Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.” Adam Bede Forgetting is an active neural process. As long as synaptic representations are reinforced, the person persists in cortical networks. Death is biological, remembrance is neural. | Eyerusalem Bergene Banti

Mary Ann Evans, writing as George Eliot, transformed the English novel in the Victorian era. Born in 1819, she adopted a male pseudonym to be taken seriously. Her novels—*Adam Bede*, *The Mill on the Floss*, *Silas Marner*, and *Middlemarch*—delved into human psychology, moral complexity, and women’s struggles for meaning. Living unconventionally with George Henry Lewes, she crafted stories that blended empathy and social critique, reshaping fiction’s possibilities. English Literature Subscriber