George Eliot's Life as Related in her Letters and Journals.

ELIOT, George - CROSS, John Walter (ed.).

Edité par Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1885

A propos de cet article

First edition, presentation copy, sent by the editor, Eliot's widower John Walter Cross, to a collaborator of Eliot's, her letters to whom are printed in Volume Three. The front free endpaper in Volume One has a mounted card inscribed by Cross in the publication month, "To Professor James Sully, in memory of his kind helpfulness to George Eliot in 1879 & with grateful thanks from J. W. Cross, London, 29 Jan. 1885". Professor Sully (1842-1923) assisted Eliot in 1879 by penning a 20-page biography of her late partner George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) in New Quarterly Magazine and by proofreading, as an expert in psychology, the final volume of Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind (1874-9). Sully paid frequent visits to Eliot and Lewes from 1874 until Lewes's death in 1878, meeting during these occasions Tennyson and Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf. Sully was later a member of Stephen's walking group the Sunday Tramps. Sully's ownership inscription, dated 1885, is on the front free endpapers verso and his neat pencil annotations occasionally feature in the margins. Volume Three prints five letters from Eliot to Sully. Four of these are dated 1879 and discuss the legacy of Lewes. In one letter, Eliot thanks Sully "for the help you have given me in my sad and anxious task. Your eyes have been a most precious aid" (p. 380). In another, she states of his biography of Lewes, "I think that he would himself have regarded it as a generally just estimate. Your selection of subjects for remark, and the remarks themselves, are in accordance with my feeling to a comforting extent; and I shall always remain your debtor for writing the article" (p. 378). The earliest letter to Sully printed here, dated 1877, is well-known among literary historians and is cited in the OED for Eliot's line "I don't know that I ever heard anybody use the word 'meliorist' except myself" (p. 301). The meliorist worldview, that human effort can slowly make the world a better place, was vital in Eliot's fiction to such a degree that her contemporaries, including Sully, erroneously credited her with coining the term (see Pessimism, p. 399). Following his death, Eliot wedded Cross (1840-1924) in 1880 before dying later that year. Cross then laboured on her legacy just as Eliot and Sully had done for Lewes. Styled by Cross as an "autobiography", the work consists of Eliot's selected personal writings, arranged in chronological order and presenting her comprehensive life story to the public for the first time. Unfortunately, Eliot "suffered a temporary decline in reputation in the decades following her death. This was largely due to her husband's well-meaning but misguided efforts, in the biography he published in three volumes in 1885, to portray her as respectable despite her unorthodox relationship with Lewes [and] as a stuffy, sibylline figure" (ODNB). James Sully, Pessimism: A History and a Criticism, 1877. 3 vols, octavo. Frontispieces and 7 plates, all with tissue guards, double-page facsimile of Eliot's handwriting. Errata slip tipped in at end. Original brown cloth, spines lettered in gilt, spines and covers ruled and tooled in black, black coated endpapers, edges untrimmed. Loosely inserted card from the Chiswick-based music dealer Charles Bernard. Spines cocked and lightly toned, small frays to spine ends, short split to head of vol. III rear joint, vol. I with small red mark on rear cover and cracked front inner hinge, remaining sound, other inner hinges with cosmetic splits, occasional spots to contents. A very good set.

N° de réf. du vendeur 172874

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: George Eliot's Life as Related in her Letters and Journals.
• Éditeur: Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1885
• Édition: Edition originale