She published her major works during Lewes’s lifetime, including Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), Adam Bede (1859), Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876). Her personal life received attention and gossip due to her relationship with a married man named George Henry Lewes with whom she lived for more than twenty years. She began publishing essays, writing under the pen name George Eliot in order to escape the stereotype of her day that women wrote romances. In London, she started working as an editorial assistant for The Westminster Review. She decided to move to London and begin a career as a writer. When Mary Anne moved to Coventry at age twenty-one, she befriended Charles Bray at whose home she was exposed to a circle of intellectuals and freethinkers. Her writing was also impacted by the diverse lives and lifestyles she observed on the Arbury Estate, from those of the wealthy landowners to those of the poorer workers farming the land. After she finished school at age sixteen, she continued learning by reading: she had access to the library at Arbury Hall, and her knowledge of Classical literature deeply affected her later writing. Her father was the estate’s land agent, received a good education during her youth.

Mary Anne Evans grew up on Arbury Estate in Warwickshire, England, where she grew up on one of the estate’s farms.

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