mitigating shadows. On the very first page, Dorothea is likened to Saint Theresa, whose "passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life, . . . some illimitable satisfaction . . . which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self"-an arresting comparison, which is immediately qualified. Many Theresas are born, Eliot says, and then doomed to "a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity." Dorothea Brooke, luckily, does not suffer a lifetime of mistakes, but on the brink of adulthood- she's not quite twenty-she makes just one, and a terrible mistake it is. Against the urging of her uncle and guardian, the foolish and nonchalant Mr. Brooke, her shrewd younger sister Celia, and her would-be suitor, the unimaginative but decent Sir James Chettam, she marries the wrong man.
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A pioneer until the end, Eliot's interest in the life of the mind anticipated the interior narratives of modern literature. D.H. Lawrence wrote of her: "It was really George Eliot who started it all. It was she started putting action inside." Then up-and-coming author Henry James spoke for many when he characterized her greatness in an 1885 issue of the Atlantic Monthly:
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Eliot's first book was a translation of German theologian David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1846). After traveling for two years in Europe, she returned to England in 1851 and wrote a book review for the Westminster Review. She subsequently became assistant editor of that publication.
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