George Eliot attended Bedford College in 1849.
One of the first Bedford College students was George Eliot (christened Mary Ann Evans), who is justly famous for the novels Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Her insightful psychological novels anticipated the narrative methods of modern literature, prompting D.H. Lawrence to write: "It was really George Eliot who… started putting action inside."