Page:Early Essays by George Eliot (1919).djvu/14

 such students no small service in putting within their reach a few examples of George Eliot's earliest work. She was already twenty-seven at the time the following papers were written, and at this age Charles Dickens (only seven years her senior) had published the "Boz" Sketches, the "Pickwick" papers, and Nicholas Nickleby; but George Eliot's genius matured very slowly, and thus her first efforts in literature possess a peculiar interest.

The author of Adam Bede, it will be remembered, went with her father to Coventry in 1841, and there continued to live for eight years. During this period we know that she occupied her leisure in translating Strauss's Life of Jesus, which was published anonymously. Then her father died, and she travelled on the continent, returning to Coventry to stay for a year with the Brays at Rosehill. In 1851 she met George Henry Lewes, and was living with him at Richmond, Surrey, when Amos Barton was written in September, 1856. This was George Eliot's first acknowledged work in fiction, but there can be little doubt her correspondence would show that she had indulged in original composition for fifteen years at least. Of this period of literary activity, however, we know practically nothing, for Mr. Cross's theory of the art of biography is thus explained by himself:

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