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George Eliot, christened Mary Ann Evans, was born in Nuneaton at the Arbury Estate in 1819 before moving to Griff house in 1820. Throughout her adolescent years she was educated at Misses Franklins School at 29 Warwick Row in Coventry. When she reached 21 her brother married, and her mother passed away. She moved with her father to Bird Grove on Foleshill Road in Coventry, where she become acquainted with the Bray and Hennell families. Evans maintained a longstanding relationship with the Hennell and Bray families, sharing correspondences regularly even when she had moved to London Eliot also participated in the Intellectual circle the Brays had grown at Rosehill, where thinkers of the time such as Herbert Spencer and Robert Owen frequented. It was here that Eliot became influenced by agnostic ideas (to her fathers’ great displeasure) and translated works by Feuerbach and Strauss. In 1850 she moved to London in hope of becoming a writer and found employment at the Westminster Review, eventually becoming its foremost writer of material. It was here in her later life that Eliot produced the most prominent of her literary works, including Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, the highly acclaimed Middlemarch, and the controversial Daniel Deronda. Evans later died in 1880 and rests at Highgate cemetery in London where figures such as Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer are also buried. She leaves a great legacy behind her, not only producing works of fiction which are held in the highest regard, but also one of being a liberal thinker certainly by her contemporaries’ standards.

This collection contains newsletters, pamphlets and original correspondence written by George Eliot to both Cara and Charles Bray and Mr and Mrs Hennell.