George Eliot

George Eliot took a man's name because a woman writing seriously about provincial life would not have been read seriously, and wrote what many still call the best novel in English. She was born Mary Ann Evans, an estate agent's daughter in Warwickshire, educated further than most girls of her class, and lost her evangelical faith at twenty-two after reading German biblical criticism - a break that half-estranged her from her father and cost her the family. She translated Strauss's Life of Jesus and Feuerbach, moved to London, and became assistant editor of the Westminster Review, running much of it while a man's name stood at the top. In 1854 she went to Germany with George Henry Lewes, who was married and unable to divorce, and lived with him for twenty-four years as his wife in everything but law, which shut her out of respectable society and did not stop her being read in every house that excluded her. The novels came late: Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, then Middlemarch, a study of a whole town in which no one gets quite the life they intended. Daniel Deronda took Jewish nationalism seriously before Zionism existed. Queen Victoria admired the novels and commissioned paintings of scenes from Adam Bede. Middlemarch was published in eight parts in 1871-72 and Virginia Woolf later called it one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. After Lewes died she married John Cross, twenty years younger, which reconciled her brother Isaac to her after twenty-three years of silence; she died seven months later. Westminster Abbey refused her a grave on grounds of her irreligion and her domestic life, and she was buried at Highgate beside Lewes. A memorial stone was placed in Poets Corner in 1980.

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