Based on a wealth of biographical fact, Heathen and Outcast dramatizes the years 1842 - 1854 in the remarkable life of Mary Ann Evans, later known as the great novelist George Eliot. Her uncompromising search for independence ignited conflict within her family, threatened alienation from friends and risked banishment from respectable society. Set mainly in the English Midlands and London in the mid-nineteenth century, the book will fascinate readers already interested in George Eliot as well as to those readers who approach the book with little or no prior knowledge of its heroine.