by George Eliot

George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Anne Evans) was born November 22, 1819, at South Farm, Arbury, Warwickshire, as the third child of land agent Robert Evans and Christiana Evans. The strong evangelical piety inculcated in her during childhood would stay with her until she encountered the ideas of the freethinker Charles Bray and his circle in the 1840s. In 1846 she translated the work of the radical biblical scholar D. F. Strauss and would later translate the works of theologians Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach and Baruch Spinoza. Settling in London in 1851, she exercised further intellectual influence as subeditor of The Westminster Review. In 1853 Eliot’s friend Herbert Spencer introduced her to George Henry Lewes, one of the founders of the radical weekly The Leader. A man of liberal views, Lewes lived apart from his wife, who had...