George Eliot is known primarily for her novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862-1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876), as well as for her poetry and essays.

George Eliot’s most significant achievement is her very place in the literary canon. Despite her male pseudonym, she became a respected female writer in her own day, admired by her peers. Her novels are part of the flowering of serious writing done by women in the nineteenth century. She achieved this respect in spite of her unconventional lifestyle, having broken with her church, taken up decidedly liberal causes such as reform and women’s rights, and lived openly with a married man. Such behavior was the downfall of other Victorian women, but Eliot was able to succeed and to be treated with the respect an author of her talents deserved. Eliot’s works are serious, contemplative, and thoughtful, and they brought the novel to a new height, combining such philosophical seriousness with artistic handling of her subjects. Eliot and her peers were in large part responsible for the so-called rise of the novel in the mid-nineteenth century.

Three of George Eliot’s early stories, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story,” and “Janet’s Repentance,” originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine, were collected as Scenes of Clerical Life in 1858. She wrote two other stories, “The Lifted Veil,” also published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1859, and “Brother Jacob,” published in the Cornhill Magazine in 1864. The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, a miscellany of sketches and essays, was published in 1879. Eliot’s poetry does not achieve the high quality of her prose; the most notable examples are The Spanish Gypsy (1868), a verse drama, and The Legend of Jubal, and Other Poems (1874). Eliot wrote more than seventy periodical essays and reviews; a comprehensive collection of these is found in Essays of George Eliot (1963), edited by Thomas Pinney. Eliot also translated David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1846) and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums as The Essence of Christianity (1854). Her translation of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethica (1677; Ethics, 1870) has never been published.

George Eliot’s pivotal position in the history of the novel is attested to by some of the most distinguished English novelists. Reviewing Middlemarch in 1873, Henry James concluded, “It sets a limit, we think, to the development of the old-fashioned English novel.” Middlemarch does, indeed, take what James calls the panoramic novel—“vast, swarming, deep-colored, crowded with episodes, with vivid images, with lurking master-strokes, with brilliant passages of expression,” seeking to “reproduce the total sum of life in an English village”—to an unsurpassed level of achievement. Eliot was also an innovator. In the words of D. H. Lawrence, “It all started with George Eliot; it was she who put the action on the inside,” thus giving impetus to the rise of the psychological novel, where the most significant actions derive from the motives of the characters rather than from external events. Eliot’s work is, then, both the culmination of the panoramic Victorian novel as practiced by Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray and the beginning of the modern psychological novel as practiced by James, Lawrence, and many others.

More than anyone else, Eliot was responsible for making the novel, a genre that had traditionally been read primarily for entertainment, into a vehicle for the serious expression of ideas. Few novelists can equal Eliot’s depth of intellect or breadth of learning. Deeply involved in the religious and philosophical ferment of her time, Eliot was...