It was under the male pseudonym George Eliot that Mary Anne Evans (November 22, 1819 – December 22, 1880) became one of the most revered voices in literary history – a choice dictated as much by the biases of the Victorian era, in which women writers tended not to be taken seriously for anything beyond romance novels, as it was by Evans’s desire to keep the turbulence of her private life out of the public eye. Evans received little formal education after the age of sixteen, but thanks t...
