If you were reading or writing novels in the second half of the 19th-century, you were either loving or competing with George Eliot.

This lady (her real name is Mary Anne Evans; George Eliot is her pen name) helped define realism, a movement that was all about holding a mirror up to life and recording everything. It was a rising genre in the 19th century, both in Britain and abroad. But Eliot's narrator doesn't stop at just recording everything she can see from the outside. She also has a tricky way of delving into how characters' minds work and analyzing the best and worst parts of them. Even when we see the most shameful and unlikable parts of a character, Eliot's still not done: now she wants us to imagine sympathizing with them—even with the characters we love to hate.

Adam Bede 

Although she was competing with some big names—like Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, to name only two—Eliot is really in her own class. Her views on art and philosophy get all tangled up with her plots. Sometimes when you think you're just reading about a girl with a crush, you realize you're actually reading philosophy.

That's exactly what happens in Adam Bede, Eliot's first novel. The novel takes a turn midway through and things start to get all meta: Eliot's narrator starts talking about how she writes and why. Imagine the voice-over in Grey's Anatomy suddenly breaking into an episode and explaining why things are going down the way they are. Like the (spoiler alert!) plane crash of a season finale—"You might be wondering why we decided to stage a plane crash and kill someone off so quickly: well, let us explain!"

Middlemarch 

Lots of Victorian novels end with a marriage, and we get to assume that everything continues happily ever after. Not so with George Eliot's marriage plots: in Middlemarch the point isn't getting married, but being married. It's as if she were saying, yes, it's all well and good to write about growing up—growing up is tough. But what happens when you're already grown up? What if you're still trying to figure things out? Virginia Woolf realized this years later, when she called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" (source). Zing.

Chew on This:

Can a novel make us more sympathetic? What about those certain people that we just can't feel sorry for? (Come on, Rosamond so knew better!) Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch, tackles these questions head on.

Eliot's The Mill on the Floss takes inspiration from Eliot's own life, and it's got a lot to say about how to grow up, and how to be both an individual and a member of a group, whether it's family or society. What's Eliot's take? Could you say that this novel is philosophy and fiction?