George Eliot

(1819—1880)

United Kingdom

Biography

Mary Anne Evans, better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist. She was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Her novels, largely set in provincial England, are well known for their realism and psychological insight. She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure that her works were taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names, but Eliot wanted to ensure that she was not seen as merely a writer of romances. An additional factor may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes.

ePub Books Available by George Eliot

8 Titles Online

Adam Bede [en] (1859)

The seemingly peaceful country village of Hayslope is the setting for this ambitious first novel by one of the nineteenth century's great novelists. With sympathy, wit, and unflinching realism, Adam Bede tells a story that would have been familiar to Eliot's first readers: the seduction of a...

Genres: Historical Fiction, Romance

Brother Jacob [en] (1921)

Brother Jacob is Eliot's literary homage to Thackeray, a satirical modern fable that draws telling parallels between eating and reading. Revealing Eliot's deep engagement with the question of whether there are 'necessary truths' independent of our perception of them and the boundaries of art and...

Genres: Satire, Short Stories

Daniel Deronda [en] (1876)

George Eliot’s final novel and her most ambitious work, Daniel Deronda contrasts the moral laxity of the British aristocracy with the dedicated fervor of Jewish nationalists. Crushed by a loveless marriage to the cruel and arrogant Grandcourt, Gwendolen Harleth seeks salvation in the deeply...

Genres: Fiction, Satire

How Lisa Loved the King Book Cover Image

How Lisa Loved the King [en] (1884)

Written between the inception of Middlemarch and the completion, seven years later, of Daniel Deronda this book is a charming treatment of a subject taken from Boccaccio; a poem interesting by virtue of its graceful form.

Genre: Poetry

Middlemarch [en] (1874)

Often called the greatest nineteenth-century British novelist, George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) created in Middlemarch a vast panorama of life in a provincial Midlands town. At the story’s center stands the intellectual and idealistic Dorothea Brooke—a character who in many ways...

Genre: Fiction

The Mill on the Floss [en] (1860)

This novel's unsentimental evocation of childhood in the English countryside stands as an enduring triumph; but equally memorable are its portrayal of a narrow, tradition-bound society, its striking, superbly drawn heroine, Maggie Tulliver, and its dramatic unfolding of tragic human destiny.

Genre: Fiction

Romola [en] (1863)

Set in late fifteenth-century Italy, in the Renaissance Florence of Machiavelli and the Medicis, Romola is the most exotic and adventurous of George Eliot's novels. It charts the career and martyrdom of the charismatic religious leader Savonarola, who rebelled against the humanistspirit of the...

Genre: Historical Fiction

Silas Marner [en] (1861)

Accused of a crime he didn't commit and unjustly forced from his home town, Silas lives a reclusive and godless life, finding love and companionship only in material objects. It will take the theft of his gold and the discovery of an abandoned infant to remind him of the importance of human...

Genre: Drama