George Eliot (Marian Evans)

Marian used a pen name for a few reasons.  One was that she wanted to use a masculine name, because women novelists, while there were many of them… were often thought of poorly by serious critics and thinkers.  

She herself had written a critical article entitled “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”, decrying the “Silver Fork” genre, which was very popular.  These novels were a picture of “high life’ among the glamorous upper classes... Rather like the sillier sort of costume dramas nowadays.  Since Marian thought of herself as much better educated and capable of writing more intelligent fiction...she didn’t want to be classed with the silly lady novelists.  
Another reason was her ambiguous status.  Many people thought of her as a “bad woman”, because of her living with Lewes openly.  However Marian Evans thought of herself as a very serious and highly moral woman.  She believed that her relationship with Lewes was  equivalent to a marriage, and she herself did not believe in casual affairs, or easily broken ties.
  She assumed the role of “mother” to his sons by his wife, and felt that she could justify her behaviour as regards getting involved with him.  She said that there were women who engaged in liaisons, within the confines of respectable marriage, which helped to cover their infidelities... These women were accepted in society and were still “invited to dinner” in society..but she was not interested in that sort of life...

Her novels were very much “moral” ones where sin was punished for the most part. In particular, she was strict with her female characters.  Some critics have complained that although she herself broke with many conventions and led a very independent life for a woman… she didn’t allow any of her women characters to do anything like that. 
In “Adam Bede”, the heroine, Dinah starts out as a Methodist woman preacher, but when she marries and the Methodists decide that women should not be allowed to preach, she  conforms.

Another example is Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of Middlemarch.  Dorothea is intelligent but very naive, makes an unhappy first marriage to a dry and dull clergyman, and finds that he is narrow minded, not very intelligent and incapable of warmth.  In her next marriage, she chooses a young man, Will Ladislaw, who goes into parliament as a reformer, and we’re told that she found fulfilment in being a helper to him, supporting him in his work etc.  In short subsuming her life in his.

 It’s very different to the way that Marian’s partner, Lewes, supported her, helped her get published, encouraged her to write and protected her from bad reviews etc. 

Even during her lifetime, many women writers who knew Marian -women who were single or widowed and who wrote for a living-  were a little irritated at the “goddess” airs they felt that she assumed and at how her partner protected and supported her greatly. They often had to write hard and fast to provide for children or other impoverished relatives, and could not spend years researching and coming up with intellectual projects as she was able to do…

It’s probable that her intellectual snobbery alienated many people almost as much as her “being an immoral woman” in a sexual sense, did…

 Because of her ambiguous status, not many women at first would visit her.  However she was devoted to her work and she was able to receive male friends.. As time passed and her novels became highly admired and respected, she did become more socially acceptable and had a salon of male and female visitors.