Pen name of Mary Ann Evans, the English novelist whose Middlemarch (1871–72) is by common consent the greatest novel in the English language and whose work represents the high point of the 19th-century realist novel as an instrument of moral and psychological inquiry. Evans was a formidable intellectual before she was a novelist: translator of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity (1854) and Strauss's Life of Jesus (1846), assistant editor of the Westminster Review, partner (unmarried, which scandalized) of the polymath G. H. Lewes.
She came to fiction late, in her late thirties, and under a male pseudonym. Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Silas Marner (1861) established her; Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, is the summation. The novel follows four or five interwoven marriages and vocations in a Midlands town on the eve of the 1832 Reform Act, and in doing so produces perhaps the richest single portrait of the moral texture of an ordinary community ever put into English prose. Dorothea Brooke's frustrated idealism, Tertius Lydgate's ruin by a bad marriage and small compromises, Casaubon's fossilized self-regard, Bulstrode's secret — each is realized with an ethical attention that makes most subsequent English novels look thin by comparison.
Daniel Deronda (1876) — with its Jewish plot that influenced early Zionism and its Gwendolen Harleth, the most fully interior heroine in Victorian fiction — was her last novel. Her rejection of Christian metaphysics for what she called a "religion of humanity" (the Feuerbachian and Comtean inheritance) was the moral ground beneath the fiction: duty, sympathy, and consequence had to be grounded in human life because there was nowhere else left to ground them.