George Eliot

‘…At all events, she is greatly inferior to Scott in play and richness of pictorial imagination, in rapidity of movement, and in warmth of colour.  “Romola”, her one historical romance – though it is full of subtlety of conception, contains some very striking figures, and is painted with a surprising minuteness of realistic detail – is a doubtful success.  Sir Walter Scott never failed in making the chief historical figure of his historical romances the most interesting in his group…’

The text above comes from Chambers’s Cyclopedia of English Literature, in a passage on George Eliot.  Chambers seems to prefer Scott, though three of Eliot’s novels are extremely well known (“The Mill on the Floss”, “Silas Marner”, “Middlemarch”).  The English author George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) died on December 22, 1880.