Mary Ann Evans was born on Nov. 22, 1819, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, to Robert Evans and Christiana Pearson. She was educated at Nuneaton and Coventry (1841-). Her first publication was a poem in the Christian Observer (Jan. 1840). After leaving the Church, she moved to London in 1849 and edited The Westminster from 1851 to 1853. From 1854 to his death in 1878, she lived with George Henry Lewes, editor of the Leader, a married man. Under her pen name, George Eliot, beginning in 1857, she published the novels for which she is famous: Scenes from Clerical Life (1857), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), Felix Holt (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876). Her two books of verse are The Spanish Gipsy (1868) and The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1874). After Lewes' death, she married Johnnie Cross on May 6, 1880. Her death followed quickly, on Dec. 22.

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