Mary Anne
(alternatively Mary Ann or Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880),
better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist
and 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), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most
of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological
insight.
"A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you."
by Alice Munro
