Books

2 volumes. First Edition. With both half-titles. 8vo, in handsome antique full green morocco, the covers with double-ruled gilt fillet lines at the edges, the spines with ornate gilt framed panels between raised bands, two compartments with gilt lettering, additional gilt lettering at the tail and gilt ruling at both tips, gilt ruled board edges and beautifully gilt tooled turn-ins, fine marbled endpapers, t.e.g. 366; 381 pp. A handsome set, the text quite clean and fresh and free from any spotting, a light touch of normal age at the edges, the fine binding in very good and attractive condition, the hinges firm and fine, only a trivial bit of wear and the spines mellowed to a very attractive tone of olive. FIRST EDITION, GEORGE ELIOT'S (Mary Anne Evans) FIRST PUBLISHED FICTION AND THE FIRST WORK PUBLISHED UNDER THE GEORGE ELIOT PSEUDONYM. A collection of three short stories. Her partner, G. H. Lewes, in order to help her get her stories written and published, arranged for John Blackwood to publish these first tentative efforts claiming them to be written by a 'friend' named George Eliot. The stories first appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine throughout 1857 and were then first published in book form, as here, in January of 1858. In this complete form it was met with 'just and discerning applause', and considerable speculation as to the identity of its author. Charles Dickens, wrote to the unknown author by care of William Blackwood saying, "I have been so strongly affected by the two first tales in the book you have had the kindness to send me, through Messrs. Blackwood, that I hope you will excuse my writing to you to express my admiration of their extraordinary merit. The exquisite truth and delicacy both of the humour and the pathos of these stories, I have never seen the like of; and they have impressed me in a manner that I should find it very difficult to describe to you. if I had the impertinence to try. In addressing these few words of thankfulness to the creator of the Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, and the sad love-story of Mr. Gilfil, I am (I presume) bound to adopt the name that it pleases that excellent writer to assume. I can suggest no better one: but I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman. I have observed what seemed to me such womanly touches in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself mentally so like a woman since the world began." This makes him among the first to suggest the author may have actually been a woman.

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.