A village carpenter loves a dairymaid who has been noticed by the young squire, and a Methodist woman preacher sees what is coming before anyone else. George Eliot — Mary Ann Evans, who took a man's name to be read seriously and lived openly with a married man — put her father's Warwickshire into her first novel and made the ordinary rural poor the subject of serious fiction, which nobody had done. Fifty-four plates by painters including Constable and Cox carry the fields, wheat and water meadows of an English rural year alongside the text.
