By: Elhamm Kohpaye

George Eliot
1864: The life of Jesus 1859: Adam Bede 1860: The Mill on the Floss 1877-72: Middle march

She was 40 when her first novel, , an outstandingly popular work, Was published. The lives of her characters are viewed from the vantage point of maturity and extensive experience. This perspective is accentuated by her practice of setting her stories back in time to her own childhood. In most of her novel she evokes small town life of the English Midlands. She views with a combination of nostalgia and candid awareness of their limitations. This quality illustrated by the opening chapter of The Mill on the Floss two page of it he said reduce me to tears. Her real name, , she spent her childhood at Arbury farm. Her father, Robert Evans, was supervisor and land agent

1819 the year of her birth was an for the 19th century. During these decades Marian read widely in and out of school, was affected by Evangelicalism she advocated in her girlhood. Her mothers death led to her leaving school at 16 and in the next 4 or 5 years she seems to have experienced bouts of depression and self- doubt. In a letter of 1871, she likened her state of mind to that of at the time of her attempted suicide.
All the age of 21 Marian moved with her father to the town of Coventry and her intellectual horizons were widened. As the result of her association with a group of free thinking and her own studies of theology. She decided that could no longer believe in Christian religion. These preoccupations led to her first book, a translation of the by D.F. Strauss higher criticism in Germany.

This criticism was the work of a group of scholars dedicated to testing the historical of biblical narratives of modern methods of research. For the rest of her life Marian Evans continued to read in English and continental philosophy. When she moved to London in 1851, her impressive intellectual credentials led to her appointment as an assistant editor of the Westminster Review a learned journal edited by that it was her remarkable charm. after meeting her for the first time, reported to his father that he had fallen in love. Intellectual and religious background is carried over into Eliots novel is difficult to determine, her characters only discuss issues directly. She never produced a , her novel as Harvey adds, are involved with what ordinary men mean when they talk of having a philosophy of life. Her temperate essay on the early feminist exemplifies her interest in feminist. She didnt believe in subverting her fiction to platform performances.

The experience of her heroines as and dramatize some of frustrations of women in a male- dominated culture, but they remain dramatization rather than tracts. A third important aspect of her experience was her falling in love in the 1850s , with , a brilliant critic of literature and philosophy .Lewes, a married man and father of three children, could not obtain a divorce. Marian Evens elected to live with him as a common- law wife and what they called their marriage until his death. In the last year of her life she formally married an admirer and friend Who became her biographer. Her earlier decision to live with Lewes was painfully. Her brother never spoke to her again after the events. This experience affects the stress in all of her novels, on incidents choice. All of her characters are tested by situations as in the , are painful. Scenes from clerical life appeared in magazine installments in 1857 under the pen name that misled most of her readers into believing the author to be a man a university man.

This work was followed by six or Seven full- length novels in the 1860s and 1870s, most of which repeated the success of with the Victorian reading public. praised Middlemarch written for grown-up people and later readers find a similar maturity, combined with a powerful creative energy, in other novels buy Eliot as and Daniel Deronda. Her novels astonish as with their insights into human behavior and their almost relentless exposure of human motives. But unlike flaubert, Gorge Eliot Performs her analyses with compassion. selection from Eliots novel, unlike from are restricted to a single

novel

was able to offer successful public reading by selecting episodes from an assortment of his novels but her novels are more exclusively preoccupied with the development of characters than are of dickens. Within novel, to a sequence of scenes in the life and development of are character, the heroine.

Eliots second novel was published in 1860. it records the education and tempestuous development over a span of ten years of , whose father owns a water mill near. Could have been subtitled, like Eliots later great novel . A study of Provincial life. The following selections omit this background, to record stage in a girls intellectual and emotional development in home and at school up to point at which relationships with men became to overriding problem of her life.

JOHN RUSKIN

1843: Publication of first volume of Modern Painters. 1851-53: The stones of Venice 1860: Unto this last. 1885-89 : Praeterita

John Ruskin was both the leading Victorian critics of art and important critic of society. These two roles can be traced back to two important influences of his childhood His father, a wealthy wine merchant, was fond of travel, and on tours of the Continent he introduced his son to landscape, architecture, and art. Ruskin acquired a zest for beauty that animates the most theoretical of his discussion of aesthetics. In his autobiography he describes his first view of the Swiss Alps at sunset. During a tour of this holy land of Italy, he visited Venice and recorded in his diary his response to cathedral square in that city

Ruskins choice of phrase in these accounts of how beauty affected him reflects the second influence in his life, often at variance with the first his daily reading under the direction of his mother from this biblical indoctrination Ruskin derived some elements of his lush and highly rhythmical prose style. Ruskins life was spent in traveling, lecturing and writing. His prodigious literary out-put can be divided into three phases. At first he was preoccupied with problems of art. , he began writing at the age of 23 was a defense of English landscape painter . This defense involved Ruskin in problem of truth in art and in the ultimate importance of imagination

Ruskins realization after 1860, that despite his fame he was becoming isolated and that the world was continuing to move in directions opposite from those. As reports in but he had not then been working harder than usual. His marriage to in 1843 was a disaster. Ruskin testified that he had not found his wifes person physically attractive althongh by others she was considered a great beauty. one of these admirers was the Pre- Raphaelite painter , who fell in love with her shortly after he married her. In later years Ruskin fell in love with a young Irish girl, , when he was forty, they were divided not only by the gap of age but by religious differences. She was pious believer after Ruskin proposed marrige to her she tried unsucessfully to persuade him to return to the Evangelical faith that he had abandoned. In 1875, after herself suffering attacks of mental illness, died at the age of twenty- five. His publications during his active period included six volume, of his lectures on art, that he had delivered as Slade professor of fine Arts at oxford, as well as his letters to laborers,

One topic prominent in these writing is pollution of air and water, ad ideal subjects for Ruskins eloquence. In discussing it he combines his lifelong love for beautiful landscape and landscape painting with his later acquired conviction the modern industrial leadership was woefully irresponsible. Among Ruskins publications that illustrate his crusade against pollution is hi tirade of 1884, And finally, following this awesome vision of the future, Ruskin concluded his long writing career with a dramatic shift of focus form time future to time past in his delightful autobiography (meaning the past) written fro 1885-1889.