Pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880) English novelist. Her works include the pastoral Adam Bede 1859; The Mill on the Floss 1860, with its autobiographical elements; Silas Marner 1861, which contains elements of the folktale; and Daniel Deronda 1876. Middlemarch, published serially 1871–72, is considered her greatest novel for its confident handling of numerous characters and central social and moral issues. Her work is pervaded by a penetrating and compassionate intelligence.
Born at Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, George Eliot had a strict evangelical upbringing. In 1841 she was converted to free thought. As assistant editor of the Westminster Review under John Chapman 1851–53, she made the acquaintance of Thomas Carlyle, Harriet Martineau, Herbert Spencer, and the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes (1817–1878). Lewes was married but separated from his wife, and from 1854 he and Eliot lived together in a relationship that she regarded as a true marriage and that continued until his death. In 1880 she married John Cross (1840–1924). + prikaži više

T(homas) S(tearns) (1888-1965) US poet, playwright, and critic. He lived in London from 1915. His first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations 1917, introduced new verse forms and rhythms; subsequent major poems were The Waste Land 1922 and ‘The Hollow Men’ 1925. For children he published Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats 1939. His plays include Murder in the Cathedral 1935 and The Cocktail Party 1949. His critical works include The Sacred Wood 1920. Nobel Prize for Literature 1948.
Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, and was educated at Harvard, in France at the Sorbonne, and in the UK at Oxford. He settled in London 1915 and became a British subject 1927. He was for a time a bank clerk, later lecturing and entering publishing at Faber and Faber. As editor of the highly influential Criterion literary magazine 1922–39, he was responsible for a critical reevaluation of metaphysical poetry and Jacobean drama, and wrote perceptively about such European poets as Dante, Charles Baudelaire, and Jules Laforgue.
Prufrock and Other Observations expressed the disillusionment of the generation affected by World War I and caused a sensation with its experimental form and rhythms. His reputation was established by the desolate modernity of The Waste Land. ‘The Hollow Men’ continued on the same note, but ‘Ash Wednesday’ 1930 revealed the change in religious attitude that had led him to join the Church of England 1927. Among his other works are Four Quartets 1943, a religious sequence in which he seeks the eternal reality, and the poetic dramas Murder in the Cathedral (about Thomas ŕ Becket); The Cocktail Party; The Confidential Clerk 1953; and The Elder Statesman 1958. His collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was used for the popular English composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats 1981.
Eliot’s critical works, which include The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 1933, The Idea of a Christian Society 1940, and Notes toward the Definition of Culture 1948, are conservative in tone, emphasizing the traditional values of ritual and community. He coined two important literary critical terms: dissociation of sensibility and objective correlative. + prikaži više