George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans lost her Evangelical faith in her twenties, translating Strauss and Feuerbach's skeptical theology into English and editing the radical Westminster Review in a London literary world normally closed to women. In 1854 she began an openly unmarried life with the critic George Henry Lewes, already married to someone else: a scandal that cost her family's speaking terms but gave her, she said, the settled happiness to finally write fiction.

She didn't publish a novel until thirty-seven, under a male pseudonym chosen partly to escape assumptions about 'women's writing.' Middlemarch (1871–72), her panoramic study of a provincial town, is generally read as the summit of the form in English. Lewes died in 1878; she married a much younger friend, John Cross, in 1880 and died within months.