In George Eliot’s masterpiece of 19th century realism, characters are confronted with the limits of their individual capacities and visions.
A portrait of George Eliot at 30 by Alexandre-Louis-François d'Albert-Durade. Her masterpiece Middlemarch is often claimed to be the greatest novel in the English language.
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Henry James called her a ‘great, horse-faced bluestocking’. On the 200th anniversary of her birth, we celebrate George Eliot, a literary trailblazer with an endless appetite for ideas, living in a patriarchal time.
George Eliot (1819-1880), aged 30.
Alexandre-Louis-François d'Albert-Durade/National Portrait Gallery