Mary Ann Evans was born on a farm in Warwickshire, in the English Midlands, the daughter of an estate manager. She was a serious, devout, bookish girl, and the countryside and small-town life of her childhood became the world of almost all her novels. In her early twenties, after reading widely in science and the new German biblical criticism, she lost her religious faith and refused to go to church. Her father was so angry that for a time he would not live with her. She went back, in the end, but kept her own beliefs.

She became one of the most learned women in England. She translated David Strauss’s Life of Jesus, a book that treated the Gospels as history rather than miracle, and in 1851 she moved to London to work on the Westminster Review, a leading intellectual journal, which she effectively edited. There she met George Henry Lewes, a lively writer and critic. He was married, and the law made divorce impossible for him, but in 1854 they decided to live together as husband and wife. Respectable society shut its doors on her for years.

It was Lewes who encouraged her to try fiction. In 1856 she wrote a scathing essay, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” and then set out to write a better kind herself. She chose the name George Eliot: George for Lewes, and Eliot, she said, because it was “a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.” A man’s name would ensure her novels were judged seriously, and would keep the scandal of her private life out of the reviews.

Adam Bede (1859) was a huge success, and The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner followed. Middlemarch (1871–72) weaves together many lives in a provincial town around 1830: an idealistic young woman, Dorothea Brooke, who marries a dry old scholar; an ambitious young doctor whose marriage drags him down; bankers, farmers, clergymen. Virginia Woolf called it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

Lewes died in 1878. In 1880, Eliot married a much younger friend, John Cross, and died that December. She was refused burial in Westminster Abbey because of her unconventional life, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, next to Lewes. A hundred years later, a memorial stone for her was placed in Poets’ Corner.