George Eliot, George (pen name of Mary Ann, or Marian, Evans, 1819-1880). One of the greatest English authors of the 19th Century, George Eliot is renowned for her realistic storytelling and insight into the human psyche.

Collecting George Eliot Modern First editions

Key Titles

Eliot was on the verge of middle age before she wrote her first fiction. In 1857 (when she assumed her pen name) her first works of fiction - three short stories - appeared in  Blackwood's and were published later as the volume Scenes of Clerical Life ( 1858). Adam Bede , her first full-length novel, was followed soon after, and in 1860 came The Mill on the Floss, followed by Silas Marner in 1861. Inspired by a trip to Florence, she did a great deal of painstaking research in the Italian Renaissance and produced her only historical novel,  Romola, in 1863. Turning again to the contemporary scene in England, she wrote Felix Holt, The Radical and Middlemarch, that  was considered not only Eliot's finest work but one of the greatest novels to come out of 19th-century England.

Her last novel, Daniel Derona  is peopled with characters who illustrate her moral philosophy. In 1880, two years after Lewes's death, she married J. W. Cross, a clergyman twenty years her junior. She died later in the same year.