George Eliot

George Eliot was the name Mary Ann Evans took when she began publishing fiction at thirty-seven, after years as a translator of Strauss and Feuerbach and editor of the Westminster Review, and after scandalising her family by living with the married George Henry Lewes. Adam Bede was her first novel; Middlemarch, a study of provincial life around the Reform Bill of 1832, is for many readers the greatest English novel, and its Dorothea and Lydgate the fullest portraits of idealism meeting the world. She lost her faith and kept its seriousness, and wrote about ordinary lives as if they were the only subject.