ABSTRACT
The sketches and impressions grouped together as 'Poetry and Prose, From the Notebook of an Eccentric' are George Eliot's first published original writing, except for the short poem entitled 'Farewell' that appeared in the Christian Observer for January, 1840. (Despite the title, no poetry was included in the 'Poetry and Prose' essays.) They are slight, awkward, and self-consciously literary, but the careful reader will discover in them the presence of ideas and attitudes that look forward to the preoccupations of George Eliot's mature work. It is interesting to note that in her last book, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, she returned to the form of these early essays: though they are separated by more than thirty years, her first and last published prose compositions are both moralia.
