Queen Victoria loved her novels enough to commission paintings of scenes from them, yet the woman who wrote them was barred from respectable drawing rooms across England. Mary Ann Evans was born in 1819 in Warwickshire, where her father managed the Arbury Hall estate. He looked at a daughter he judged unlikely to attract a husband and made a pragmatic calculation: if marriage would not provide for her, education might. So she got boarding schools, classical languages, philosophy, and the run of a great house's library. She also got an education nobody planned, riding along on her father's managerial rounds and watching the gap between the landowners inside the manor and the laborers on the land. That double vision became the foundation of her realism.

Near Coventry she fell in with the free-thinking circle around the manufacturer Charles Br ...