George Eliot (1819-80) is the pseudonym of Victorian novelist Mary Ann Evans. She is primarily known for her realist mode of writing through which she addresses a large spectrum of themes and issues from social mobility and industrialisation to moral choices and cultural identity. The author also received a significant amount of ill fame for going against Victorian conventions as she, for instance, started cohabiting with a married man, Henry Lewes – a relationship that at some point became a ménage-à-trois. She later, however, was admired by feminist authors and even those who largely rejected Victorian writing, such as Virginia Woolf. Eliot was mostly self-taught having left formal education at the age of sixteen. Among her other widely read works are Adam Bede (1859), Middlemarch (1871-72) and a behemoth novel Daniel Deronda (1876).
