George Eliot rose to fame by way of infamy; she was everything a nineteenth-century woman was not supposed to be -- ambitious, sensual, and mercenary. Her path to literary success was lit by her own private passions. Rejecting the narrow expectations of her friends and family in the provincial county of Warwickshire, their call to Calvinism and commitment to lifelong marriage, the woman born Mary Ann Evans left for London in 1849, at the age of thirty, and returned only in her fiction. - Jacket flap.