She first read George Eliot’s great English novel Middlemarch when she was 17 and admits that she has been obsessed by it through her life. George Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans, was arguably one of the greatest English novelists of the 19th century, along with Charles Dickens and, living an unconventional life with her married (but not to her) literary critic partner George Henry Lewes, she made a stellar career writing fiction about her English compatriots. Middlemarch, completed in 1871-1872 and published serially, is her crowning achievement, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. As Virginia Woolfe noted, it was one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. It does not end in a happy wedding, as does Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and other romantic novels with feminine heroines of that century.