On a late November morning in 1819, an exceptionally cold year, Mary Ann (informally, Marian) Evans was born the third child of Robert and Christiana Evans. Robert was a strong pragmatic man, who managed the large family estates of the Newdigate family (and already the father of two teenaged children by his first marriage), and Christina the daughter of a modestly affluent local family. The rural nature of Marian's childhood surroundings in the Nuneaton-Coventry area is recreated in some detail in her early novels, but she was also close to the industrial heartland of Warwickshire, Derbyshire, and Staffordshire. Here a strong dissenting community worked hard to exploit the natural abundance of coal seams, forests, and rivers, and they …
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