Several times during the writing of this book I feared that I had turned into Edward Casaubon, the fastidious blocked cleric from Middlemarch who has been working for far too long on the ‘Key to All Mythologies’. But unlike Casaubon, I did eventually start – and finish – writing and need to thank the many people and institutions who helped me along the way.
Anyone working on George Eliot bears a huge debt to Gordon Haight, the Yale academic who spent his life collecting her letters into nine immaculately edited volumes, as well as producing the excellent biography of 1968. Other Eliot scholars whose work has been particularly helpful include Rosemary Ashton and Ruby Redinger.
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Warwickshire County Record Office and the Nuneaton Library all allowed me generous access to their manuscript holdings, from which I am very grateful to be permitted to quote. Thanks especially to Jonathan Ouvry, George Henry Lewes’s great-great-grandson, for allowing me to cite the unpublished journals of Eliot and Lewes held at Yale. I am also grateful for the help I received from the British Library, the London Library and London University Library.
George Eliot called John Blackwood ‘the best of publishers’. I could say the same of Christopher Potter at Fourth Estate, to whom I am very grateful for commissioning this book. My editor Katie Owen provided exactly that blend of insight and enthusiasm which authors fantasise about during the long, dark days of composition. Thanks go too to Ilsa Yardley for her immaculate copy-editing and to Leo Hollis for taking on the picture research. And, of course, I am indebted to Rachel Calder at the Tessa Sayle Agency for first putting me and Eliot together. More personally, I’d like to thank Karen Merrin for her friendship and my brother, Dr Michael Hughes of Brunel University, for hours of phone support, not to mention a crash course in German philosophy. But my greatest debt is to my parents who have never, in all the years I have spent writing about the nineteenth century, hinted that there might be easier ways to make a living.