Jane Austen and George Eliot: The Lady and The Radical

In October 1851, a chance meeting in a Piccadilly bookshop changed the course of literary history. For it was here that Mary Ann Evans, an unworldly young scholar from the Midlands, was first introduced to the love of her life, the married critic and philosopher George Lewes. Encouraged and supported by Lewes, Mary Ann Evans went on to become the queen of literary London, famous under her pen name, George Eliot.

In nurturing George Eliot's talent, Lewes drew inspiration from the works of his own favourite writer, an unfashionable author of the previous generation by the name of Jane Austen. On the face of it, Austen and Eliot had little in common. Austen was a genteel spinster who spent her whole life painting regency-period domestic dramas with delicate irony and unfailing charm. Eliot, meanwhile, was a radical intellectual who lived scandalously with a married man, travelled widely in Europe, and sought to document with stirring realism the social upheavals of her age.

And yet, when George Eliot embarked on her career as an author in the late 1850s, the works of Jane Austen were at her side and feeding her imagination. Separated by time, circumstance and temperament, the two writers nevertheless had a vital impetus in common: to prove the value of a woman's eye in a man's world.