Influenced by the German school of thought called Higher Criticism, she came in her twenties to regard sacred texts as historical documents rather than divinely revealed truth. She learned French and German and was adept at playing the piano.

In her schooling at Coventry, Evans lost her provincial accent and learned to speak English perfectly in a well-modulated voice. Her excellent education was first shaped by Christian teachings and then by her conversion to Evangelicalism. George Eliot was the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans (later Marian Evans and in the last year of her life Marian Cross), who was born on November 22, 1819, in Arbury, Warwickshire, the daughter of Robert Evans, an estate manager. Some of the epigraphs are attributed to other writers and were taken from a wide range of sources, while the unsigned ones were written by the author herself. Each chapter begins with an epigram (a concise, often satirical poem or witty expression) that is related to the text, sometimes ironically. This novel reflects that exposure and demonstrates the breadth of her reading in English and other languages. In her editorial work at the Westminster Review and through George Henry Lewes and their London circle of intellectuals, Eliot was exposed to the leading scientific, medical, and psychological thinking of her day. By the time she was writing this novel, Eliot was already a well-established and highly respected author.

Subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, George Eliot's novel Middlemarch, published in eight books or installments between 18, is also a study in human nature a portrait of several memorable characters, the first of whom is Dorothea Brooke and a historical reflection from the vantage point of the early 1870s on the three years culminating in the passage of the first Reform Bill in 1832.

Middlemarch author