The best novelist in the English language.

I recommend "Silas Marner" first, it's a short novel, and absolutely exquisite. Most people consider "Middlemarch" her best, though my favorite is "The Mill on the Floss". "Adam Bede" is also a wonderful book.

I was torn between Middlemarch and Silas Marner, but opted for Silas as it's shorter and simpler, which I think is always the best place to start until you've decided whether you like the author.

George Eliot is one of my favourite authors. Something to keep in mind as you read her work: Eliot lived a very unconventional life (she lived common-law with a married man for many years). So she is concerned with the hypocrisies of "respectable society," which tries to sweep its dirty deeds under the carpet. You can see this in Silas Marner, in the treatment of Eppie's mother.

Also, GE was a rather mannish-looking woman with a formidable intellect, and was frequently regarded as being a little too "masculine" in terms of her intellectual interests. She was interested in Darwin's theory of evolution, and seems to have taken a lot of interest in whether men's and women's characters are formed as the result of nature, or nurture, and whether they can be altered. So we see Silas Marner, a bachelor, nurturing his small adopted daughter, and in Middlemarch we see Dorothea Brooke come to the gradual realization that she is her husband's intellectual superior, when all she wanted to be was his handmaiden.