Location: Highgate Cemetery (East), London, England
Cause of death: Kidney Failure
Photo taken by: DeadGoodBooks
Buy books by George Eliot
English novelist, one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Born Mary Ann Evans in Warwickshire, her mother died in 1836 and she became her father’s housekeeper but educated herself in her spare time. In 1850 she began contributing to the Westminster Review, a leading journal for philosophical radicals, and became it’s assistant editor in 1851.
She met George Henry Lewes who was separated from his wife, but there was no possibility of a divorce so Lewes and Eliot lived together from 1854 until his death in 1878. It was George Henry Lewes who encouraged Mary Ann to move from philosophy and journalism to fiction.
She claimed to have chosen a male pen name to ensure that her work was taken seriously so that she was not mistaken for a writer of romance, but is also likely that it was to protect her private life. Two years after Lewes died she married a friend, John Cross, who was twenty years her junior. She died a few months later, aged 61, and was buried beside Lewes.
As an author, Eliot was not only successful in terms of sales but she also widened the horizons of the novel, and was, and remains, widely praised for her style and psychological insights.
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