Mary Anne (alternatively Mary Ann or Marian) Evans (November 22,1819 - December 22, 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight. 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. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years. In the spring of 1880 Eliot courted controversy once more by marrying a man twenty years younger than herself and changing her name to Mary Anne Cross. John Cross jumped or fell from their hotel balcony into the Grand Canal during their honeymoon, but he survived and they returned to England. Eliot fell ill with a throat infection. This, coupled with the kidney disease she had been afflicted with for the previous few years, led to her death in December at the age of 61.