

Many of her best-known novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), center on the interior and private emotional lives of people in provincial communities. She became the assistant editor of The Westminster Review, a left-wing journal, in 1951, which was an uncommon role for a woman.

After the age of sixteen, Evans continued her education independently, teaching herself from the wealth of books in the library of the estate where her father worked. Worried that their daughter would have little success finding a husband, Mary Evans’s parents provided her with an education, which was uncommon for young girls to receive. Like Maggie in The Mill on The Floss, Evans didn’t meet the conventional beauty standards of her day. Mary Anne Evans (pen name George Eliot) was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, to Robert and Christiana Evans.
