George Eliot is the penname of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880, an English novelist, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight. She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Her 1872 work Middlemarch has been described by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.