The Project Gutenberg EBook of Scenes of Clerical Life, by George Eliot

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Title: Scenes of Clerical Life

Author: George Eliot

Release Date: February 16, 2006 [EBook #17780]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE ***

Produced by James Tenison

GEORGE ELIOT

Scenes of Clerical Life

INTRODUCTION BY GRACE RHYS

DENT London

EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY

All rights reserved

Printed in Great Britain

This edition was first published in Everyman's Library in 1910

INTRODUCTION

George Eliot, or Mary Ann Evans, was born at Arbury Farm, in the parish
of Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, on the 22nd of November, 1819. She was
the fifth and last child of her father by his second wife--of that father
whose sound sense and integrity she so keenly appreciated, and who was to
a certain extent the original of her famous characters of Adam Bede and
Caleb Garth.

Both during and after her schooldays George Eliot's history was that of a
mind continually out-growing its conditions. She became an excellent
housewife and a devoted daughter, but her nature was too large for so
cramped a life. 'You may try,' she writes in Daniel Deronda, 'but you can
never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and to
suffer the slavery of being a girl.'

While her powers were growing she necessarily passed through many phases.
She became deeply religious, and wrote poetry, pious and sweet, fair of
its kind. Music was a passion with her; in a characteristic letter
written at the age of twenty to a friend she tries but fails to describe
her experience on hearing the 'Messiah' of Birmingham: 'With a stupid,
drowsy sensation, produced by standing sentinel over damson cheese and a
warm stove, I cannot do better than ask you to read, if accessible,
Wordsworth's short poem on the "Power of Sound."' There you have a
concise history of George Eliot's life at this period, divided as it was
between music, literature, and damson cheese.

Sixteen years of mental work and effort then lay between her and her
first achievement; years during which she read industriously and thought