George Eliot

(Mary Anne Evans) 1819-1880. Daughter of a land agent from Warwickshire, England, George Eliot was educated at the local school, and then at a girls' school in Coventry. After her father's death, Eliot took a job as an assistant editor for the Westminster Review. Eliot set up home with George Lewes (he inspired her penname), a married man whose wife was already involved with someone else. For all intents and purposes, Eliot and Lewes were husband and wife. In 1856, Eliot began publishing her fiction. Lewes died in 1878, and in 1880, only a month before her own death, George Eliot married John Cross. Her works: Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda, Felix Holt, The Radical, The Lifted Veil, Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Romola, Scenes of Clerical Life, Silas Marner.