ABSTRACT
Many biographies have been written about Marian Evans and the novelist George Eliot. Marian was a thirty-four-year-old translator, reviewer and editor from London. When she suddenly left for Germany in 1854 in the company of George Henry Lewes, a writer and journalist who was known for his free way of living, their joint departure caused a scandal among their families, friends, acquaintances and professional contacts that was to reverberate to come. The journey to Germany was Marian's second foreign visit. She had first been abroad in 1849, when her Coventry friends, the Brays, invited her to accompany them on a Continental tour to Paris, Nice, Genoa, Milan and the Italian Lakes, and then across the Alps to Geneva and Vevey. Marian's translation of Ludwig Feuerbach's Das Wesen des Christentums was published in 1854. In Frankfurt, Weimar and, especially, Berlin, Marian took the opportunity to see and examine critically contemporary German art and to develop her own aesthetic of the real.
