About fifteen years ago, I read my first George Eliot novel, and I have been hooked ever since. The more I learned about the writer, the more fascinated I became by the paradoxes of her extraordinary world.

Notoriously unattractive, Eliot struggled to reconcile a fierce intellect and ambition with an intense need for approval and affection—all within a society which had the most conventional ideas about female beauty and behavior. Eliot’s radicalism often shocked her friends and family. But she was a reluctant rebel at best. Determined to be true to herself, she made choices that left her a social outcast for much of her adult life. “It isn’t true that love makes all things easy,” she writes in one of her novels. “It makes us choose what is difficult.”

Like all great dramatic figures, Eliot seemed to be at war with herself. She grew up as Mary Anne Evans in the countryside, spending ten years as dutiful housekeeper for her brother and father. After her father’s death, she moved to London, changed her name to “Marian,” and earned her living as a journalist. And then, at the age of 35, she began writing fiction. Eliot also lived with a married man who fully respected and supported her career. George Henry Lewes answered her mail, dealt with the real-estate agents, handled their social engagements—in brief, he was the “wife” every liberated woman dreams of. Reading about Eliot, I thought, “Now here is a woman feminists must adore!”

Alas, I was wrong.

Male critics of the 19th century placed George Eliot on a level with Shakespeare. But in the 20th century, feminist critics found fault, bordering on betrayal. In their eyes, Eliot lived one life—and wrote another. In her biography, Kathryn Hughes describes “the puzzle about Eliot” that bothered these critics: “While in her most intimate and habitual life she flouted orthodox social roles, her politics and her novels dealt with the status quo, with life as it is rather than how it might be.”

In the play, I explore the unusual circumstances of Marian Evans’ life and the difficult choices she made -- not least of these her decision to reveal herself as the real George Eliot. But I also hope to shed light on her work. Her novels often strike a modern reader as nostalgic and conservative. However, there is a subversive streak in them, too. Ordinary and antiheroic, Eliot’s characters are spiritually severed from the society she carefully renders. And, like their creator, they find true affinities -- true happiness -- outside the hearth and home into which they’re born.

A century and a half later, we continue to wrestle with these issues: the importance of female beauty, the definition of a true family, the consequences of revealing to our own families who we really are. Did Eliot hide behind her pseudonym and George Henry Lewes’s protectiveness? Or did she wisely conceal her identity from a critical and unforgiving society? A Most Dangerous Woman is about a figure misunderstood both then and now -- a woman with a lifelong desire for legitimacy, determined to fulfill that need on her own terms.

[November 2010]

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