Mary Anne Evans/George Eliot Character Analysis

Mary Anne Evans lived during the Victorian era in England and published famous novels, such as Middlemarch, under the pseudonym of George Eliot. When she was a child, she was very self-centered. She had intense moral aspirations, but they were too lofty to be of any real good. First, she was passionately religious, and later became passionately against religion. She believed that morality could fill the void in the absence of religion, but she had no idea how to go about achieving this. Even as a young woman, she could not quiet her desires and her need for attention. She fell for men constantly, turning husbands away from their wives, and competing with other mistresses for the same man. She loved the idea of loving and being loved but had no experience of true commitment or selfless love. When she met George Lewes, however, everything changed. She became calm, stable, and committed. He encouraged her to write novels, which she did, finally channeling her intense moral ardor into stories involving characters who made moral improvements in their everyday lives and relationships. Her life demonstrated that each person has a chance to make small moral improvements in their daily lives and in mundane situations, such as in a marriage or in a friendship. Brooks suggests that without the stabilizing love of her husband, Eliot would not have let go of her need for attention and would therefore never have poured her energies into writing life-changing novels.