Eliot, George (1819-1880) Pen-name of the novelist Mary Ann Evans (at different times of her life she also spelt the name Mary Anne, Marian and Marianne).
[I was in her church in Coventry in 1997]

She was the daughter of a land agent in the rural midlands (Warwickshire); her father's work (the management of estates) gave her wide experience of country society and this was greatly to enrich her insight and the scope of her novels. Brought up in a narrow religious tradition, in her early twenties she adopted agnostic opinions about Christian doctrine but she remained steadfast in the ethical teachings associated with it. She began her literary career with translations from the German of two works of religious speculation (German influence on Victorian literature); in 1851 she became assistant editor of the Westminster Review, a journal of great intellectual prestige in London. Her friendship with George Lewes led to a union between them which they both regarded as amounting to marriage; this was a bold decision in view of the rigid opposition in the English society of the time to open unions not legalized by the marriage ceremony.
Her first fiction consisted of tales later collected together as Scenes of Clerical Life. Then came her series of full-length novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862-3), Felix Holt (1866), Middlemarch (1871-2) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Up till Romola the novels and tales deal with life in the countryside in