George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, an English novelist who wrote deeply thoughtful books like Middlemarch about ordinary people's lives. She chose to publish under a man's name so her serious novels would be taken seriously in a time when many people didn't respect women writers. She is now considered one of the greatest novelists in the English language, and Virginia Woolf famously called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."