George Eliot

Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career; and, the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past.

A gentle linen weaver in a small English town is wrongly accused of a theft goes into seclusion and finds redemption in his unselfish love for an abandoned child who mysteriously appears at his cottage.

A young carpenter living in the fiction community of Hayslope, Adam Bede falls desperately in love with a local beauty, Hetty Sorrel. When two newcomers arrive in town—a gallant young captain and Hetty's gentle cousin Dinah—the affections and desires of these young people are pitted against the pressures of their social situations.

Adam Bede is the first novel written by author George Eliot and was met with critical acclaim upon

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George Eliot's The Lifted Veil was first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1859 and has now become one of the author's most widely read and critically discussed stories. Told from the point of view of a young, egocentric, and morbid clairvoyant man, Latimer, it is a dark fantasy portrait of an artist whose visionary powers merely blight his life. The story reflected the scientific interest of the time in the physiology of the brain, mesmerism,...

In this essay, originally published anonymously in The Westminster Review (1856), George Eliot examines the state of women's fiction in her time. She lamentingly argues that absurd and banal novels, written by well-to-do women of her time, do great disservice for the overall appreciation of women's intellectual capacities within society. Eliot divides 'silly novels by lady novelists' into several distinct categories: the mind-and-millinery species,...

The tragic tale of Maggie Tulliver, the miller's daughter, who defies her embittered brother in standing by the man she loves - shocking the stifling society in which she lives - in an attempt to pursue her blighted dreams.

Daniel Deronda, a sensitive young Englishman of indistinct parentage, is forced to choose between the love of two very different women.