ABSTRACT
George Eliot’s – or rather Marian Evans Cross’s – untimely death (see Life and contexts, p. 30) came at a time when her literary standing was at its highest. As Leslie Stephen noted in the opening of the anonymous obituary he published in the Cornhill Magazine, ‘[H]ad we been asked, a few weeks ago, to name the greatest living writer of English fiction, the answer would have been unanimous. No one – whatever might be his special personal predilections – would have refused that title to George Eliot’ (CH, 464). Although her career as a novelist had lasted for little more than twenty years, she had managed to build up a reputation not only as an outstanding literary artist but also as an intellectual and a moralist; in fact, as early as in the early 1870s she had already become something of a cultural icon, not only highly respected both by the reading public and by the intellectual elites of mid-Victorian Britain but also positively venerated by a faithful circle of devoted admirers, some of whom entertained literary ambitions of their own (see Life and contexts, p. 26). In consequence, it does not come as a surprise that the first book devoted exclusively to George Eliot’s writings was not a critical study sensu stricto, but a collection of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse, Selected from the Works of George Eliot (1872), compiled by Alexander Main; republished several times over the following two decades, it may have been a token of its editor’s appreciation of George Eliot’s work, but it did little to stimulate critical discussion of her achievement – if anything, it presented the writer in a rather solemn light, and it created, through its selective use of quotations, an impression that her work was excessively sententious and moralistic.
