Which 19th-century British novelist wrote 'Middlemarch'?

The 19th-century British novelist who wrote Middlemarch was George Eliot.

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, an English novelist whose work examined morality, society, religion, education, and the restricted choices available to women. Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life was published in eight instalments between 1871 and 1872. It is set in a fictional English Midlands town between 1829 and 1832, during a period of political and social change.

Rather than following only one hero, the novel interweaves the lives of several residents, including Dorothea Brooke, Tertius Lydgate, and Rosamond Vincy. Their stories explore ambition, marriage, medical reform, money, idealism, and the consequences of misunderstanding. This broad social design is one reason the book is often praised as a landmark of realist fiction.

A frequent source of confusion is Eliot’s name. George Eliot was a woman, and she used a male pen name partly to ensure that her serious fiction would be judged on its merits in a literary culture often dismissive of women novelists. Middlemarch is not by Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, or Elizabeth Gaskell, though all three were prominent Victorian writers.