George Eliot

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, one of the greatest novelists in the English language, whose psychologically profound and intellectually ambitious fiction set a new standard for the novel in the Victorian era and beyond. Her masterpiece Middlemarch is regularly cited as the greatest novel in the English language. Born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire in 1819, Evans was the daughter of a land agent. She received an unusually thorough education for a woman of her time and was intellectually formidable from an early age. She lost her Christian faith in her twenties and moved to London, where she became assistant editor of the Westminster Review, one of the leading intellectual journals of the day, and moved in radical literary and philosophical circles. She adopted the pen name George Eliot to ensure her work would be taken seriously — women authors were often dismissed or confined to certain genres — and to separate her literary life from her personal reputation. She lived openly with the married writer and critic George Henry Lewes, a relationship that was scandalous by Victorian standards but profoundly supportive of her work. Adam Bede (1859) was her first novel and an immediate success. The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861) followed. Middlemarch (1871-72), subtitled "A Study of Provincial Life," is her masterpiece — a vast, intricately structured novel set in a fictional Midlands town that explores politics, religion, science, marriage, idealism, and disillusionment with unmatched psychological insight. Daniel Deronda (1876) was her last novel. George Eliot died in 1880, seven months after marrying John Walter Cross. The audiobook editions of Eliot's novels are richly rewarding listening experiences — her dense, compassionate, intellectually demanding prose benefits from the sustained attention that audiobooks encourage. Her books and audiobooks are essential — the work of one of the greatest minds ever to write fiction.