Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century.
1907. Critical and Biographical Essay by James Ashcroft Noble
George Eliot (Mary Ann Cross) (18191880) THE STORY of the life
of the great writer who chose to be known to the world as George
Eliot has been told with more or less of completeness by one
American and three English biographersMr. George Willis Cooke,
Miss Mathilde Blind, Mr. J. W. Cross, and Mr. Oscar Browning;
and the details of that uneventful but interesting career are
familiar to most readers. Suffice it, then, here to say that
Mary Ann Evans was born at Kirk Hallam, in Derbyshire, on
November 22nd, in the year 1819, her father, Robert Evans, being
agent for an estate held by a member of the Newdigate family.
The letters of her quiet early years show her to have been a
studious, thoughtful girl, deeply imbued with a somewhat narrow
form of Evangelical Christianity; but in early womanhood she
made the acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. Bray, and of their
relatives the Hennellsnames not unkno