George Eliot — born Mary Ann Evans — lived openly with a married man for over two decades in an era when such arrangements meant complete social exile. She was shunned by her own family, excluded from polite society, and forced to publish under a male pseudonym. From that ostracism, she wrote Middlemarch, which Virginia Woolf called “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” and which is now regularly voted the greatest novel in the English language.

This episode traces Eliot from her provincial Warwickshire childhood through her intellectual awakening, the scandalous relationship with George Henry Lewes, and the novels that transformed her from pariah to the most respected writer in Victorian England.

• Mary Ann Evans’s evangelical childhood and the intellectual crisis that ended her faith
• The relationship with George Henry Lewes and the social exile it cost her
• The male pseudonym, the early novels, and the path to Middlemarch
• Why Middlemarch is considered the greatest English novel and how ostracism made it possible