George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Anne Evans, was a 19th century English novelist and journalist. Her most famous work is the novel Middlemarch, which follows the lives and romances of several residents of the small town of Middlemarch. The novel focuses on three major love stories: Dorothea Brooke marries the elderly scholar Edward Casaubon hoping to help with his intellectual work but finds him lacking passion; Lydgate marries Rosamond Vincy based on her beauty but they are unhappy as he is devoted to his medical career; and Mary Garth helps save Fred Vincy from unhappily entering the clergy by refusing to marry him if he chooses that path. The characters and their intertwining personal