A Portrait of George Eliot by Don Taylor
with Sheila Allen as Marian Evans

Marian Evans from Nuneaton became world-famous in 1859, at the age of 39, as George Eliot, the author of Adam Bede. In the next 20 years she wrote six more novels, among them The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. But fame came to her comparatively late in life.
This film, first shown in Omnibus on the 150th anniversary of her birth, shows what happened to the ugly girl from the Midlands before she became a great novelist.
(Sheila Allen is an associate member of the Royal Shakespeare Company)