On October 3, 1836, Mary Ann Evans was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, the daughter of a Midlands estate manager whose work gave her unusual access to a wide range of English social classes. She would go on to write Middlemarch, which has been called the greatest novel in the English language. She published it under the name George Eliot.

Evans was extraordinarily educated by the standards available to women in early Victorian England: she studied languages, classics, and philosophy, and translated David Friedrich Strauss's The Life of Jesus from German at twenty-six — a project that took two years and required mastery of advanced theological scholarship. She worked as assistant editor of the Westminster Review in London, a position of genuine intellectual authority, under the auspices of the nominal male editor. The actual editorial decisions were hers.

She began writing fiction in her late thirties, choosing the male pseudonym George Eliot to ensure her work was taken seriously as literature rather than dismissed as "women's fiction." She maintained the pseudonym for her entire writing career even after it was an open secret that George Eliot was a woman. Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda were published between 1859 and 1876 under the name.

She lived with the philosopher George Henry Lewes from 1854 until his death in 1878 — they could not marry because he was legally unable to divorce his first wife. The relationship was a social scandal that cut her off from her family and much of respectable Victorian society for years.

She died in 1880, seven months after marrying the banker John Walter Cross, who was twenty years her junior.