Mary Ann Evans 22 November — 22 December ; alternatively Mary Anne or Marian [ 1 ] [ 2 ] , known by her pen name George Eliot , was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. As with Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy , she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there.
Her works are known for their realism , psychological insight , sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside. Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" [ 4 ] and by Martin Amis [ 5 ] and Julian Barnes [ 6 ] as the greatest novel in the English language. Scandalously and unconventionally for the era, she lived with the married George Henry Lewes as his conjugal partner, from to , and called him her husband.
He remained married to his wife and supported their children, even after she left him to live with another man and have children with him.
In May , eighteen months after Lewes's death, George Eliot married her long-time friend, John Cross, a man much younger than she was, and she changed her name to Mary Ann Cross. Her full siblings were: Christiana, known as Chrissey — , Isaac — , and twin brothers who died a few days after birth in March She also had a half-brother, Robert Evans — , and half-sister, Frances "Fanny" Evans Houghton — , from her father's previous marriage to Harriet Poynton — In early , the family moved to a house named Griff House , between Nuneaton and Bedworth.
The young Evans was a voracious reader and obviously intelligent. Because she was not considered physically beautiful, Evans was not thought to have much chance of marriage, and this, coupled with her intelligence, led her father to invest in an education not often afforded to women. Wallington's school in Nuneaton, and from ages thirteen to sixteen at Miss Franklin's school in Coventry.
