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 cu

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First published 21 March 2002

Citation: Uglow, Nathan. "George Eliot". The Literary Encyclopedia. 21 March 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1408, accessed 9 February 2010.]