George Eliot

1819–1880 · English novelist (pen name of Mary Ann Evans)

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), one of the leading English novelists of the Victorian era. Her masterpiece, Middlemarch (1871–72), is a panoramic study of provincial life whose closing meditation on quiet, unrecorded goodness is among the most quoted passages in English fiction. She wrote under a male name to be taken seriously and to distance her fiction from her unconventional private life.

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“For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”

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