Reading List

Authors Like George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans translated German theology, edited the Westminster Review, wrote an essay called “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” taking apart the fiction women were expected to produce, and then published under a man's name so her own work would be read on its merits. She also lived openly for twenty-four years with George Henry Lewes, who could not divorce his wife, and was cut by respectable society for it while being read by all of it. Middlemarch (1871–72) is the result of all that: three hundred thousand words about a provincial English town in 1832, in which a clever young woman marries a dry scholar believing she is joining a great work, and an idealistic young doctor is worn down by small debts, small compromises and a wife who wants a better house. Virginia Woolf called it one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. The other six — Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Daniel Deronda — are worth the time too. The RSC opens a two-part stage Middlemarch at the Swan in Stratford on 1 October 2026. The ten below are chosen on moral seriousness and on what a narrator is for.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Victorian fiction · Seven novels · Middlemarch at the RSC · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

The closest match is Henry James, who read her closely and whose Isabel Archer is a direct descendant of Dorothea Brooke. Among her contemporaries, Charles Dickens is the opposite method, Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Trollope the nearest company, and Leo Tolstoy the only one working at the same scale and depth at once. Three later writers inherit the interiority. And one Frenchman wrote her subject with the narrator taken out.

Every book by George Eliot →

Where to start if you loved George Eliot

If you want the closest match, read Henry James.

The Portrait of a Lady. Dorothea with money and an ocean crossing.

If Middlemarch was too slow to start, read Elizabeth Gaskell.

North and South. The same intelligence at twice the speed.

If you want the same scale, read Leo Tolstoy.

Anna Karenina. Two marriages, one collapsing and one being built.

If you want the ancestor, read Jane Austen.

Emma. The provincial marriage plot, and the technique Eliot inherited.

If you want the argument against her, read Gustave Flaubert.

Madame Bovary. The same woman, with the narrator removed entirely.

If you want more novels of this kind

My shelf of the best fiction has the rest.

10 authors like George Eliot

01
Her closest reader · Closest match

Henry James

American-British · The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Ambassadors (1903)

James reviewed Eliot's novels as a young man, met her, and wrote The Portrait of a Lady a decade after Middlemarch: Isabel Archer, a clever American with money and ambition, chooses a cultivated man who turns out to be hollow and cruel, and the novel follows what she does once she understands. James spent his career on consciousness — long sentences tracking what a character half-notices about their own motives — and became a British subject in 1915.

The most direct inheritance in English fiction, and he admitted the debt. Isabel Archer is Dorothea Brooke with money and an ocean crossing: the same intelligent young woman, the same catastrophic marriage chosen for the wrong high-minded reasons, the same refusal by the novelist to rescue her. James is slower, more interior and far less interested in society at large. Read The Portrait of a Lady after Middlemarch and you can watch the influence working.

— Lisanne
02
The other half of the Victorian novel

Charles Dickens

British · Bleak House (1853), Great Expectations (1861)

Dickens published fifteen novels in monthly or weekly parts, built on orphans, coincidence, enormous casts and social outrage delivered through comedy and melodrama. He was the most famous writer in the English-speaking world by thirty, edited magazines, campaigned on sanitation and schooling, and gave public readings that ruined his health. A four-part A Tale of Two Cities is running on BBC One and MGM+ this autumn.

Her contemporary, her admirer, and her exact opposite in method. Dickens builds people from the outside — a phrase, a walk, a tic you never forget — and Eliot builds them from the inside, following the reasoning that leads a clever person into a bad decision. He is funnier and faster; she is the one who will change how you think about someone you know. Read both and you have the whole century.

— Lisanne
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03
The nearest company

Elizabeth Gaskell

British · Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1853), North and South (1855)

Gaskell was a Unitarian minister's wife in Manchester who wrote the cotton industry from close range, gave her striking workers arguments rather than pathos, and let the mill owner in North and South be intelligent. She also wrote the first biography of Charlotte Brontë, which caused a scandal, and the quiet comic masterpiece Cranford, about a village run almost entirely by women.

The contemporary closest to Eliot in temperament: serious about class, serious about religion, and unwilling to make a villain out of anyone whose position she can explain. Gaskell is warmer and less philosophical, and she is much better on the industrial north, which Eliot leaves alone. If Middlemarch was too slow to start, North and South is the same intelligence at twice the speed.

— Lisanne
04
The institutions, and the money

Anthony Trollope

British · Barchester Towers (1857), The Way We Live Now (1875)

Trollope wrote forty-seven novels while working full-time at the Post Office, producing a fixed number of words each morning before leaving for the office. The Barsetshire novels follow the clergy of an invented cathedral city and the Palliser novels follow politics; The Way We Live Now is a furious satire on a financial swindler and the London society that will not ask where his money came from.

The Victorian who most resembles Eliot in method and least in ambition. Like her he follows ordinary reasoning into ordinary compromise, and he is unmatched on how an institution actually behaves — a chapter, a party, a bank. What he does not do is step back and think about what any of it means, which is the whole of Eliot's final paragraph. Read him for pleasure and her for the argument.

— Lisanne
05
The same scale, in Russian

Leo Tolstoy

Russian · War and Peace (1869), Anna Karenina (1878)

Anna Karenina runs two marriages against each other — one collapsing through an affair, one being slowly built in the country — across hundreds of pages of Russian society, farming, politics and faith. War and Peace covers the Napoleonic invasion through several families and stops periodically to argue with historians. Tolstoy later renounced most of his own fiction and much of his property.

The only nineteenth-century novelist working at Eliot's scale and her depth at the same time. Both fill a large canvas with ordinary people whose inner lives are rendered completely, both are interested in whether a good life is possible inside a bad system, and both refuse to let a moral question resolve neatly. Tolstoy is the greater dramatist; Eliot is the better psychologist of self-deception. Read Anna Karenina next.

— Lisanne
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06
Older than the genre · The ancestor

Jane Austen

British · Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1815), Persuasion (1817)

Austen wrote six novels about a narrow slice of English gentry — three or four families in a country village, as she put it — in which marriage is the only available career and the comedy comes from watching intelligent people misread each other. She published anonymously, earned very little, and died at forty-one. Her reputation has grown steadily for two centuries and shows no sign of stopping.

The writer Eliot is extending. Austen established that a provincial marriage plot could carry serious moral intelligence, and invented the free indirect style — the narrator slipping into a character's thoughts without announcing it — that Eliot then uses to go far deeper. What Eliot added was failure: Austen's heroines end up with the right man, and Dorothea does not. Read Emma and then the first hundred pages of Middlemarch.

— Lisanne
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07
The interiority, taken further

Virginia Woolf

British · Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927)

Woolf dissolved plot almost entirely: Mrs Dalloway covers one June day in London as a woman prepares for a party, moving between her mind and those of the people she passes, and To the Lighthouse spans years in three sections, the middle of which passes a decade and several deaths in a few pages of an empty house. She also wrote A Room of One's Own, and it was Woolf who called Middlemarch one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.

The next stage of the thing Eliot invented. Eliot follows a mind closely and then steps back to tell you what it means; Woolf keeps the closeness and removes the stepping back, so the reader assembles the judgement themselves. If the passages inside Dorothea's head are what you loved, Woolf is where that technique goes. If the narrator's wisdom is what you loved, you will miss it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Virginia Woolf →

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08
Moral seriousness, written now

Marilynne Robinson

American · Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004)

Gilead is a dying Iowa minister writing a long letter to his young son about his father, his grandfather and the godson he cannot bring himself to trust; it won the Pulitzer Prize. Three further novels revisit the same town and the same two families from different sides. Robinson taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for twenty-five years and writes essays on Calvinism and the American mind.

The living novelist who takes religion and moral obligation as seriously as Eliot did, and from the inside rather than the outside. Both write small provincial places where a single decision reverberates for decades, and both are interested in whether ordinary goodness counts for anything. Eliot lost her faith and kept the ethics; Robinson kept both. Read Gilead if the last paragraph of Middlemarch is the reason you are here.

— Lisanne

Every book by Marilynne Robinson →

09
The provincial town, this century

Elizabeth Strout

American · Olive Kitteridge (2008), Tell Me Everything (2024)

Strout writes small coastal Maine towns across linked books, returning to the same streets and the same families from different angles. Olive Kitteridge is thirteen linked stories in which a retired schoolteacher is central to some and passes through the background of others; it won the Pulitzer Prize. Her eleventh novel, The Things We Never Say, appeared in May 2026 and left Maine for the first time.

The closest living equivalent to what Eliot does structurally: a single town examined from enough angles that it becomes a study of provincial life rather than a story about one person. Strout is far shorter, has no narrator delivering wisdom, and lets her people be unpleasant without redeeming them. Read Olive Kitteridge if the town rather than the philosophy is what held you.

— Lisanne
Every book by Elizabeth Strout →

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10
The argument against her

Gustave Flaubert

French · Madame Bovary (1856), Sentimental Education (1869)

Madame Bovary is a provincial doctor's wife whose reading has given her expectations no marriage could meet, and who ruins herself on affairs and debt in a small Normandy town. Flaubert was prosecuted for obscenity on publication and acquitted. He spent years on the sentences, hunting what he called le mot juste, and removed himself entirely: there is no narrator telling you what to think about Emma Bovary, ever.

The same subject, fifteen years earlier, with everything Eliot adds taken away. Both write a provincial woman whose ambitions outrun the life available to her; Eliot surrounds Dorothea with a narrator who explains, forgives and draws the moral, and Flaubert refuses to appear at all. The charge that has always been laid against Eliot — that she lectures, that the wisdom is applied from above — is best tested here. Read Madame Bovary and decide whether you want the narrator back.

— Lisanne

Frequently asked questions about authors like George Eliot

Who should I read if I love George Eliot?

Henry James is the closest — he read her carefully and The Portrait of a Lady is Middlemarch's direct descendant. Among her contemporaries, Charles Dickens is the opposite method, Elizabeth Gaskell the nearest in temperament and Anthony Trollope the nearest in subject, while Leo Tolstoy is the only one working at her scale and depth at once. Jane Austen is the ancestor she extends. Virginia Woolf takes the interiority further, Marilynne Robinson keeps the moral seriousness, and Elizabeth Strout writes the provincial town now. Gustave Flaubert is the argument against.

Which George Eliot novel should I start with?

Not Middlemarch, unless you have the month. Silas Marner (1861) is under two hundred pages, has a proper plot and contains everything she does in miniature: a wronged man, a small community, and a moral question worked out rather than announced. The Mill on the Floss (1860) is the most emotionally direct and the most autobiographical. Come to Middlemarch third, and to Daniel Deronda last.

Why did Mary Ann Evans write as George Eliot?

To be read on her own terms. Women were publishing novels in large numbers in the 1850s, and she had written a scathing essay, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”, about the sort of fiction they were expected to produce and the critical condescension attached to it. A male name kept her work out of that category. It also protected her from the scandal of her private life: she was living with George Henry Lewes, who was married and could not divorce, and was cut by polite society for twenty-four years while being read by all of it.

Is Middlemarch worth the length?

It is about three hundred thousand words and most readers who finish it say yes. It helps to know what it is doing: it is not one story but four or five, run through a whole town, so the early chapters are laying rails rather than building momentum. The reward is that by the end you know several people as well as you know anyone in fiction. If you stall, the 1994 BBC adaptation with Juliet Aubrey and Rufus Sewell is unusually faithful and runs to six and a half hours.

What is being staged in 2026?

The Royal Shakespeare Company opens a two-part Middlemarch at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, adapted by Nina Raine and directed by Jeremy Herrin, with Part 1 from 1 October 2026 and Part 2 from 10 October, running to 16 January 2027. The cast includes Nia Towle and Amanda Root. Separately, Hampstead Theatre in London premiered Bird Grove, a biographical drama about Eliot named after her Coventry home, earlier in the year.

What is the criticism of George Eliot?

That the narrator will not leave you alone. Her books stop to explain, to forgive a character, to draw a general moral about human sympathy, and readers who want to reach their own conclusions find it intrusive — the wisdom applied from above rather than discovered. She is also slow to start, and Daniel Deronda is widely held to contain one superb novel and one that does not work. The fastest way to test the first objection is Flaubert, who wrote the same material and refuses to appear in it at all.

What order should I read her novels in?

They stand alone. By publication: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), Felix Holt (1866), Middlemarch (1871–72) and Daniel Deronda (1876). A practical route is Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, then Daniel Deronda. Romola, set in fifteenth-century Florence, is the one even admirers skip.

What did she do besides write novels?

A great deal, and it shapes the fiction. She translated Strauss's Life of Jesus and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity from German, which is where the loss of her own faith and her retention of its ethics comes from. She was effectively the editor of the Westminster Review, one of the most serious intellectual journals in Britain, before she published a word of fiction. She wrote poetry and essays throughout, and she was reading science, philosophy and theology at a level almost no other novelist of the century attempted.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”

— George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872.

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