ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively "Mary
Anne" or "Marian"), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist, translator and one of the
leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels,
including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860),
Silas
Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them
set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological
insight.
She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be
taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only
writing lighthearted romances. She also wished to have her fiction judged
separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and
critic. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to
shield 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 years.
Her 1872 work Middlemarch has
been described by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.
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