Letter to Mrs. John Cash (Miss Mary Sibree), 6th June, 1857.
Your letter was very sweet to me. The sense of my deficiencies in the past often presses on me with a discouraging weight, and to know that any one can remember me lovingly, helps me to believe that there has been some good to balance the evil. I like to think of you as a happy wife and mother; and since Rosehill must have new tenants, I like to think that you and yours are there rather than any one else, not only because of my own confidence in your nature, but because our dear friends love you so much as a neighbor. You know I can never feel otherwise than sorry that they should not have ended their days in that pretty home; but the inevitable regret is softened as much as possible by the fact that the home has become yours.
It is very nice to hear that Mrs. Sibree can relish anything of my writing. She was always a favorite with me; and I remember very vividly many pleasant little conversations with her. Seventy-two! How happy you are to have a dear, aged mother, whose heart you can gladden.
I was a good deal touched by the letter your brother wrote to you about accepting, or, rather, declining, more pupils. I feel sure that his sensitive nature has its peculiar trials and struggles in this strange life of ours, which some thick-skinned mortals take so easily.
I am very happy—happy in the highest blessing life can give us, the perfect love and sympathy of a nature that stimulates my own to healthful activity. I feel, too, that all the terrible pain I have gone through in past years, partly from the defects of my own nature, partly from outward things, has probably been a preparation for some special work that I may do before I die. That is a blessed hope, to be rejoiced in with trembling. But even if that hope should be unfulfilled, I am contented to have lived and suffered for the sake of what has already been. You see your kind letter has made me inclined to talk about myself, but, as we do not often have any communication with each other, I know it will be a gratification to your sympathetic nature to have a few direct words from me that will assure you of my moral well-being.
I hope your little ones are just like you—just as fair and sweet-tempered.
Journal, June, 1857.
I sent off the first part of "Janet's Repentance," but to my disappointment Blackwood did not like it so well—seemed to misunderstand the characters, and to be doubtful about the treatment of clerical matters. I wrote at once to beg him to give up printing the story if he felt uncomfortable about it, and he immediately sent a very anxious, cordial letter, saying the thought of putting a stop to the series "gave him quite a turn:" he "did not meet with George Eliots every day"—and so on.
Letter to John Blackwood, 11th June, 1857.
I am not much surprised and not at all hurt by your letter received to-day with the proof. It is a great satisfaction—in fact, my only satisfaction—that you should give me your judgment with perfect frankness. I am able, I think, to enter into an editor's doubts and difficulties, and to see my stories in some degree from your point of view as well as my own. My answer is written after considering the question as far as possible on all sides, and as I feel that I shall not be able to make any other than superficial alterations in the proof, I will, first of all, say what I can in explanation of the spirit and future course of the present story.