Mary Anne Evans (known now as George Eliot) is born in the parish of Chilvers Coton in Warwickshire

Mary Anne Evans' translation from the German of David Friedrich Strauss's controversial Life of Jesus is published anonymously

Marian Evans meets the journalist George Henry Lewes in William Jeff's bookshop in Burlington Arcade

Marian Evans (her new spelling of her name) moves to London and gets a job as subeditor of Westminster Review

G.H. Lewes leaves his serially unfaithful wife and begins an affair with Marian Evans

Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes flout British convential morality by travelling openly to Germany together

On their return to England, Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes pretend to be married (Lewes is unable to get a divorce)

Calling themselves Mr and Mrs Lewes, Marian and George move into lodgings at 7 Clarence Row in East Sheen

Marian Evans (George Eliot) and G.H. Lewes move into lodgings at 8 Parkshot in Richmond, with Mrs Croft as their landlady

G.H. Lewes encourages Marian to try her hand at fiction and her first story, 'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton' is successfully published

In the cramped sitting room that she shares as a study with Lewes, Marian Evans begins writing her first novel, Adam Bede

'Amos Barton' and two other stories are published together, as Scenes of Clerical Life, under the pseudonym George Eliot

Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes move from Parkshot in Richmond to Holly Lodge in Wandsworth

English author George Eliot wins fame with her first full-length novel, Adam Bede

Marian Evans reluctantly allows her publisher to admit the truth of rumours that George Eliot is Marian Evans, also known as Mrs Lewes

George Eliot publishes The Mill on the Floss, her novel about the childhood of Maggie and Tom Tulliver

George Eliot publishes Silas Marner, the story of a miser who loses his gold but finds happiness in adopting a child

George Eliot is offered £10,000 to write a novel about Savonarola as a 12-part serial in the new Cornhill Magazine

Under the title Romola, George Eliot's story of Savonarola in Florence begins publication (completed in August 1863)

George Eliot, now prosperous, moves with G.H. Lewes into the Priory, a splendid house near Regent's Park

George Eliot publishes Felix Holt the Radical, based on her childhood memories of the period of the great Reform Bill in 1832

George Eliot publishes Middlemarch, in which Dorothea makes a disastrous marriage to the pedantic Edward Casaubon

George Eliot publishes Daniel Deronda, contrasting Jewish idealism with upper-class English materialism

George Eliot is devastated by the death from cancer of G.H. Lewes, her partner of 25 years

George Eliot develops an emotional bond with her investment banker, John Walter Cross, whose beloved mother died a week after Lewes