George Eliot

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), who used it to be read seriously and to keep her unmarried life with George Henry Lewes out of the reviews. Middlemarch, subtitled “A Study of Provincial Life”, follows several people whose large ambitions are ground down into ordinary usefulness, and refuses to treat that as failure. Its closing argument — that the world’s improvement rests largely on unhistoric acts by people nobody remembers — is the source of her most quoted lines. Quotes here are given with chapter numbers and checked against the text.