Preface

Summary

Two of George Eliot's fictional heroines fantasize about journeying to see a famous writer. Unhappy Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss harbors a pathetic dream: “she would go to some great man – Walter Scott, perhaps – and tell him how wretched and how clever she was, and he would surely do something for her” (Mill, IV:3). Equally wretched Romola leaves her husband with the intention of visiting “the most learned woman in the world, Cassandra Fedele, at Venice” to ask her advice about how she can learn to support herself (R, II:36). Perhaps the narrator of Adam Bede offers the explanation for why neither Maggie nor Romola realizes her fantasy: “if you would maintain the slightest belief in human heroism, you must never make a pilgrimage to see the hero” (AB, II:17).

George Eliot (Marian Evans Lewes) was a literary hero to many during her life and to subsequent generations of readers and writers. In historical memory, she is as compelling and charismatic a figure as she was in life. Her astonishing mind led men and women to fall in love with her even before she began to write fiction. Some fell in love with her through reading her fiction. In the final years of her life, many came to pay tribute at the carefully orchestrated afternoon salons in her London home, the Priory. After her death, some of the pilgrims became disillusioned, and her reputation suffered.