George Eliot

Biography

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), who took a male pseudonym because she knew female novelists were not taken seriously. She was self-educated beyond what her era permitted women to study formally, taught herself Greek, Latin, German, and Italian, translated Strauss and Feuerbach, and worked as a journalist and editor before becoming a novelist. She lived openly with the philosopher George Henry Lewes, a married man who could not divorce under Victorian law — making her a social outcast from respectable society while being the most celebrated novelist in England. She began Middlemarch in 1869, combining two separately begun stories ('Miss Brooke' and a story about Lydgate) into a single novel, and published it in installments in 1871-72.

George Eliot at a glance