Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot, was born in 1819 in Warwickshire England. As a child, the young Evans was a voracious reader and demonstrated her intellectual curiosity very early. Her father, the manager of an estate, invested in a formal education for his daughter after seeing the extent of her potential. Evans was raised religious, but she began to question that faith as a young woman. She also spent a good deal of time in the Swiss countryside, which no doubt lent inspiration to the intricate, naturalistic landscapes of her novels.  
In 1850, Evans moved to London with the intent of being a writer. She succeeded for some time as the assistant editor of the Westminster Review. Evans wrote many pieces of social commentary, drawing from her own personal experiences, to largely favorable reception. She also penned many essays focusing on topics such as organized religion, class inequalities, and political conflicts. Though she was applauded for her non-fiction, the novel was Evan’s first love. She invented the author George Eliot, and existed as this writer for the duration of seven great novels.
Many very prominent female writers of this period would take male pen names, in part to obliviate the socially conservative sexism of the time. Many women writers published under their own names to be sure, but they encountered a risk in doing so: women’s writing, as such, was meant to concern itself with certain themes, domestic life and religion among them. While Evans did include these topics in her works, she flouted limitations and also tackled themes like politics, philosophy, art, history, and education.
George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte, just to name two of the great powerhouse female novelists of the Victorian period, were far more ambitious in the scope of their literary projects than the constraints of “women’s fiction” would allow. They took up masculine pen names in the hope that it would allow their writing to be taken more seriously, and also to shield their personal relations from any vitriol that they might have encountered in the press. We should be grateful to these pioneering writers. Thankfully, their work now lives on, and wherever in this wide world of ours you find a deep reader, you will find the books of Brontë and Eliot are deeply read.