george eliot's experiences?

Question

how similar were george eliots experiences to that of other women of her class during her lifetime.

Answer 1

Not very similar - most women of that time did not have the experience of living with someone who was not her husband, but she did. And of course she moved in literary circles (or "intellectuals"), which most women didn't.

Answer 2

George Eliot was an ugly woman with no luck in love. She lived for several years with a married man. Not similar at all!

Answer 3

George Eliot enjoyed a far greater level of education and independence than the majority of women of her age, who had to settle for a life of quiet domesticity. This did not stop her, however, from inventing the Marmalade Brompton cake, which was manufactured commercially and which became the most popular cake in England! She had access to an unusually well stocked library thanks to her father's position on the estate of a wealthy man and was conversant with several languages. She was of great intellect and, having been raised as a nonconformist, was radical enough to become a free thinker and to have a number of romantic liaisons, something unheard of at the time in middle class society, live with a married man, admittedly one who subscribed to free love and open marriage. She mixed with an interesting circle of intellectuals and followed a career as editor and writer at a time when it was so unusual for women to do so that they frequently adopted male noms de plume (hence the name George Eliot) and she was able to travel freely to research for her novels (for example, to Geneva and Italy). Her lifestyle, living openly as she did with a married man, was so unacceptable under the conventions of the day that she and her lover received very few visitors. She was, in fact, persona non grata in polite society until Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria and an enthusiastic reader of her novels, received her. She later behaved unconventionally by marrying a man some twenty years her junior. Her achievements as writer of a very wide range of novels addressing a great many social issues, marked her as very different from other middle class women of the age, a woman who dared to be different.