George Eliot

Mary Anne Evans, better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an intelligent and well-educated child. Eliot lived at home until age 30, after which she moved to London and worked as an editor of the Westminster Review. It was around this time that she met the married philosopher and critic George Lewes, with whom she would have an infamous 20-year affair. Eliot began writing novels in the late 1850s, using a male pen name so people would take her seriously. Her 1872 novel, Middlemarch, has been described as one of the greatest novels ever written. Eliot died in 1880 at age 61 of kidney problems and a throat infection.