George Eliot

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

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, one of the major English novelists of the nineteenth century. Scenes of Clerical Life — three linked stories about Anglican clergy in the English Midlands — was her first published fiction, appearing in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1857 under a name chosen to keep her identity hidden. The novels that made her reputation, among them Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, followed over the next two decades.

Traced to source

3 quotes we’ve traced to George Eliot

“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”

Verified

“The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone”

Verified

“It is never too late to be what you might have been”

Disputed

Not actually George Eliot

Often misattributed to George Eliot

Famous lines widely pinned on George Eliot that we’ve traced to someone else.

“It is never too late to be what you might have been”

actually Adelaide Anne Procter (probable inspiration)

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