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 Radcliffe (sic) New Novelist’s Pocket Magazine appeared in 1802, a collection of fictions compiled “by Mrs Mary Anne Radclife, of Wimbledon in Surrey.” Certainly Radcliffe was living in Surrey around this time. Mary Ann Radcliffe states in her memoirs that it was her intention to publish all of her books anonymously however she was coerced by her publisher into publishing under her name to benefit by the similarities of her name with that of the more famous Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe. Her later published book, "The Memoirs of Mrs. Mary Ann Radcliffe; in Familiar Letters to her Female Friend" in 1810,