The Essence of Christianity

Before becoming ‘George Eliot’ and writing the most sophisticated philosophical fiction of the nineteenth century, Marian Evans (1819–80) was already a significant intellectual figure. Only after the remarkable popular success of her first novel, Adam Bede (1859), was the identity of George Eliot widely known; it was revealed amid mounting public speculation and a rival claim of authorship from a man purporting to have written Scenes of Clerical Life , a collection of three novel-las published the year before. For over a decade before this, Marian Evans – a contraction of her birthname Mary Ann Evans – wrote professionally as a journalist, reviewer, essayist, editor, and translator, joining a group of free-thinkers clustered around the radical quarterly periodical the Westminster Review .