The George Eliot Archive is a major open-access scholarly resource that brings together a vast array of materials by and about George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), providing everything researchers need to study the life, writings, and legacy of one of the most highly acclaimed novelists in Western literature.

ALL PUBLISHED WRITING

The Archive provides free access to everything George Eliot published--fiction, poetry, translations, and nonfiction. We prioritize Blackwood's "Cabinet Edition," the standard final versions of Eliot's collected works published during her lifetime. We also include the original publications for comparison research. These searchable and downloadable complete texts require no registration, just a request that you credit the George Eliot Archive as your source.

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EARLY WRITINGS ABOUT GEORGE ELIOT

This collection features more than 1,200 public‑domain books, articles, reviews, and other early writings about George Eliot—ranging from contemporary responses to later nineteenth‑century studies and commentary.
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INTERACTIVE PROJECTS

Our Interactive Data section features born-digital data visualization models that provide highly detailed and organized information about aspects of George Eliot's life, such as an interactive chronology detailing more than 3100 days in the author’s life, and George Eliot’s Social Network, launched in 2019 and expanded in 2023 to include a sortable gallery of 125 friends and family members. Additionally, the Archive includes George Eliot’s England, an interactive map with 165 images and descriptions of significant places in Eliot's life and works and additional interactive maps to show the sites and routes of Eliot's travels abroad, such as her 1849 trip with the Brays, her 1954 trip to Germany with Lewes, their four trips to Italy, and her 1880 honeymoon trip with Cross.

Our major born-digital project, the George Eliot Text Explorer (2023-25) represents the first machine-readable, open-access version of Eliot’s complete published works. By converting PDF documents into TEI-encoded XML files, we’ve created a foundation for advanced text analysis tools, including the AI Analysis of Eliot's fiction (Chen & Rilett, 2023) and the Text Explorer application (Cui, Sun, and Rilett, 2023), which enables instant keyword and phrase searches. The project is further enhanced through integration with Voyant Tools, an open-source text visualization platform.

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CORRESPONDENCE

Our goal is to provide open access to all of George Eliot’s writing—both her published works and her private materials, including journals, notebooks, and correspondence. We have begun by digitizing two public‑domain collections: the 894 letters published by John Cross in 1885 and the 76 letters to Elma Stuart, edited by her son Roland Stuart in 1909. These letters can be individually searched by date, sender, and recipient.

We also offer searchable snippets from full‑text transcriptions of Eliot’s Journals and Notebooks, similar to Google Books; users may read excerpts but cannot download the complete texts to ensure compliance with copyright. A full digital edition of more than 3,000 of Eliot’s letters will be released in early 2026, with full sorting and search capabilities.
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IMAGE GALLERY

Our George Eliot Image Gallery includes the fist complete collection of the portraits of George Eliot created during her lifetime. These include preliminary sketches, final portraits, an authentic photograph and one that was overpainted and sold as authentic. We have also created the first collection of illustrations from her works, collected over many years from rare editions. Comparing how various artists depicted the scenes and characters from Eliot's works opens opportunities for new scholarship. We are in the process of adding alt-text descriptions to improve accessibility for those who rely on screen readers. 

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GEORGE ELIOT SCHOLARS

The Archive’s sister site, George Eliot Scholars is a digital commons where contributors publish their essays, articles, lectures, conference presentations, and other work on Eliot they wish to share to our non-commercial open access public repository. For the George Eliot Scholars website, we are also collecting peer-reviewed, open-access journal articles to share with the Scholars community. 

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THE GEORGE ELIOT JOURNAL

The Archive’s other sister site, the George Eliot Review Online, makes all issues of the George Eliot Review from its inception in 1970 accessible on the internet for the first time. This open-access digital project, launched in December 2017, has been made possible in partnership with the journal’s UK publishers, the George Eliot Fellowship.

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ARCHIVE PROJECT TEAM

The George Eliot Archive, George Eliot Scholars digital commons and George Eliot Review Online, have been developed by Dr. Beverley Park Rilett and her small but mighty team of research assistants at Auburn University in Alabama (and previously, from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln) along with dozens of expert consultants and contributors. Please check back frequently for updates and improvements as we continue to create resources for studying George Eliot. 

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