The notorious George Eliot
Two centuries after she was born, George Eliot’s books are still read, studied, talked about. Alongside Jane Austen, she’s England’s most famous woman novelist, but she is not as she seems. Her best known book is , a rich tale of provincial England in the early 1800s, in which a young woman dreams of doing great things. Virginia Woolf described it as the first English novel written for grown-ups. Along with her novels, various pictures of her survive, many suggesting she was as plain as she thought herself to be, with a long nose and large chin. But what
