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Introducing George Eliot at Astley:George Eliot is one of the most famous novelists in the world. Her real name was Mary Anne Evans and she was born in 1819. Her mother was born at Old Castle Farm in Astley; her father worked on the Arbury estate and at the Castle. Her parents got married in St Mary the Virgin Church, Astley and attended services there, as did George Eliot. There’s a plaque on the wall dedicated to the memory of her father’s first wife, Harriet Poynton, mother of Eliot’s half-brother and sister, who moved down here to work as a servant at Arbury Hall.George Eliot made a fortune from writing about life in Astley and Nuneaton. Her novels describing this place and its people are still read all across the globe. Although she had to get by on very little money when she was younger, by the time she was in her 40s she was one of the highest-paid writers there has ever been. Someone once asked her if she would write her autobiography. She was world famous by then, but still said that if her life story was useful for anything it was for those who were strugglers, and who despaired of ever doing anything with their lives or getting anywhereYoung Mary Ann Evans was a rebel and daydreamer, happiest when wandering off with her brother to fish in the canal, forgetting that she was supposed to be keeping clean and tidy, and dreaming of running away from home. As she grew older, she had to deal with her mother’s death when she was in her late teens and then caring for her father as he grew older. She tried to keep him happy, but they had huge arguments about religion after she refused to carry on going to church. She moved to Coventry and then to London after her dad died. She fell out with her brother and relations after moving in with a man who didn’t divorce his first wife. In one angry letter she wrote that she’d rather die than move back in with family in Nuneaton again. She said she felt ‘walled in’ by family here.Although she never came back, George Eliot made this place famous – and herself rich – by writing about it and making it seem so real that readers over the world though they knew the place and its people. She called her work a ‘study of provincial life’ – and compared it to looking through a microscope at everyday life in the middle of England.She argued that stories shouldn’t be just about wicked villains, or impossible heroes, or only beautiful people. She wanted people to read about everyday people who might be like their own cousins, classmates, annoying neighbours. She thought that through reading books we could learn to be more sympathetic – have more empathy – with other people’s points of view. Through reading we can play around with what it is like to see the world through the eyes of someone very different from ourselves – and learn to feel sympathetic or loving towards them, even if they are annoying or selfish. When she first started publishing her stories, she didn’t want to use her own name. She used a pseudonym: ‘George Eliot’ (her partner was called George, and Eliot is a bit like ‘Evans’). She also used fake place names. But the stories she told about the people and places around Nuneaton she remembered from her childhood were so detailed that local people got a bit obsessed with finding out who the real George Eliot was. It was only when a campaign started to get money for a local man – a big drinker and big mouth - called Joseph Liggins, who started to take credit for being the real writer, cheated out of his earnings, that she revealed herself. It was all quite traumatic, because in the Victorian period, a woman living with a man she wasn’t married to was often shamed and shunned. Eliot wanted her work to be judged for itself, rather than people being influenced by her personal reputation. Look around Astley church and find the clues that helped local people work out who ‘George Eliot’ was.Astley Church Quiz: How did people in Nuneaton work out that George Eliot’s stories were set here? [The vicar] mounted his horse and rode hastily with the other in his pocket to Knebley, where he officiated in a wonderful little church, with a checkered pavement which had once rung to the iron tread of military monks, with coats of arms in clusters on the lofty roof, marble warriors and their wives without noses occupying a large proportion of the area, and the twelve apostles, with their heads very much on one side, holding didactic ribbons, painted in fresco on the walls. (from: George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857))This piece of writing contains some of the first clues for people living around Nuneaton that ‘George Eliot’ knew this area really, really well. Read the passage and then walk around the church. See if you can spot four things in the church that are described in this story._________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Extension:What is meant by ‘didactic ribbons’? What job are they doing in the church?______________________________________________________________________[T]he Knebley farmers would as soon have thought of criticizing the moon as their pastor. … Some of them … had dined half an hour earlier than usual—that is to say, at twelve o'clock—in order to have time for their long walk through miry lanes, and present themselves duly in their places at two o'clock, when Mr. Oldinport and Lady Felicia, to whom Knebley Church was a sort of family temple, made their way among the bows and curtsies of their dependants to a carved and canopied pew in the chancel, diffusing as they went a delicate odour of Indian roses on the unsusceptible nostrils of the congregation. (from: George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857))George Eliot often wants readers to think about how people from different backgrounds might experience the same places in a very different way. Imagine you are one of the farmers described above, arriving at this church. How did you get to church? What was the weather like on the way here? What might your shoes look like? How might you feel? Would you find it easy or difficult to listen properly to the vicar? What might you smell like? Now think about ‘Mr Oldinport and Lady Felicia’ – the wealthy owners of most of the land and farms and the castle. How do you imagine they walk into church? Use your own words to describe their way of walking.What do they smell like?Extension: Eliot uses the word ‘unsusceptible’ to describe the farmers sitting in the congregation. It means ‘not likely to be influenced by’. How might this description relate to a bigger theme of Eliot’s works: how people from different backgrounds often don’t understand each other? ................
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