1819–1880 · English novelist, poet, journalist & translator
Mary Ann Evans wrote under the pen name George Eliot to be taken seriously in a literary world that dismissed women’s fiction as frivolous. Her novels, especially Middlemarch (1871–72), are ranked among the greatest in English literature for their psychological depth and moral seriousness — which is precisely why inspirational-sounding lines are so often pinned on her, whether she wrote them or not.