George Eliot

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, born in 1819 in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England. She grew up in the Midlands countryside, received a good education for a girl of her time, and became a serious reader and translator of German works on religion and philosophy. She moved to London, worked as an editor and writer for the Westminster Review, and in her thirties began to write fiction. She chose a male pen name partly to be taken seriously and partly to protect her private life, which was unconventional for the Victorian age.

Her novels combine close observation of ordinary provincial lives with deep moral and psychological insight. She wrote about conscience, sympathy, ambition and the limits placed on people by their society, and she is often counted among the greatest English novelists. She died in December 1880.