Having been happily sunk in Middlemarch for several weeks now, I finally got around to googling the author, Mary Ann Evans (pen name: George Eliot), and was amused to read, in the description accompanying the second return, that she was "one of the leading female English novelists of the 19th century." This seems a lot like calling Tiger Woods one of the best mixed-race golfers on the PGA tour. It's a BBC History site, and if you click the link you discover that the article itself avoids being ridiculous by leaving off "female": "one of the leading English novelists of the 19th century."
The principal competition would be Dickens and I have to say that I like Middlemarch better than any of his books I've read. But it's like Tolstoy or Dostoevski. There's no accounting for taste. With Dostoevski and Dickens you have wounded geniuses working it out with pen and paper. Tolstoy and Eliot seem more like naturals to me. No wound necessary. They were born to be omniscient narrators.