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In this literary life, the fiction of Marian Evans (George Eliot) is placed in a biographical and literary-historical context. Since the life experiences that most influenced her novels were those of her formative years, biographical information becomes less important after the publication of her first novel in 1859, when she was in her 40th year. The author gives emphasis to his subject's intellectual development and ideas on the one hand, and to considerations of gender and sex on the other. His principal concern, however, is with Marian Evans as a writer of prose fiction. He details her views on other novels and novelists and examines her aesthetic thinking as it developed from the faithful representing of commonplace things towards more complex considerations.