IN CHOOSING this selection of George Eliot’s work, our guiding editorial principle has been to include items that, as well as being interesting in themselves, will be of value to anyone wishing to form a clearer understanding of the development of her thinking and of her work as a novelist. For this reason we have chosen pieces that help to illuminate her views about the nature and purpose of fiction, that illustrate the development of her thinking about religion, art and narrative form, and that record her formulation of the principles governing her own fictional work. Some items we have omitted (for example, the promisingly titled ‘Pictures of Life in French Novels’ in the Saturday Review, 17 May 1856) are little more than brief notices of the books under review. Others (such as her review of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Vol. IV in the Westminster Review, July 1856, pp. 274–8) have been partially incorporated in the notes.
Eliot’s essays and reviews were originally published in periodicals and are here reproduced from photocopies of the original publications. In this edition we have treated her essays as a discrete body of work in which she was, as A. S. Byatt remarks in her Introduction (pp. xii–xiii), ‘clearing the ground’ and have, therefore, separated them from her book reviews, which are, with rare exceptions, responses to individual works. Eliot’s revision of some of her essays for publication in book form towards the end of her life (Essays and Leaves from a Notebook, 1884) indicates that she too regarded the essays as qualitatively distinct work. Significant variations are registered in the notes. Her quotations from the books she is reviewing are notoriously inaccurate, especially the foreign language texts. Again, we have chosen to reproduce the reviews as originally published, but have corrected spelling and have also noted substantive variations from the original. Obvious printers’ errors (e.g., ‘Bridgenorth’ for ‘Bridgworth’) have been silently corrected. Because the copy texts come from a wide variety of printed sources, they were originally set in different house styles. Anomalies have been silently harmonized, although we have retained some of Eliot’s consistent idiosyncracies (e.g., ‘Shakspeare’ for ‘Shakespeare’). Her own annotations are reprinted as footnotes on the appropriate page; all other notes are to be found at the back of the volume, along with details about the circumstances of composition. Translations of passages in foreign languages are also printed in full in the notes.
The Eliot–Harrison correspondence, as well as extracts from letters referred to in the notes, and the extract from ‘The Ilfracombe Journal’ are taken from Gordon S. Haight’s edition of The George Eliot Letters. The poems are reprinted from the first published edition, as are the extracts from her translations and the essay from Impressions of Theophrastus Such. The 1868 essay ‘Notes on Form in Art’ is reproduced from the manuscript at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.