⁵ Anonymous publication was common in mid-Victorian periodicals, but it was especially important to Marian Evans and George Henry Lewes, who considered themselves husband and wife, although a legal marriage was made impossible by the divorce laws of the period. Her pseudonym did not prevent Blackwood from guessing the authorship early on, but he was as committed as Lewes and George Eliot to maintaining her anonymity, fearing negative judgments of her work based on her personal life. For discussion of the attempts to maintain her anonymity, see Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: A Life (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996), 172, 190–93, et passim.