Choir Invisible: selected poems

Mary Ann Evans – known by her pseudonym George Eliot – was born in 1819 in rural Warwickshire, England. She attended boarding schools of religious atmosphere until the age of sixteen but returned home to keep house for her father upon her mother’s death. In 1841 they moved to Coventry, where she became acquainted with the freethinker Charles Bray, a prosperous ribbon manufacturer. This meeting precipitated her break with orthodoxy, and she continued going to church only to please her father until his death in 1849. After spending the winter in Geneva, she moved to London, where she was the subeditor of The Westminster Review until 1854. In 1851 she met Charles Lewes – separated from his wife – with whom she lived openly until his death. They bought a priory in Regent’s Park in 1863, where Lewes died in 1878. In 1880, she married her banker, John Walter Cross, and moved to Chelsea. She died the same year.

Under the pen name George Eliot, Mary Evans published translations, poetry, essays and novels, among them Middlemarch (1871-72), The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Adam Bede (1859). Her writing is famous for its depictions and psychological analyses of rural society.

This edition presents one of her main long poems, The Legend of Jubal, and shorter poems collected and published in Complete Poetical Works (1888), including the blank verse poem “O may I join the choir invisible”. Additionally, the poem “Knowing that shortly I must put off this tabernacle” (Christian Observer, 1840) has been included.