Mrs. Tulliver had lived thirteen years with her husband, yet she retained in all the freshness of her early married life a facility of saying things which drove him in the opposite direction to the one she desired. Some minds are wonderful for keeping their bloom in this way, as a patriarchal gold-fish apparently retains to the last its youthful illusion that it can swim in a straight line beyond the encircling glass.

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.