THE girl Mary Anne Evans who was to become the distinguished novelist George Eliot grew up in Griff House, a spacious farmhouse on the road between Nuneaton and Coventry. She enjoyed an idyllic country childhood with her parents and elder brother and sister, and later drew upon these experiences in her novel The Mill on the Floss .     
  At 16, Mary Anne was obliged to leave her boarding school in Coventry and go back to Griff when her mother became terminally ill. She had excelled particularly in English composition with schoolteachers Mary and Rebecca Franklin, daughters of a local Baptist minister. The sisters had offered a religious influence, but Mary Anne began to question her own beliefs after moving to live in Coventry, where she found new, interesting friends.  

She set up a clothing club for the poor with her next-door neighbour Mrs Pears, wife of a wealthy ribbon manufacturer, and through them met other business people including the Quaker Joseph Cash, and Charles Bray, who became a lifelong close friend.
   The Brays lived a comfortable walk from Mary Anne’s home with her father in what is now George Eliot Road. Charles Bray was an intellectual philanthropist, actively concerned about sanitary and social conditions in Coventry, and he and his wife Cara entertained many radical thinkers of the day. Mary Anne began to read and think more widely and experienced religious doubts, much to the outrage of her father, a staunch and active Anglican, who threatened to take her away from Coventry and her new influential friends.
   Her brother restored peace, and after a long stay with him at Griff she returned to Coventry and resumed her friendship with the Brays, despite her father’s disapproval. Through this connection she found work translating a German book about the life of Jesus – her first published writing venture. This in turn led to Charles Bray commissioning reviews from her for his radical paper, the Coventry Herald, which he had bought in 1846. Around this time it is believed that a young artist from Leamington Spa proposed marriage, but Mary Anne severed the relationship before an engagement was announced.
   Mary Anne was becoming a respected writer. After her father died in 1849 she had some money left by him, but it was not quite enough to live on comfortably. After a holiday in Switzerland recovering from the exhaustion of nursing her parent, she moved to London to take up work using the literary contacts and experience she had gained in Coventry, and to launch her novel-writing career.