Mary Anne Evans / George Eliot - Wonderful Woman No. 114

Mary Anne Evans (Pen Name: George Eliot) - 1819–1880
British Author, Poet and Journalist

Added to the album by Julie, A Wonderful Woman

As we have read with many of the Wonderful Women already featured in the blog, such as Frida Kahlo - Wonderful Woman No. 37 and Gertrude Elion - Wonderful Woman No. 86, in so many fields of work women have faced fierce sexism and a struggle to be taken seriously in their careers. Mary Anne Evans was so conscious of the negativity towards female writers, that she chose to adopt a male pen name, George Eliot, in order for her writing to reach a wider audience.

In 1851, Mary Anne began writing for The Westminster Review, a left-wing political journal. She was a very liberal woman for the time, bearing children to a married man, speaking openly of her lost faith in Christianity and travelling extensively throughout Europe.

The first of her seven novels, Adam Bede, was published in 1859. The most famous Middlemarch, published in 1871, remains popular to this day and is considered a masterpiece of English literature.

One of the few English novels written for grown-up people.
Virgina Woolf, Another Wonderful Woman

In addition to her novels, Mary Anne wrote many essays and articles, as well as a fine catalogue of poetry.

I Grant You Ample Leave

I grant you ample leave
To use the hoary formula 'I am'
Naming the emptiness where thought is not;
But fill the void with definition, 'I'
Will be no more a datum than the words
You link false inference with, the 'Since' & 'so'
That, true or not, make up the atom-whirl.
Resolve your 'Ego', it is all one web
With vibrant ether clotted into worlds:
Your subject, self, or self-assertive 'I'
Turns nought but object, melts to molecules,
Is stripped from naked Being with the rest
Of those rag-garments named the Universe.
Or if, in strife to keep your 'Ego' strong
You make it weaver of the etherial light,
Space, motion, solids & the dream of Time--
Why, still 'tis Being looking from the dark,
The core, the centre of your consciousness,
That notes your bubble-world: sense, pleasure, pain,
What are they but a shifting otherness,
Phantasmal flux of moments?--

A woman of great intelligence and talent, who understood and overcame the inequality faced by women in the time she lived, an excellent addition to this celebration of Wonderful Women.

When a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.
Mary Anne Evans / George Eliot