She was also the author of the classics Daniel Deronda, The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, and Silas Marner. George Eliot was the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, born in 1819 in Warwickshire, England, a novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. George Eliot, in a sketch by Samuel Lawrence, 1857.

“Miss Brooke,” the novel begins, “had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.” I bought a copy soon after, and opening to the first page, was not disappointed. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. Her full nature, like that river of which Alexander broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible.

In the final scene, we see the novel’s central character, Dorothea Brooke, climb the stairs in a darkened house, embroidered shawl wrapped close, as Dench narrates the novel’s closing lines: I’d seen none of the episodes so far, and knew nothing about the book or its author, but the final lines of the novel, narrated in voice-over by the inimitable Judi Dench, stopped me in my tracks. The year after the BBC’s series based on the book appeared, it came to public television in the States, and one evening, I caught the final scene. The first thing I knew about Middlemarch, George Eliot’s classic novel, was the ending.

Middle march author