Mary Anne (alternatively Mary Ann or Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and 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. 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 as the greatest novel in the English language by Martin Amis and by Julian Barnes.
Read more about George Eliot: Literary Assessment
Famous quotes by george eliot:
“... it is seldom a medical man has true religious views—there is too much pride of intellect.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“... it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter- writing.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“... men know best about everything, except what women know better.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)