George Eliot was an English Victorian novelist, poet, journalist, translator, editor, essayist, and philosopher, born on 22 November 1819 in Nuneaton.

She worked across a wide range of forms and disciplines, producing fiction, poetry, journalism, translation, essays, and editing work throughout her career. She received an education at Bedford College and Royal Holloway, University of London. She died in London on 22 December 1880.

Her fiction appeared across roughly two decades. Adam Bede came out in 1859, followed closely by The Mill on the Floss in 1860 and Silas Marner in 1861. Romola ran between 1862 and 1863, and then, after a gap of several years, Middlemarch was published between 1871 and 1872. Daniel Deronda followed in 1876. These six novels represent the core of her output in long-form fiction.

Throughout her career, Eliot worked within the tradition of literary realism, a movement her fiction is closely associated with. That association with realism, alongside her work as a poet, journalist, translator, editor, essayist, and philosopher, marks the breadth of her engagement with nineteenth-century English intellectual and literary life. Her final novel, Daniel Deronda, appeared in 1876, four years before her death in London.