Who is George Eliot?
George Eliot is the pen name of the critically acclaimed English Victorian writer, Mary Ann Evans. Her literary contributions include The Mill and The Floss, Adam Bede, Silas Marner and Middlemarch. She is considered by many to be one of the finest authors of the Victorian era, in many cases as good or better than Charlotte Bronte. Her work clearly stands shoulder to shoulder with the work of Dickens, and she was excellent at addressing the social strata of rural communities. Many women writers in the Victorian Era had ceased to use male pen names, as writing became a more respectable trade for women. George Eliot probably used a pen name because her personal life would have been considered less than respectable. She would have been considered in her time as a “kept woman,” as she lived with a married man named George Lewes. Lewes’ wife refused to divorce him, thus he and George Eliot privately pursued their relationship. To keep this undercover was vastly important; otherwise George E
