Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Feb. 1856.
I was so glad to have a little news of you. I should like to hear much oftener, but our days are so accurately parcelled out among regular occupations that I rarely manage to do anything not included in the programme; and, without reading Mrs. Barbauld on the "Inconsistency of Human Expectations," I know that receiving letters is inconsistent with not writing any. Have you seen any numbers of the Saturday Review, a new journal, on which "all the talents" are engaged? It is not properly a newspaper, but—what its title expresses—a political and literary review. We are delighting ourselves with Ruskin's third volume, which contains some of the finest writing I have read for a long time (among recent books). I read it aloud for an hour or so after dinner; then we jump to the old dramatists, when Mr. Lewes reads to me as long as his voice will hold out, and after this we wind up the evening with Rymer Jones's "Animal Kingdom," by which I get a confused knowledge of branchiæ, and such things—perhaps, on the whole, a little preferable to total ignorance. These are our noctes—without cenæ for the present—occasionally diversified by very dramatic singing of Figaro, etc., which, I think, must alarm "that good man, the clergyman," who sits below us. We have been half laughing, half indignant, over Alison's new volume of his "History of Europe," in which he undertakes to give an account of German literature.
Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 25th Feb. 1856.
What you tell me of Harriet Martineau interests me very much. I feel for her terrible bodily suffering, and think of her with deep respect and admiration. Whatever may have been her mistakes and weaknesses, the great and good things she has done far outweigh them; and I should be grieved if anything in her memoir should cast a momentary shadow over the agreeable image of her that the world will ultimately keep in its memory. I wish less of our piety were spent on imaginary perfect goodness, and more given to real imperfect goodness.
Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of Feb. 1856.
I am very happy for you to keep the sheets, and to get signatures (for the Women's Petition that they should have legal right to their own earnings). Miss Barbara Smith writes that she must have them returned to her before the 1st of March. I am glad you have taken up the cause, for I do think that, with proper provisos and safeguards, the proposed law would help to raise the position and character of women. It is one round of a long ladder stretching far beyond our lives.
During March, George Eliot wrote only the Belles-lettres section for the April number of the Westminster, having resigned the subject of "Missions" to Harriet Martineau. She also wrote two articles for the Saturday Review, and two for the Leader. And there are the following letters in March to the Brays, in which allusion is made to their leaving the old home at Rosehill, owing to the unsatisfactory state of the Coventry business.
Letter to Charles Bray, 26th Mch. 1856.
We are flourishing in every way except in health. Mr. Lewes's head is still infirm, but he manages, nevertheless, to do twice as much work as other people. I am always a croaker, you know, but my ailments are of a small kind, their chief symptoms being a muddled brain; and, as my pen is not of the true literary order which will run along without the help of brains, I don't get through so much work as I should like. By the way, when the Spinoza comes out, be so good as not to mention my name in connection with it. I particularly wish not to be known as the translator of the "Ethics," for reasons which it would be "too tedious to mention." You don't know what a severely practical person I am become, and what a sharp eye I have to the main chance. I keep the purse, and dole out sovereigns with all the pangs of a miser. In fact, if you were to feel my bump of acquisitiveness, I dare say you would find it in a state of inflammation, like the "veneration" of that clergyman to whom Mr. Donovan said, "Sir, you have recently been engaged in prayer." I hope you recognized your own wit about the one-eyed dissenters, which was quoted in the Leader some time ago. You always said no one did so much justice to your jokes as I did.
Letter to Charles Bray, 31st Mch. 1856.