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 Hanway Mary Ann Hanway Mary Ann Hanway was an eighteenth-century travel writer and novelist. She has been proposed as the anonymous author of "Journey to the Highlands of Scotland" (1777). Hanway was also the author of "Christabelle, the Maid of Rouen" (1814), in which a woman's father loses their family's fortune, and she joins a nunnery, "Ellinor" (1798), and "Andrew Stuart" (1800). Hanway did not always find the process of writing easy, declaring in the preface to her 1809 novel "Falconbridge Abbey", that "four years it has been procrastinated, from a series of ill health, having laid dormant in my desk