Eliot, George (Mary Ann, later Marian, Evans) (1819-80), translator, novelist. Born Warwickshire, youngest surviving child of estate agent Robert Evans, largely self-taught, first publishing translations from German into English of works connected to Christianity. In 1857 her first story, also on a religious theme, 'The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton', appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, expanded by two stories and published as Scenes of Clerical Life. A succession of critically-acclaimed, popularly-received novels followed, establishing her as one of Britain's leading novelists: Adam Bede (1859); The Mill on the Floss (1860); Silas Marner (1861); Romola (1862-3); Felix Holt (1866); Middlemarch (1871-2); and Daniel Deronda (1874-6).
Ruskin did not completely reciprocate Eliot's admiration. He particularly denounced The Mill on the Floss as an insignificant, diseased work containing characters who are 'simply the sweepings out of a Pentonville omnibus' ( Works, 34.377).