Lives of Girls Who Became Famous

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

To George Eliot all this was cause for the deepest gratitude. They were able now to rent a home at Wandworth, and move to it at once. The poverty and the drudgery of life seemed over. She said: "I sing my magnificat in a quiet way, and have a great deal of deep, silent joy; but few authors, I suppose, who have had a real success, have known less of the flush and the sensations of triumph that are talked of as the accompaniments of success. I often think of my dreams when I was four or five and twenty. I thought then how happy fame would make me.... I am assured now that Adam Bede was worth writing,--worth living through those long years to write. But now it seems impossible that I shall ever write anything so good and true again." Up to this time the world did not know who George Eliot was; but as a man by the name of Liggins laid claim to the authorship, and tried to borrow money for his needs because Blackwood would not pay him, the real name of the author had to be divulged.

Five thousand copies of Adam Bede were sold the first two weeks, and sixteen thousand the first year. So excellent was the sale that Mr. Blackwood sent her four thousand dollars in addition to the first four. The work was soon translated into French, German, and Hungarian. Mr. Lewes' Physiology of Common Life was now published, but it brought little pecuniary return.

The reading was carried on as usual by the two students. The Life of George Stephenson; the Electra of Sophocles; the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, Harriet Martineau's British Empire in India; and History of the Thirty Years' Peace; Béranger, Modern Painters, containing some of the finest writing of the age; Overbech on Greek art; Anna Mary Howitt's book on Munich; Carlyle's Life of Frederick the Great; Darwin's Origin of Species; Emerson's Man the Reformer, "which comes to me with fresh beauty and meaning"; Buckle's History of Civilization; Plato and Aristotle.

An American publisher now offered her six thousand dollars for a book, but she was obliged to decline, for she was writing the Mill on the Floss, in 1860, for which Blackwood gave her ten thousand dollars for the first edition of four thousand copies, and Harper & Brothers fifteen hundred dollars for using it also. Tauchnitz paid her five hundred for the German reprint.

She said: "I am grateful and yet rather sad to have finished; sad that I shall live with my people on the banks of the Floss no longer. But it is time that I should go, and absorb some new life and gather fresh ideas." They went at once to Italy, where they spent several months in Florence, Venice, and Rome.

In the former city she made her studies for her great novel, Romola. She read Sismondi's History of the Italian Republics, Tenneman's History of Philosophy, T.A. Trollope's Beata, Hallam on the Study of Roman Law in the Middle Ages, Gibbon on the Revival of Greek Learning, Burlamachi's Life of Savonarola; also Villari's life of the great preacher, Mrs. Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art, Machiavelli's works, Petrarch's Letters, Casa Guidi Windows, Buhle's History of Modern Philosophy, Story's Roba di Roma, Liddell's Rome, Gibbon, Mosheim, and one might almost say the whole range of Italian literature in the original. Of Mommsen's History of Rome she said, "It is so fine that I count all minds graceless who read it without the deepest stirrings."

The study necessary to make one familiar with fifteenth century times was almost limitless. No wonder she told Mr. Cross, years afterward, "I began Romola a young woman, I finished it an old woman"; but that, with Adam Bede and Middlemarch, will be her monument. "What courage and patience," she says, "are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything!" "In authorship I hold carelessness to be a mortal sin." "I took unspeakable pains in preparing to write Romola."

For this one book, on which she spent a year and a half, Cornhill Magazine paid her the small fortune of thirty-five thousand dollars. She purchased a pleasant home, "The Priory," Regent's Park, where she made her friends welcome, though she never made calls upon any, for lack of time. She had found, like Victor Hugo, that time is a very precious thing for those who wish to succeed in life. Browning, Huxley, and Herbert Spencer often came to dine.

Says Mr. Cross, in his admirable life: "The entertainment was frequently varied by music when any good performer happened to be present. I think, however, that the majority of visitors delighted chiefly to come for the chance of a few words with George Eliot alone. When the drawing-room door of the Priory opened, a first glance revealed her always in the same low arm-chair on the left-hand side of the fire. On entering, a visitor's eye was at once arrested by the massive head. The abundant hair, streaked with gray now, was draped with lace, arranged mantilla fashion, coming to a point at the top of the forehead. If she were engaged in conversation, her body was usually bent forward with eager, anxious desire to get as close as possible to the person with whom she talked. She had a great dislike to raising her voice, and often became so wholly absorbed in conversation that the announcement of an in-coming visitor failed to attract her attention; but the moment the eyes were lifted up, and recognized a friend, they smiled a rare welcome--sincere, cordial, grave--a welcome that was felt to come straight from the heart, not graduated according to any social distinction."

After much reading of Fawcett, Mill, and other writers on political economy, Felix Holt was written, in 1866, and for this she received from Blackwood twenty-five thousand dollars.