The Mill on the Floss - Role of Victorian Women

George Eliot was an English novelist, journalist, and translator, and one of the leading writers of her life-time period. Although she would use a number of spelling variations of her name over the years, she was born Mary Anne Evans on 22 November 1819, into a middle-class family, in Warwickshire, England, and was the youngest of five children in her family. George Eliot, actually, was the masculine pen name of the writer Mary Anne Evans, one of Victorian England’s influential novelists. She changed her name 1819-1880 because writing by women’s name, especially which was of a vague nature, was not accepted in the Victorian society in which she lived.

Eliot herself lived a controversial and unconventional life: she has been the subject of much scholarly debates and the study of many biographers. In her time many people were shocked by her choice of “unbecoming a woman”, but she eventually earned the deserved esteem of an accomplished author. Also, it is an interesting fact that her works stand on their own, infrequently being overshadowed by her personal life. Among the best of the Victorian writers, G. Eliot deals with themes of social changes and triumphs of the heart and has a remarkable talent to show us the depth and scope of English life: its classes, pretensions, and hypocrisies. Many of her novels today are included in the canon of classic 19th century literary works. Furthermore, some of her masterpieces have been adapted to film and many still in print today.

“A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe” George Eliot

Many novels speak of women life, fate, labyrinths in love, and traps in passion, but very few speak of the dynamics that actually make the lives of feminine