In 1841, she and her father moved to a house near Coventry where Mary Ann came under different intellectual influences.

However, her theological ardor eventually cooled and she found herself reading all of Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Southey and, especially, Wordsworth, among others.

During that time, she disapproved of frivolities such as the theater and novels. At school, as an adolescent, she was allowed considerable freedom in what she read she devoured books, including Sir Walter Scott’s novels.Įvans was strongly touched by Evangelicalism in her later teenage years, and devoted several years to taking religion and religious study seriously. Recognized at an early age for her intelligence, Evans gained access to the estate’s library. Important developments at the material base of society, in industry and technology, in the natural sciences, as well as in art and culture, influenced their lives-in different ways and under different conditions, of course.Įliot (whose real name was Mary Ann or Marian Evans) was born in Warwickshire in England’s West Midlands region, the daughter of an estate manager known for his conscientious work habits and staunchly conservative political views. There are numerous biographies of Eliot, and Adam Bede is easy enough to obtain, but certain details about the author and her first novel are worth commenting upon.Īnatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Education following the Russian Revolution and a literary critic of note, once recommended, “be born a genius by all means-but the most important thing is to be born at the right time,” adding Goethe’s observation, “Had I been born 20 years earlier or later, I would have been quite a different person.”Įliot’s life, 1819-1880, coincides almost exactly with Marx’s (1818-1883). He held a Grand fête du Réalisme at his studio in Paris in October, writing a friend two months later that “Realism is very much under attack at the moment…we must marshal new forces and do everything we can.”īefore 2009 comes to an end, the publication of George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede early in 1859 also deserves to be noted. Gustave Courbet was the acknowledged, if embattled, leader of the Realist current in painting. Its preface contains the famous summation of the materialist conception of history (which, decades later, the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky would memorize and be able to recite by heart) that begins, “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.…” ( 1)Ī Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens appeared in 1859, as did Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov.

Marx, who immediately recognized the significance of Darwin’s work, published his own A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that same year.

Adam Bede by George Eliot