George Eliot

Karl shows how Eliot's break from respectable womanhood by running off with the married George Henry Lewes allowed her to begin her career as the major British novelist of the nineteenth century. Often, she drew upon her own life to create her plots and characters. She set several of her masterworks - Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Felix Holt, and Middlemarch - in the England of the past and her youth to show a complex portrait of society and character - one that captures us today with its moral dilemmas and psychological shrewdness.