Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). 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" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.
Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) in 1850
Portrait of George Eliot by Samuel Laurence, c. 1860
Photograph (albumen print) of George Eliot, c. 1865
Blue plaque, Holly Lodge, 31 Wimbledon Park Road, London
Adam Bede was the first novel by English author George Eliot, first published in 1859. It was published pseudonymously, even though Evans was a well-published and highly respected scholar of her time. The novel has remained in print ever since and is regularly used in university studies of 19th-century English literature. She described the novel as "a country story full of the breath of cows and scent of hay".
Title page of the first edition, 1859
George Eliot, ca.1865
Painting by Edward Henry Corbould (1861) of Hetty Sorrel and Captain Donnithorne in Mrs Poyser's dairy.
Poster for Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, depicting Adam (left) and Captain Donnithorne.