They lived together, however, until Lewes’s death in 1878. However, Lewes was already in an open marriage and could not obtain a divorce from his wife, so he and Evans could never marry in the eyes of the law. Between them, they helped to define the literary tastes of the era. Marian Evans/George Eliot lived for over twenty years as the common-law wife of Victorian critic and man of letters, G. On her gravestone in Highgate Cemetery, the name ‘George Eliot’ appears in quotation marks her real name is given, but it isn’t Evans. Eliot is now best-remembered for Middlemarch, her masterpiece (which we include in our pick of the best Victorian novels), though her novels Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Daniel Deronda continue to find admiring readers.ĥ.
Eliot was by this stage a literary superstar: when Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowdwas published anonymously in 1874, some people thought Eliot was the author. Romola is, however, now among Eliot’s least-known works, along with Felix Holt, the Radical, about the First Reform Act of 1832 and the political upheaval attending it. For her ambitious 1862-3 novel Romola – set in fifteenth-century Florence around the time of the infamous ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ – she earned the biggest publisher’s advance that had yet been bestowed upon a novelist.
By 1862, Eliot was the leading female novelist in Britain and the success of works such as Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss had made her hot property. For her novel Romola she received the then-record payment for a novel of £10,000.
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