Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans was born in Warwickshire in 1819, the youngest child of Robert and Christina Evans. She was deeply religious during her childhood and adolescence, a trait she developed partially from her family background and partially under the influence of Miss Lewis, the "principal governess" of a boarding school which Mary Ann attended from 1828 to 1832.
After her mother died and her sister married, Mary Ann ran her father's household. But in 1841, her brother Isaac married and took possession of the house, and Mary Ann and her father moved to Coventry. In the city the young woman's intellectual horizons widened and her early faith diminished; under the influence of Charles Bray and Charles Hennell, she became interested in the "new criticism" of the Bible and anonymously published her first work, a translation of D. F. Strauss' Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus), in 1846. She also published a few articles and reviews in a periodical edited by Bray during this period.
Mary Ann cared for her invalid father, who strenuously objected to her changed religious views, until he died in 1849. After traveling in Europe for a time, she returned to England, where she became involved with a group of rationalists, best known of whom was John Chapman. In 1851, she became assistant editor of Chapman's Westminster Review. While in London, she met many prominent people, among them the philosopher Herbert Spencer. Through Spencer she came in contact with George Henry Lewes, a drama critic and author who was separated from his wife, and the pair fell in love. Lewes could not obtain a divorce, and he and Mary Ann decided to ignore the prohibitions of society and live together as man and wife. The union was a marriage in every aspect but the legal one and lasted until Lewes' death in 1878. Two years later, Mary Ann married J. W. Cross, and she herself died on December 22, 1880.
