When the Scottish phrenologist George Combe was sent a cast of 25-year-old Mary Ann Evans’s head in 1844, he took it for a man’s. “Miss Evans’s head is a very large one, 22 ¼ inches round,” he wrote; “the intellect predominates,” while the “Animal” and “Moral” regions are roughly equal, with “the moral being quite sufficient to keep the animal in order”. “She has a very large brain,” he affirmed eight years later, when he finally met her.
Mary Ann Evans was never admired for her looks. To add to her outsized head, she had a long face, large nose, crooked teeth and jutting lower jaw, which she self-consciously hid with her hand in the most widely available photograph of her, taken in the 1850s. It was a face unsuited to be framed with simpering curls.