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On
21st June 1980 a memorial stone for George Eliot (Mary Ann
Evans), novelist, was unveiled in Poets' Corner in Westminster
Abbey. The sculptor was John Skelton.
The stone is set between memorials to Dylan Thomas and W.H.
Auden and the quote is taken from Scenes of Clerical Life. The
stone was unveiled by Gordon Haight of Yale University, who
also gave the address. Tenniel Evans, great-great nephew of
the novelist and President of the George Eliot Fellowship gave
a reading, as did Margaret Wolfit and Gabriel Woolf. A wreath
of laurel and white flowers was laid on the stone by Mr
A.F.Adams.
Mary Ann Evans was born at South Farm, Arbury near Nuneaton on
22nd November 1819. In 1841 she moved to Coventry and she
later travelled abroad. Back in London she edited the
Westminster Review. In 1854 she went to Germany with George
Henry Lewes and lived with him there. Her first work of
fiction was Scenes from Clerical Life, a book about people and
places in her native town, followed by Adam Bede, published
under the nom de plume George Eliot. Her other well-known
works are Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch. In May 1880 she
married a banker John Walter Cross but died a few months later
on 22nd December 1880. She is buried at Highgate cemetery in
London. Many modern critics regard her as the greatest
novelist of the 19th century.
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