George Eliot was one of the best writers of the 19th century, but By George, this was no man. Instead, George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, a skilled female novelist who wanted to make sure her work was taken seriously by using a masculine pen name. The practice was widely used in Europe in the 19th century, including by the Bronte sisters. 

Regardless of her name, her work became well known in its time for realism and its psychological insight, including novels like 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. Her work also infused religion and politics, and Victorian Era readers were fond of her books' depictions of society. 

Adam Bede, Eliot's first novel, tells a tale of love between characters in a rural community. The interwoven plot has been termed by some as a "love rectangle."