Toy Story was the first feature-length film created completely using computer-generated imagery. It took around 5 years and $30 million to make. It was a worthy investment as Toy Story grossed nearly $380 million at the box office worldwide, was nominated for three Academy Awards and two Golden Globes, and launched a franchise of related merchandise, video games, and sequels. The most recent sequel, Toy Story 4, came out in June 2019 and grossed $1 billion at the box office. 

 

 

Of course many listeners will know that George Eliot is a pen name - the writer’s true identity was Mary Ann Evans. 

 

As a young child, Mary Ann Evans was declared unpretty. She did possess obvious smarts though, and so her father sent her to a boarding school in the hopes that she could develop her brains to make up for her lack of beauty. The amount of formal schooling she received was unusual for a country girl in the first half of the 1800s. 

 

George Eliot returned from school around 16 to take care of the home after her mother’s death. She continued reading voraciously and corresponded via letters with her former teacher. 

 

Still unmarried at age 21, George Eliot followed her father in his move to a town near the larger-sized Coventry, where she became friends with a well-connected couple, and started to mix with the intelligentsia of the town. When Eliot’s father passed away in 1849, it was if she was newly liberated. 

 

Eliot subsequently took a trip to mainland Europe with close friends of her and stayed in Geneva for a spell. Upon her return to England she relocated to London, taking up a position as an editor at a couple literary magazines as she continued to write on her own. While an editor she made up her mind to write novels, perhaps to fill a hole in what she saw as “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” 

 

Partly to keep her writing career separate from her editing career, and also to escape public scrutiny, Mary Ann Evans published all her novels as George Eliot. At the time, Eliot was living with a married man, and polite society disapproved of the arrangement, despite Eliot’s partner being in an open relationship. 

 

Mary Ann Evans was forced to admit that it was she who was truly George Eliot after other writers began claiming they were George Eliot. Fortunately, Eliot’s books had already become beloved by the public and Mary Ann carried on living with her partner without harm to her book sales. 

 

Eliot’s most notable novels include Adam Bede, The Mill on Floss, and Middlemarch. Middlemarch in particular stands out among her works - it is the novel most often adapted to TV and film and although scholarly opinions remain mixed, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf were personal fans of the novel. Emily Dickinson once said in a letter to her cousin: “What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory?”

 

 

George Eliot

 

If you sit down at set of sun 

And count the acts that you have done, 

And, counting, find 

One self-denying deed, one word 

That eased the heart of him who heard, 

One glance most kind 

That fell like sunshine where it went -- 

Then you may count that day well spent. 

 

But if, through all the livelong day, 

You've cheered no heart, by yea or nay -- 

If, through it all 

You've nothing done that you can trace 

That brought the sunshine to one face-- 

No act most small 

That helped some soul and nothing cost -- 

Then count that day as worse than lost.