George Eliot

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), an English novelist born in Warwickshire, the setting of much of her fiction. Before turning to novels she was a translator of German theology, an editor of the Westminster Review and an essayist in the London intellectual world. Her decision to live openly with the married critic George Henry Lewes cost her social acceptance for years. Her novels, from Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss to Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, are known for their psychological depth, moral seriousness and broad sympathy for ordinary lives. Middlemarch is often judged the greatest English novel of its century.