George Eliot

Scenes Of Clerical Life George Eliot

When Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot's first novel, was published anonymously in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1857, it was immediately recognized, in the words of Saturday Review, as `the production of a peculiar and remarkable writer'. The first readers, including Dickens and Thackeray, were struck by its humorous irony, the truthfulness of its presentation of the lives of ordinary men and women, and its compassionate acceptance of human weakness. The three stories that make up the Scenes, The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, Mr Gilfil's Love Story, and Janet's Repentance, foreshadow George Eliot's major work, and their success gave her the confidence to become one of the greatest English novelists. George Eliot, or Mary Ann Evans, was born at Arbury Farm, in the parish of Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, on the 22nd of November, 1819. She was the fifth and last child of her father by his second wife-of that father whose sound sense and integrity she so keenly appreciated, and who was to a certain extent the original of her famous characters of Adam Bede and Caleb Garth. Both during and after her schooldays George Eliot's history was that of a mind continually out-growing its conditions. She became an excellent housewife and a devoted daughter, but her nature was too large for so cramped a life. 'You may try, ' she writes in Daniel Deronda, 'but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.