Vast and crowded, rich in irony and suspense, Middlemarch is richer still in character, with two of the era's most enduring characters, Dorothea Brooke, trapped in a loveless marriage, and Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor. George Eliot was the nom de plume of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880). She began her literary career as a translator and later was editor of the Westminster Review. In 1857 she published Scenes of Clerical Life, the first of eight novels she would publish under the name George Eliot.