02 Jul George Eliot
There’s almost complete agreement that the greatest novel by an English writer is Middlemarch (1871-72), George Eliot’s sprawling account of life in a provincial town in the middle of the 19th Century. So why is she so poorly commemorated? After all, she wrote many other fine novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861) and more. Can we do better? This year (2019) marks the 200th anniversary of Eliot’s birth.
On your next literary tour of England you might go to Highgate Cemetery in north London, where Eliot is buried in a well-tended grave. Also there’s a modest memorial stone in Poets’ Corner in London’s Westminster Abbey, which was placed there in 1980 (100 years after her death). The rather dreary town where Eliot was born, Nuneaton in north Warwickshire, is justifiably proud. There’s a statue, a memorial garden and a George Eliot gallery in the town’s museum. The local hospital is named after her, as is a street and even a pub!