George Eliot was the pen name used by the English novelist Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), one of the most important writers of European fiction. Her masterpiece, Middlemarch, is not only a major social document but also one of the greatest novels in the history of fiction.

Mary Ann Evans was born in Warwickshire, the daughter of an estate agent or manager. Her education was a conventional one, dominated by Christian teachings and touched by the enthusiasm generated by the Evangelical movement of church reform. In her 20s she came into contact with a circle of freethinkers and underwent a radical transformation of her beliefs. Influenced by the so-called Higher Criticism--a largely German school of biblical scholarship that attempted to treat sacred writings as human and historical documents--she devoted herself to translating its findings for the English public. She published her translation of David Strauss's Life of Jesus in...