George Eliot was born in Nuneaton on 22nd November 1819. Baptized Mary Anne Evans, Eliot chose to write using a male pen name. She was sent away to school but returned when her mother died in 1836.She later moved to Coventry with her father.After her father's death she became the Assistant Editor of the Westminster Review in 1851. She also met George Henry Lewes this year and they became partners for the rest of his life. Lewes was already married, although he and his wife both considered their relationship to be an open one, but he and Eliot set up home together, much to the dismay of polite London society.In 1857 Eliot published Amos Barton in Blackwood's Magazine and in 1859 her novel Adam Bede was published to great acclaim.Her first attempt to write Middlemarch, her most famous novel, ended in failure. Abandoning it, she began a short novella entitled Miss Brooke which was eventually integrated into the final version of Middlemarch. The novel was published serially in eight parts in 1871. Lewes died in 1878 and Eliot married again in 1880. Her husband, John Walter Cross was an American who was twenty years her junior. George Eliot died on 22nd December 1880 at 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea and is buried in Highgate Cemetery next to Lewes.Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time and The Fraud; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; four collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free, Intimations and Dead and Alive; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.

Perhaps the greatest novel of them all... An enormous canvas and a vast and poignant range of character...a marvellous portrait of nineteenth-century provincial life