Short answers, pulled from the story.
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, an English novelist, poet, journalist, and translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She was born on the 22nd of November 1819 and died on the 22nd of December 1880.
Mary Ann Evans chose the name George Eliot to escape the stereotype that women's writing was limited to lighter fare and to have her fiction judged apart from her work as a translator and critic. She told her biographer J. W. Cross that George was Lewes's forename and Eliot was "a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word."
George Eliot wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862-1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876). Middlemarch was named by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.
George Eliot lived with the married philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes as his partner from 1854 to 1878 and called him her husband. Lewes remained married to Agnes Jervis and supported their children, and the open relationship drew heavy disapproval as it broke the social conventions of the era.
George Eliot was not buried in Westminster Abbey because she had denied the Christian faith and had lived with George Henry Lewes. She was interred instead in Highgate Cemetery, in the area reserved for political and religious dissenters and agnostics, beside Lewes and near the graves of Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer.
George Eliot married John Walter Cross, a Scottish commission agent 20 years her junior, on the 16th of May 1880, eighteen months after Lewes's death, and changed her name to Mary Ann Cross. She died on the 22nd of December 1880 at the age of 61 after a throat infection combined with longstanding kidney disease.