George Eliot

Abstract

Marian Evans published her work under the name of George Eliot because, even in the 1850s, there was still some hostility to women novelists.¹ G. H. Lewes wrote, after the great success of Adam Bede, ‘It is quite clear that people would have sniffed at it if they had known the writer to be a woman but they can’t now unsay their admiration.’² She lived to be acclaimed as the greatest woman of modern times. ‘The female Shakespeare’, ‘She thinks just like a man’,³ her admirers said. When she died she was called ‘a woman whose achievements were without parallel in the previous history of womankind’.⁴