Mary Ann Evans did not begin writing fiction until relatively late in life. Her first pieces were three short stories, "Amos Barton," "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story," and "Janet's Repentance," which were published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857 and reissued collectively as Scenes of Clerical Life in 1858. They appeared under the pseudonym George Eliot, a penname which Evans used throughout the rest of her career. In 1859, Adam Bede, Eliot's first full-length novel, came out, and her reputation was established. The Mill on the Floss, an autobiographical novel, and Silas Marner both appeared in 1860. Romola, a historical novel set in Renaissance Florence, was published three years later and Felix Holt, the Radical in 1866. Middlemarch, widely considered to be Eliot's masterpiece, came out in 1871-72, and Daniel Deronda in 1876.
Eliot's work represents a definite break with the work of her immediate predecessors in several ways. In Adam Bede, she issued her declaration from convention and announced her intention to write realistically. "So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity." We, looking back towards Eliot, may be inclined to dispute her claim; her work may not seem realistic when compared with more modern efforts. But we must not lose sight of the fact that a number of the most admirable qualities in modern fiction derive, either directly or indirectly, from Eliot; her work was revolutionary in its own day and opened new directions for the development of the novel as an art form.
Eliot's writings are more realistic than those of her famous contemporaries in that she habitually presents characters which are not simplistic caricatures of human beings but complex, ambiguous, ultimately indefinable figures like those we meet on the street every day. They are analyzed at great length in the novels, and this psychological approach, in which the subtleties of motivation are laid bare, enables Eliot to present human situations as they really occur; both the mental and physical aspects of action are reproduced. She also attempted, perhaps with imperfect success, to break the stranglehold which popular morality had on the novel by showing that the good or bad fortune which comes to her characters is not the work of some unseen divine hand whose laws have been either followed or violated, but is the result of human will-choices. And finally she made the novel a more serious art form than it had hitherto been by using it as a vehicle for the discussion of significant moral and philosophical issues.
