Romola - George Eliot

. .

Résumé :
George Eliot, the pen named used by Mary Anne Evans, wrote popular works that mirrored the settings and ideology of contemporary Victorian England. She was brought up in the Church of England, where she developed strong moral convictions that carried over into her fiction. During a visit to Florence in 1860 it was suggested to Eliot that the historical Fra Girolamo Savonarola would make a good subject for a novel, so Eliot spent her visit, and many months after, exhaustively researching Florentine history and culture. Her effort is undeniably evident within the pages of Romola, however Eliot has been criticized for using a 15th Century setting to deal with the 19th Century issues of Victorian England. Romola is the female protagonist through which the story is rendered; her intellectual and religious growth, often painful, reflects the religious and cultural transitions of the Italian Renaissance in Florence.

Biographie:
George Eliot was the pen name of the novelist Mary Anne Evans. Born in 1819 in rural Warwickshire, in 1841 she moved to Coventry, the city she would later use as inspiration for the fictional town of Middlemarch. There she joined a circle of free-thinking intellectuals and lost her Christian faith. After a period abroad, she settled in London to work as an editor at the left-wing Westminster Review. Eliot openly co-habited with the married philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes in defiance of contemporary notions of propriety. Lewes encouraged her to write fiction, for which she adopted her male pseudonym. Although female authors were published under their own names during her lifetime, she wanted to escape the stereotype of women's writing being limited to lighthearted romances. She also wanted to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic. Another factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny, thus avoiding the scandal that would have arisen because of her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes.

She wrote seven novels, Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862-63), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72) and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of which are set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.

Middlemarch has been described by the novelists Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language - and triumphed in BBC Culture's poll of the greatest British novels, as voted by the rest of the world.