Books

Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1858. First edition of George Eliot’s first published work of fiction, three related stories of love and loss in an English village: “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton,” “Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story,” and “Janet’s Repentance.” The stories first appeared anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1857, and were published together the following year as the work of “George Eliot,” the first use of that pen name by Mary Ann Evans. Upon the book’s appearance, Charles Dickens wrote Blackwood to congratulate the unknown author and to predict, correctly, that George Eliot would eventually be revealed as a woman. These early stories sound the depths of feeling experienced by everyday people, foreshadowing Eliot’s major achievement in Middlemarch: “At least eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last census are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise;…

Scenes of Clerical Life is the title under which George Eliot's first published works of fiction appeared in 1858, consisting of three novellas based on the lives of different clergymen. Originally published anonymously, these stories mark Eliot's debut into the world of literature.