George Eliot

George Eliot was the masculine pen name of Mary Anne (or Marian) Evans (1819-1880), one of the most talented novelists of the nineteenth century. An active participant in freethinking Victorian intellectual circles, Evans was an intimate of Herbert Spencer and had a hand in the translation of David Friedrich Strauss's influential Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus, 1846), one of the first scholarly books to seriously challenge traditional Christian beliefs. Her career as a novelist did not begin until the late 1850s., but resulted in the creation of such lasting works as Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Ramola (1861-1862), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876). Evans' writings were popular in her day, and have had a deep influence on the work of other writers, notably Henry James.