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Links | Bibliography | Author List (1819–1880) George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, who scandalized Victorian society by her decision to live openly with a married man. Her novels, however, deal not with shocking subjects, but with rural scenes of the English Midlands, where she was born and brought up on a country estate managed by her father. This region remained the center of her emotional and creative life long after she had embarked on her literary career in London. For if Dickens was nineteenth-century Britain's greatest urban novelist, George Eliot was its greatest novelist of provincial life. Nostalgic but unsentimental, her books portray the rural England of her youth, a world that was already passing away even as she wrote of it. Like her favorite poet, Wordsworth, she believed in the lasting influence of childhood experiences. In her most autobiographical novel, The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot voiced her affection for the Midlands: "What grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene?" The well-remembered landscape of childhood is "the mother tongue of our imagination."
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