Eliot's Middlemarch

George Eliot's 1872 work, Middlemarch, has been described as the greatest novel in the English language by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. -Wikipedia.com