Free Nom de Plume by Carmela Ciuraru Page B

wrote to George Eliot in January 1858. The candid letter was written a year after the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life , a collection of three stories first serialized, anonymously, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Dickens praised their “exquisite truth and delicacy” but was convinced that the writer was a woman. Elizabeth Gaskell, however, insisted that the author was a man named Joseph Liggins of Nuneaton. The Saturday Review , meanwhile, harbored its own suspicions, noting that George Eliot was rumored to be “an assumed name, screening that of some studious clergyman . . . who is the father of a family, of High Church tendencies, and exceedingly fond of children, Greek dramatists and dogs.”
    Not quite: George Eliot was a thirty-eight-year-old woman named Mary Anne (Marian) Evans, a politically progressive atheist raised in a stern, religious household, unmarried, childless, and living openly with a married man. She was a formidable intellectual who had begun educating herself after her mother’s death in 1836 and would publish seven astonishing novels in her lifetime, including The Mill on the Floss , Middlemarch , and Daniel Deronda. How Evans became one of the great Victorian novelists is the story of an eccentric young woman from the Midlands region of England who broke just about every taboo of her time. “She was never content with what was safely known and could be taken for granted,” one critic wrote of her extraordinarily restless life.
    Born on November 22, 1819, in Warwickshire, she was her parents’ third child, following the birth of a daughter and a son. (Her father, Robert, also had two children from a previous marriage; his first wife died.) The birth of a second daughter was terribly disappointing. Sons were valued and valuable; girls, until married off, were a financial drain and nothing but a burden on the family. Mary Anne was no great prize. Twin boys arrived fourteen months later, but they died soon after birth, and Mary Anne’s mother, Christiana, never recovered from the loss. She made no effort to hide that fact from her daughter.
    Mary Anne eventually dropped the “e” from “Anne” and later changed her name to Marian, but at the end of her life, she reverted to “Mary Ann.” (That’s why, in biographies, you’ll find her first name spelled with confusing variation: what to call her?) Since she lived with a mother who never doted on her, her childhood was marked by isolation and sadness. Luckily, her father was kinder, and gave her a copy of her very first book: The Linnet’s Life. But whatever bond she shared with him, it was never enough to replace the maternal affection she was denied.
    Unkempt, frequently melancholy, and extremely sensitive, she was an unsightly irritant to Christiana, who may have blamed her own poor health and depression on having given birth to Mary Anne. The Evanses’ youngest child was obstinate, fearful, and given to emotional outbursts. At the age of five, in 1824, she was sent to a boarding school. A few years later, her parents would move her to another boarding school, where Mary Anne became close to a teacher named Maria Lewis. Even for the Victorian era, five was quite young to be shipped away for one’s education, though she did come home on weekends. A timid and socially awkward student, Mary Anne would eventually find academic success and earn the admiration of her peers, but her insecurity lingered and she was always harshly critical of her own achievements.
    At seven, Mary Anne began reading Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley. This event marked the first hint of her future vocation: when the book was returned to a neighbor before she’d had a chance to finish reading it, she was terribly upset. She did the next best thing by writing out an ending herself.
    When she was twelve, Mary Anne attended a girls’ school in the Midlands run by evangelical