as
Maggie and Tom Tulliver, in _The Mill on the Floss;_ her aunt, as Dinah
Morris, and her mother, as Mrs. Poyser, in _Adam Bede_. We have a
suggestion of her father in the hero of the latter novel, but the picture
is more fully drawn as Caleb Garth, in _Middlemarch_. For a few years she
studied at two private schools for young ladies, at Nuneaton and Coventry;
but the death of her mother called her, at seventeen years of age, to take
entire charge of the household. Thereafter her education was gained wholly
by miscellaneous reading. We have a suggestion of her method in one of her
early letters, in which she says: "My mind presents an assemblage of
disjointed specimens of history, ancient and modern; scraps of poetry
picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Milton; newspaper
topics, morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology,
and chemistry; reviews and metaphysics, all arrested and petrified and
smothered by the fast-thickening everyday accession of actual events,
relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations."

When Mary was twenty-one years old the family again moved, this time to
Foleshill Road, near Coventry. Here she became acquainted with the family
of Charles Bray, a prosperous ribbon manufacturer, whose house was a
gathering place for the freethinkers of the neighborhood. The effect of
this liberal atmosphere upon Miss Evans, brought up in a narrow way, with
no knowledge of the world, was to unsettle many of her youthful
convictions. From a narrow, intense dogmatism, she went to the other
extreme of radicalism; then (about 1860) she lost all sympathy with the
freethinkers, and, being instinctively religious, seemed to be groping
after a definite faith while following the ideal of duty. This spiritual
struggle, which suggests that of Carlyle, is undoubtedly the cause of that
gloom and depression which hang, like an English fog, over much of her
work; though her biographer, Cross, tells us that she was not by any means
a sad or gloomy woman.

In 1849 Miss Evans's father died, and the Brays took her abroad for a tour
of the continent. On her return to England she wrote several liberal
articles for the _Westminster Review_, and presently was made assistant
editor of that magazine. Her residence in London at this time marks a
turning point in her career and the real beginning of her literary life.
She made strong friendships with Spencer, Mill, and other scientists of the
da