OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
ADAM BEDE

GEORGE ELIOT was born Mary Anne Evans on 22 November 1819 near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, on the Arbury estate of the Newdigate family, of which her father was agent. At the age of 9 she was imbued with an intense Evangelicalism that dominated her life until she was 22. Removing to Coventry with her father in 1841, she became acquainted with the family of Charles Bray, a free-thinker, and was persuaded to translate Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1846). After her father’s death in 1849 she spent six months in Geneva, reading widely. On her return she lived in London in the house of the publisher John Chapman, editing the Westminster Review. Here, at the focus of many radical ideas, she met George Henry Lewes, a versatile journalist, whose marriage was irretrievably ruined but for whom divorce was impossible. In 1854 she went to Germany with him, and for twenty-four years lived openly as his wife. Through his encouragement at the age of 37 she began to write fiction. Scenes of Clerical Life, serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine, and reprinted (1858) under the nom de plume George Eliot, was an instant success. Adam Bede (1859) became a best seller; The Times declared that ‘its author takes rank at once among the masters of the art’. In The Mill on the Floss (1860) and the five novels that followed, George Eliot, with increasing skill, continued the subtle probing of human motives that leads many modern critics to regard her as the greatest novelist of the nineteenth century. Lewes’s death in 1878 was a devastating blow that ended her writing career. On 6 May 1880 she married John Walter Cross, a banker twenty years her junior, and on 22 December died at 4 Cheyne Walk, London.

CAROL A. MARTIN is Professor of English at Boise State University, Idaho. She is the editor of the Clarendon edition of Adam Bede and author of George Eliot’s Serial Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994).