There has been much talk of “Cameron's Cuties” and the “Browns sugars” as secret weapons in the General Election.

Gimmicks aside, it's true that women have had a higher profile this year than ever before.

People often say our Victorian predecessors would swell with pride if they were alive today – and yet one of the borough's most successful women from that era would probably be turning in her grave.

George Eliot, author of The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, was strongly opposed to giving women the vote, despite being an independent, successful and scandalously liberal woman herself.

Her biographer, Professor Kathryn Hughes, points out the strange conflict in her book, 'George Eliot: The Last Victorian'.

“[Her] response to orthodox gender roles would always be contradictory,” she writes.

“For while she was happy to have escaped the usual duties assigned to women, she was keen to celebrate them in others. She needed and wanted women to be gentle, nurturing and domestic.”

Eliot, whose real name was Mary Anne Evans, wrote under a male pen-name to ensure that she was taken seriously as a writer.

As a young woman she was continually chided by men for being “ugly”, but as a fierce intellectual with a charismatic personality, she attracted many admirers – including a man some 22 years her junior at the age of 61.

The writer lived at Holly Lodge, Wimbledon Park Road, where she lived “in sin” with George Henry Lewes, a married man, for two years and made her fortune.

But despite this, she actively shunned feminists in her circle, including the MP's wife Mrs Clementia Taylor, who had been one of the only people to write in support of her scandalous affair.

In a response to Mrs Taylor's invitation to visit, Eliot wrote: “I have found it a necessity of my London life to make the rule of never paying visits.”

Prof Hughes added: “Feminist and radical friends assumed that a woman who lived with a married man, who had broken with her family over religion, who was one of the highest-earning women in Britain, must surely be encouraging others to do the same.

“And when they found that she did not want the vote for women... and that she sometimes even went to church, they felt baffled and betrayed."