J. W. Cross: ‘George Eliot’s Life.’
Depression after finishing each book.
As to the “great novel,” which remains to be written, I must tell you that I never believe in future books.... Always after finishing a book I have a period of despair that I can ever again produce anything worth giving to the world. The responsibility of the writer grows heavier and heavier—does it not?—as the world grows older and the voices of the dead more numerous. It is difficult to believe, until the germ of some new work grows into imperious activity within one, that it is possible to make a really needed contribution to the poetry of the world—I mean possible to oneself to do it.
Attitude towards criticism.
I hardly ever read anything that is written about myself—indeed, never unless my husband expressly wishes me to do so by way of exception. I adopted this rule many years ago as a necessary preservative against influences that would have ended by nullifying my power of writing....
I hardly think that any critic can have so keen a sense of the short-comings in my works as that I groan under in the course of writing them, and I cannot imagine any edification coming to an author from a sort of reviewing which consists in attributing to him or her unexpressed opinions, and in imagining circumstances which may be alleged as petty private motives for the treatment of subjects which ought to be of general human interest.
George Eliot: Letters, quoted by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, in ‘Last Words from George Eliot,’ Harper’s Magazine, for March, 1882.
George Eliot in 1864.