This week on the Post we celebrate what some, and we would include ourselves amongst them, think is the greatest novel ever written, certainly it's the greatest novel by a woman: Middlemarch, first published 150 years ago, in the autumn of 1871. This portrait of what has now been acknowledged as George Eliot herself was bought by Andrew Sim of Sim Fine Art in Thame in 2016 and five years later has been accepted by art historians as a genuine drawing of the novelist, details of the Thame discovery here.