Mary Ann Evans (1819 - 1880), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, 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), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72) and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.