George Eliot Reviews

Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880; alternatively "Mary Anne" or "Marian"), known by her pen name George Eliot, was a British novelist, poet, journalist, translator and a member of the top authors in the Victorian age. She's the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), and the majority of them put in provincial England and famous for their generosity and psychological penetration.

She used a male pen name, she explained, to make sure her works could be taken seriously. Female writers were printed under their own names during Eliot's own life, but she wished to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. She also desired to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely recognized job as an editor and critic. An additional element in her usage of a pen name may have been a desire to protect her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 decades.

Her 1872 job Middlemarch has been described by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest book in the English vocabulary.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo from Swiss artist Alexandre-Louis-François d'Albert-Durade (1804-86) [Public Domain], through English Wikipedia.

George Eliot Quality Chart