Penguin Random House, author portrait placeholder image

George Eliot

MARY ANN EVANS was born on November 22, 1819, at Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, England. After her father’s death she settled in London and from 1851 to 1854 she served as a writer and editor of the Westminster Review, the organ of the Radical party. In London she met she met George Henry Lewes, a journalist and advanced thinker. Lewes was separated from his wife, who had had two sons by another man, but had been unable to obtain a divorce. In a step daring for Victorian times, Mary Ann Evans began living openly with Lewes in 1854, in a union they both considered as sacred as a legal marriage and one that lasted until his death in 1878.

With Lewes’s encouragement, Mary Ann Evans wrote her first fictional work, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” for Blackwood’s Magazine in 1857; it was followed by two more stories published under the pseudonym George Elliot—“George” because it was Lewes’s name and “Eliot” because, she said, it was “a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.” At the age of thirty-nine she used her memories of Warwickshire to write her first long novel, Adam Bede (1859), a book that established her as the foremost woman novelist in her day. Then came The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Romola (1863). Her masterpiece and one of the greatest English novels, Middlemarch, was published in 1871–72. Her last work was Daniel Deronda (1876). Before her death in 1880, she had been recognized by her contemporaries as the greatest living writer of English fiction.
Middlemarch
Middlemarch
Middlemarch
Adam Bede
Political Leadership
Silas Marner
Adam Bede
Romola
The Mill on the Floss
Silas Marner
Middlemarch
Daniel Deronda
Silas Marner
Middlemarch
Scenes of Clerical Life
Romola
Daniel Deronda
Felix Holt, the Radical
The Mill on the Floss
Adam Bede
Middlemarch
Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings

Books

Middlemarch
Middlemarch
Middlemarch
Adam Bede
Political Leadership
Silas Marner
Adam Bede
Romola
The Mill on the Floss
Silas Marner
Middlemarch
Daniel Deronda
Silas Marner
Middlemarch
Scenes of Clerical Life
Romola
Daniel Deronda
Felix Holt, the Radical
The Mill on the Floss
Adam Bede
Middlemarch
Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings

Books for Women’s History Month

In honor of Women’s History Month in March, we are sharing books by women who have shaped history and have fought for their communities. Our list includes books about women who fought for racial justice, abortion rights, disability justice, equality in the workplace, and more, with insight on their remarkable lives that inspired others to

Read more