Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? [...] The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture.

Female authors were publiGeorge Eliotd under their own names during Eliot's life but George Eliot wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. 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.