Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life »

George Eliot was the nom de plume of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880). She began her literary career as a translator and later was editor of the Westminster Review. In 1857 she published Scenes of Clerical Life, the first of eight novels she would publish under the name George Eliot.

Rosemary Ashton teaches at University College London.

Middlemarch is George Eliot's masterpiece, a Victorian novel on the grandest scale. Originally published in serial form in Blackwood's Magazine in 1871-1872, it was at once a critical and popular success.