Geoffrey Beevers Author & Editor

George Eliot was born Mary Anne (known as Marian) Evans in 1819, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire. She was brought up as an Evangelist, and received a classical education at local boarding schools. After the death of her mother in 1836, she moved to Coventry with her father and became acquainted with free-thinkers Charles and Cara Bray, which led to her translating Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1846). After her father’s death in 1849, she moved to London, where she met George Henry Lewes, who was separated from, but crucially unable to divorce, his wife. Moving to Germany with him in 1854, she lived as his common-law wife for twenty-four years. Under his encouragement she began writing fiction under her nom de plume: the successful serial Scenes of Clerical Life (1858); the best-selling Adam Bede (1859); followed by a number of poems and further highly praised works such as The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–2) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Lewes’s death in 1878 saw the effective end of her writing career. A few short months into her marriage to a man twenty years her junior, she died in December 1880. After studying History at Oxford University, Geoffrey Beevers trained as an actor at LAMDA. In the theatre he has worked at the RSC, the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe and the West End, and has made over two hundred television appearances including The Jewel in the Crown, A Very British Coup and Dr Who; countless radio broadcasts including many book readings; and films from Victor/Victoria to Miss Potter. He also writes and directs. At the Orange Tree Theatre he has directed many plays, including his own, and several by Václav Havel. He has also directed in repertory theatres and drama schools. His writing work includes about a dozen plays produced in the theatre and on radio. His latest publications include an audio CD Unintelligent Design (2011), and a novel The Forgotten Fields (2014). He has long had a particular love for George Eliot’s work. He has previously adapted Adam Bede for the stage (Time Out Award) and also Silas Marner. One of his plays for Radio 4 was A Proper Woman, a drama-documentary about George Eliot’s marriage.