George Eliot’s truthful depictions of human nature and relationships within the patriarchal system made me squirm. I was astounded by her ability to reveal motives and fears, shallow desires or even worse, corrupt and malicious intentions.

Read Nasty Woman Writers post: George Eliot (1819-1880) Part 1: A Giantess of English Literature.

Tito Melema, the husband of Romola, in the novel Romola, is teeth grindingly awful. At first we have so much hope for him and what he stands to accomplish though he is an outsider with no status in 1492, Florence, Italy who has recently lost his adoptive father in a tragedy at sea. We are happy he has chosen Romola and been chosen by her. We hope that he will include her in carrying out the intellectual philosophical work that her father began though her father has cast her aside as worthless and degrades her in front of Tito for being female.

Yet Romola transcribes her father’s work and understands it better than others. Perhaps Romola and Tito will do this valiant work together. It seems a match made in heaven, but then the character of Tito Melema further emerges.

With each compliment and grand invitation in his new city, his ego grows, along with his social standing. Tito begins to believe himself untouchable. Does his character change by circumstance, does one lie lead to another and another and another until he cannot stop it and must persist, or is he bad to the bone? It is unclear. We are led along to watch him make poor decision after poor decision, including marrying and having children with another woman while he is already married to Romola. When he sells Romola’s father’s library that has been left in her care without giving Romola notice, we begin to see if he was not bad in the beginning, he sure is now. Is there any hope for him? Will he turn this around?

Again, this is one of the questions Eliot makes you wonder about. Are people bad or do circumstances drive them to it? What stops one person from making poor decisions while another does not?

Then there are decisions that may be right for one person but not for another, as with Daniel Deronda and his biological mother.

The Anti-Angel in the House

“How could you choose my birthright for me?”(627). Daniel Deronda asks his birth mother this when she reveals to him that she did everything in her power to free him from the burden of being a Jew, handing him over to her English friend to raise him as a proper English gentleman with no knowledge of his race.

He finally meets her near the end of Daniel Deronda when she summons him to Genoa, Italy. She is ill and about to die. She is clear that she has no regrets not raising him and turning him over to Sir Hugo Mallinger, a man in love with her at the time who would do anything for her. But Hugo Mallinger is not the father of Deronda. His father was his mother’s cousin, another Jew, who died when he was a baby.

“I was a great singer, and I acted as well as I sang. All the rest were poor beside me. Men followed me from one country to another. I was living a myriad lives in one. I did not want a child”(626).

We are made to understand the motivations of the choice of Daniel Deronda’s mother of whom, it is often said, gives one of the finest feminist speeches in the history of literature about what patriarchal religion makes of women and what motherhood demands of them as well.

“You are not a woman. You may try—but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out —“this is the Jewish woman; this is what you must be; this is what you are wanted for; 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 receipt”(631).

George Eliot was surely channeling some of her own rage and experience in this speech. She too had narrowly avoided or was almost squeezed into this box of wife and mother, to be domestic and make that her top priority, what Virginia Woolf calls the Angel in the House.

“I will describe her as shortly as I can,” Woolf writes. “She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of the family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need not say it—she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty—her blushes, her great grace. In those days—the last of Queen Victoria—every house had its Angel”(Woolf 59).

Even when already a famous author, George Eliot felt the pressure of this Angel in the House and worried that when her partner George Lewes’ grown sons would move in with them, she would have to become more domestic and that it would interfere with and possibly end her work, her writing.

Read Nasty Women Writers post: Virginia Woolf’s “Angel in the House” and What It Takes To Be a #nastywoman

Eliot struggled with feelings of anxiety, shame, and guilt, that to make her work and her writing her priority made her less of a woman.

Daniel Deronda’s mother in her famous feminist speech also says,

“Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel—or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others. . . I was glad to be freed from you”(628).

Writing as vocation or calling

Feminist literary critic Carolyn G. Heilbrun writes that George Eliot, like many other women writers of her time needed to deliberately take herself out of the conventional life of a woman at the time in order to allow herself to be the writer she wanted to be and become the writer she became. She needed to free herself of the expectations of a woman’s life branded onto every woman.

She took herself out of it by choosing to live with a married man. This choice basically banished her from society. Therefore, she was free to become who she wished to become. It was not without pain and repercussion, but Eliot chose to do it to free herself.

Many people describe George Eliot as ugly and intimations are made that her said ugliness offered her no prospects for a husband and is therefore what forced her to become a writer (rather than a wife), as though becoming a writer is a default for ugly women with no matrimonial options. Heilbrun also calls out this sexist trope, that success in a woman in the patriarchy is often attributed to their lack of conventional beauty.

“With highly gifted women, as with men, the failure to lead the conventional life, to find the conventional way early, may signify more than having been dealt a poor hand of cards. It may well be the forming of a life in the service of a talent felt, but unrecognized and unnamed. This condition is marked by a profound sense of vocation”(52-53).

George Eliot was driven by a feeling of vocation and she designed her life so she could achieve it.

Because I had always heard that George Eliot lived with a married man and was looked down upon because of it, I assumed she did that because she was a radical revolutionary feminist. But I have learned that is not the case. She chose to live with George Lewes who was married because he could not divorce his wife. But his wife had already discarded him, having several children with his best friend before he met Eliot.

Though Eliot’s choice to move in with Lewes in 1854 at age 35 when she was not married to him and he had another wife was scandalous, he was actually available when she met him. She did not steal him from a woman who yet wished to lay claim to him. Eliot, although not legally able to marry George Lewes, considered herself married and lived within a marriage-like  partnership until he died in 1878. Eliot ended up supporting him and his family, which included his wife and the children he had with her.

Pledging her love to and living with a married man did get her ostracized from English society: many would not invite her to parties or allow her into certain clubs, and this, as stated before, freed her from expectations she had no intention of living up to.

What was exceptional about their “marriage” was that George Lewes took care of her and made sure she had the proper conditions and time and space to write. He valued her occupation and vocation, her intellect and her talent. She was already an established writer, an editor of nonfiction under the name Marian Evans (which she had changed from her birth name Mary Ann Evans)when he met her. He was the one who suggested she begin to write novels. They came up with her pen name together.

Lewes was also a writer and scientific scholar. They worked during the day, read books aloud to one another at night, shared intellectual ideas and inspirations. He did act as her agent, handled her contracts, and guarded her emotional life in ways some criticize but overall it seems it was with her full permission. This was the radical part of her relationship. They were equals.

George Eliot made a lot of money off her writing, buying herself several houses. She was enormously successful and popular. Eventually people figured out she was George Eliot and she was glad of it. She wanted people to know it was her, Marian Evans, writing the books.

Stay tuned for George Eliot (1819-1880), Part 3: The Brave Couples of Middlemarch.

George Eliot is a Nasty Woman Writer.

©Theresa C. Dintino 2025

Works Cited

Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. Penguin Books, 1995. First published in 1876.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman’s Life. Ballantine Books, 1988.

Woolf, Virginia and Michelle Barrett, ed., Women and Writing, N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979