“To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.”

English novelist, poet, journalist, and translator, Victorian era

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, an English novelist, poet, journalist, and translator of the Victorian era. She was one of the leading writers of her time. She wrote seven novels, including Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, the Radical, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. Her fiction is known for realism, psychological depth, a strong sense of place, and close attention to the countryside.