Queen Victoria loved her novels enough to commission paintings of scenes from them, yet the woman who wrote them was barred from respectable drawing rooms across England. Mary Ann Evans was born in 1819 in Warwickshire, where her father managed the Arbury Hall estate. He looked at a daughter he judged unlikely to attract a husband and made a pragmatic calculation: if marriage would not provide for her, education might. So she got boarding schools, classical languages, philosophy, and the run of a great house’s library. She also got an education nobody planned, riding along on her father’s managerial rounds and watching the gap between the landowners inside the manor and the laborers on the land. That double vision became the foundation of her realism.

Near Coventry she fell in with the free-thinking circle around the manufacturer Charles Bray, shed her evangelical upbringing, and translated David Strauss’s German study arguing that the New Testament miracles were myth rather than eyewitness history. One earl called the book a pestilential thing vomited out of the jaws of hell. In London she became the uncredited engine of the Westminster Review, doing the editing, correspondence, and business while John Chapman held the title. Then she met George Henry Lewes, legally trapped in a marriage he could never dissolve because he had registered another man’s children as his own, which the courts read as condoning adultery. Victorian society tolerated hidden affairs. It did not tolerate what Evans did next, which was to call him her husband in public and refuse to pretend.

• Her brother Isaac cut her off for 25 years over the arrangement with Lewes, then sent warm congratulations when she finally married legally at 60, ignoring every novel she had written in between.
• Adam Bede was such a phenomenon that impostors traveled from town to town claiming to be George Eliot for money and lodging, and critics were convinced the author had to be a kindly country parson.
• Her brilliant heroines are routinely crushed by bad marriages and narrow expectations, not because she lacked nerve but because she refused to write a fairy-tale cure for a disease she was trying to diagnose.
• Westminster Abbey refused her a grave over her agnosticism and her years out of wedlock, so she was buried at Highgate in the section for dissenters and outcasts, beside Lewes and among the kind of people her novels had elevated to high art.