George Eliot

George Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans in Warwickshire in 1819, was the daughter of an estate manager. Studious from childhood and a master of several languages, she gave up her evangelical faith in her twenties, to her father's bitter anger. She translated Strauss's Life of Jesus and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, and in London became the working editor of the Westminster Review, mixing with thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill. For more than twenty years she lived with the married writer George Henry Lewes, for which society long shunned her. At thirty-seven, encouraged by Lewes, she began writing fiction under the masculine pen name 'George Eliot', and won fame with Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and other novels. Renowned for her penetrating psychology and moral reflection, she is called the most intellectually profound of the Victorian novelists.