George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), an English novelist who came to fiction after years as a translator and editor of the Westminster Review. She took a male pseudonym to be read seriously and to keep her private life, lived openly with a married man, at arm's length from her work. Her novels, above all Middlemarch, are known for their psychological realism and for treating provincial lives with the seriousness usually reserved for grander subjects.