George Eliot, the English writer as a translator
By Marie Lebert | On June 25, 2025 | Updated October 25, 2025 | Comments (0)
George Eliot was the pen name used by the English writer Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880). She used her real name as a translator, editor and critic, and used the pen name George Eliot for her fiction.
By her own account her first literary works were translations of theological and philosophical works, which influenced her work as a fiction writer. She also led a life defying the conventions of her time.
Mary Ann Evans received a good education and was a voracious reader. Her father was the estate manager of the Arbury Hall Estate (in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England) and she had access to the large library of the estate, including many Greek classics.
She moved to London in 1850 with the intent of becoming a writer. She wrote essays for The Westminster Review, a left-wing journal in which she expressed radical views and questioned organized religion.
By her own account her first literary works were translations of theological and philosophical works from German and Latin into English, which influenced some of her novels, novellas and short stories.
Mary Ann Evans’ (George Eliot) translations
Her first translation was the translation of German theologian David Friedrich Strauss’ seminal work The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (original title: Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet) into English, based on its fourth German edition (1840).
The translation of the first volume was drafted by Elizabeth “Rufa” Brabant (later known as Rufa Hennell, her married name) who, like Mary Ann, was a member of the Rosehill Circle, a group debating radical views about religion. Rufa couldn’t go on with the translation after getting married. Mary Ann edited the first volume and translated the second volume.
The English edition was published in 1846. By arguing that the miracles in the New Testament were mythical additions with little basis in fact, the book had already caused a sensation and a scandal in Germany, and the translation had a similar effect in England.
Her second translation was the translation of German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums (1841) as The Essence of Christianity (1854), with a second edition in 1881 and a third edition in 1893.
Her third translation was Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics (Ethica), a philosophical treatise written in Latin in 1661–75 and published posthumously in 1677. Completed in 1856 as The Ethics of Benedict de Spinoza, her translation wasn’t published in her lifetime. It was published much later (1981) by Thomas Deegan before being published in 2018 by the George Eliot Archive and re-published in 2020 by the Princeton University Press.
Mary Ann Evans published her own seven novels under the pen name of George Eliot. Set in provincial England, her novels describe rural life, social outsiders and times of political crisis.
Adam Bede (1859) was followed by The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862-63), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), and Middlemarch (1871–72), her most acclaimed novel. Her last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), was the only one of her works of fiction set in the Victorian society of her day and a mixture of social satire and moral searching.
Contributed by Marie Lebert. Edited by Nava Atlas, Literary Ladies Guide.
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