Ouch!

In addition to her scholarly and intellectual pursuits, [George] Eliot, now twenty-four, was looking for romance, and since she was no Gwendolyn Harleth, the bewitching heroine of Daniel Deronda, this was not a simple task. Virginia Woolf came close to saying that she looked like a horse, and Henry James called her "magnificently ugly--deliciously hideous" and did say that she looked like a horse. Perhaps an even unkinder cut came fron her friend Cara Hennell, who gave her the unflattering nickname Apollyon, who is the messenger from Hell in Revelation.

Dachslager, Earl. "Introduction." Daniel Deronda. New York: Barnes & Noble. xii-xxxviii.