On June 30, 1857, George Eliot — born Mary Ann Evans — sent the manuscript of her first full novel, Adam Bede, to her publisher, still concealed under a male name she had adopted partly to ensure her work would be taken seriously.

Eliot had begun using the pseudonym in 1856, when her first fiction appeared in Blackwood's Magazine. The choice was tactical: women's novels in the Victorian era were associated with sentimentality and domestic concerns. A male name would earn a different critical register.

The strategy worked. Adam Bede was attributed by critics to a country clergyman. When her identity was revealed, the same critics reconsidered their reviews downward.

She had also lived with George Henry Lewes without marrying him — impossible under Victorian social rules because Lewes could not divorce his legal wife. This made her unmarriageable in polite society, financially dependent on her writing, and in some ways freer than any properly married Victorian woman: she controlled her own earnings, chose her own work, and lived on her own terms.

She wrote seven novels. Middlemarch, published 1871-72, is regularly cited as the greatest novel in the English language.

She died in 1880. She is buried in Highgate Cemetery. The grave was separated from Lewes's until 1989, when a memorial stone was added connecting them.