George Eliot (1819-80)

English poet and novelist, born in rural Warwickshire. ‘George Eliot’ was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, and she was one of the leading English novelists of the 19th century. Her novels, including Silas Marner (1861) and Middlemarch (1871-2), are celebrated for the writer’s “traditional moral sensibility” (F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition, 1948). In 1867 she travelled in Spain, and her dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy appeared in the next year. Among other collections of poems are included Agatha (1869) and Armgart (1871). (M. Y.)