George Eliot, Amateur Naturalist?

George Eliot a.ka. Mary Anne Evans a.k.a. my bestie because Middlemarch: She was 19th-century lady naturalist-adjacent? She collected marine fossils?

Middlemarch is a book I re-read every five years and I didn't pick up on the natural history? Gah.

I am SO late to this party.  Butter my biscuit. Actually, butter my 10x magnifying loupe that I use to identify wasps. It's SWOON-TIME.

According to The British Library, George Henry Lewes and Eliot were deeply involved in one another's writing and research, and "Lewes' scientific work had a tremendous effect on Eliot's writing and thought. Science informs the language and imagery of Middlemarch, and is the passion of two of its characters, the surgeon Lydgate, and the amateur naturalist Farebrother." I have had a crush on Lydgate for years.

In Reading The Rocks, How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life, Eliot biographer Brenda Maddox writes, "Together the pair [Eliot and Lewes] spent many days scouring the coastal rocks around Britain, collecting marine fossils, classifying them, and storing them in glass jars." 

OMG. I am so totally going to suggest "collecting marine fossils, classifying them, and storing them in glass jars" to my husband for date night.