In October 1851, a chance meeting in a Piccadilly bookshop changed the course of literary history. For it was here that Mary Ann Evans, an unworldly young scholar, was introduced to the love of her life, the critic George Lewes. Encouraged and supported by Lewes, Evans became the queen of literary London under her pen name, George Eliot. In nurturing Eliot's talent, Lewes drew inspiration from the works of an unfashionable author of the previous generation by the name of Jane Austen. On the face of it, Austen and Eliot had little in common. Jane Austen was a genteel spinster who spent her life in Hampshire, painting Regency domestic dramas with delicate irony and unfailing charm. George Eliot, meanwhile, was a radical intellectual who lived scandalously with a married man, travelled widely in Europe and documented with stirring realism the social upheavals of her age. And yet, when George Eliot embarked on her career as an author in the late 1850s, the works of Jane Austen were at her
