English literature Victorian England. George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), was a major novelist of the mid-Victorian period. Her works, especially "Middlemarch" (1871–72), are important examples of literary realism, and are admired for their combination of high Victorian literary detail, with an intellectual breadth that removes them from the narrow geographic confines they often depict. George Meredith (1828–1909) is best remembered for his novels "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel" (1859), and "The Egoist" (1879). "His reputation stood very high well into" the 20th-century but then seriously declined. An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation
Mary Ann Tocker Mary Ann lived to see how the Reform Act 1832 did away with the corrupt electoral practices of the rotten boroughs. Then twenty five years after her trial, the Libel Act 1843 changed the law on Libel to allow a defendant to argue that what had been said was true and in the public interest just as Mary Ann had argued. Mary Ann Tocker's trial was brought to the attention of the first women lawyers in America in 1958. Writing in the "Women Lawyers Journal", Harry J. Marks gives his account of the trial and recommends to his readers that