How Lisa Loved the King, a George Eliot Poem

How Lisa Loved The King was written in 1867, and recounts, in poetic form, how Lisa, the daughter of a Sicilian merchant family falls in love with the king and how she struggles with the depth of her feelings.
Mary Ann Evans (1819 - 1880) was an English novelist who wrote under her pen name George Eliot to escape the stereotype of women's writing being limited to lighthearted romances. She wrote seven novels, including The Mill On The Floss, Middlemarch, and Silas Marner, and she became one of the leading writers of the Victorian era.
As well as her classic novels, she also wrote exceptional poetry which demonstrated her natural talent at writing prose and rhyme that displayed both realism, fantasy and psychological insight.