GE to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, London, 16 December 1876
Title
GE to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, London, 16 December 1876
Title
GE to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, London, 16 December 1876
Sender
George Eliot
Recipient
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Date(s)
- 1876-12-16
Place
London
Letter Content
GE to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, London, 16 December 1876
MS: The late Mr. Gabriel Wells. A copy found among the Cross papers is at Yale. Published: Century Magazine, 104 (September 1922), 644-645.
The Priory, | 21. North Bank, | Regents Park.
December 16. 76.
My dear Miss Phelps
I am very grateful to you for your generous words of sympathy and I am deeply touched by the image you suggest to me of yourself struggling under delicate health to fulfil worthily an office that may make a new precedent in social advance and which is at the very least an experiment that ought to be tried. 576 America is the seed-ground and nursery of new ideals, where they can grow in a larger, freer air than ours.
Your lecture if you are good enough to send it will, I am sure, be read with interest by Mr. Lewes, but I hardly ever read anything that is written about myself -- indeed, never unless my husband expressly wishes me to do so by way of exception. 577 I adopted this rule many years ago as a necessary preservative against influences that would have ended by nullifying my power of writing. Mr. Lewes reads anything written about me that comes in his way and occasionally gives me reports of what he reads if it happens to shew an unusual insight or an unusual ineptitude. In this way I get confirmed in my impression that the criticism of any new writing is shifting and untrustworthy. I hardly think that any critic can have so keen a sense of the short-comings in my works as that I groan under in the course of writing them, and I cannot imagine any edification coming to an author from a sort of reviewing which consists in attributing to him or her unexpressed opinions, and in imagining circumstances which may be alleged as petty private motives for the treatment of subjects which ought to be of general human interest.
But I am confident, dear Miss Phelps, that whatever you have spoken or written is free from any such characteristics as those I refer to -- nay, is full of a spirit animated and guided by a wide-reaching fellowship. I have only been led into this rather superfluous sort of remark by the mention of a rule which seemed to require explanation. It is perhaps less irrelevant to say, 'e0propos of a distinction you seem to make between my earlier and later works, 578 that though I trust there is some growth in my appreciation of others and in my self-distrust, there has been no change in the point of view from which I regard our life since I wrote my first fiction -- the [Scenes of Clerical Life.] Any apparent change of spirit must be due to something of which I am unconscious. The principles which are at the root of my effort to paint Dinah Morris are equally at the root of my effort to paint Mordecai. Enough of me and my doings.
You and Mrs. Stowe might well beguile me by your loving invitations to cross the wide Atlantic, 579 if it were not that Mr. Lewes's health is threatened in a peculiar way by any such perturbation of the heart's action as might come from a sea-voyage. It is this that hinders me from carrying out my longing to go to the East, 580 and that must forbid me equally from seeing your land of the Future. You speak of friends -- Mr. and Mrs. Fields of Boston -- to whom I should be glad to have my best remembrances offered when you see them.
Once more, dear Friend, believe in a gratitude which I will venture to call affectionate, from yours in sincerity
M. E. Lewes.
MS: The late Mr. Gabriel Wells. A copy found among the Cross papers is at Yale. Published: Century Magazine, 104 (September 1922), 644-645.
The Priory, | 21. North Bank, | Regents Park.
December 16. 76.
My dear Miss Phelps
I am very grateful to you for your generous words of sympathy and I am deeply touched by the image you suggest to me of yourself struggling under delicate health to fulfil worthily an office that may make a new precedent in social advance and which is at the very least an experiment that ought to be tried. 576 America is the seed-ground and nursery of new ideals, where they can grow in a larger, freer air than ours.
Your lecture if you are good enough to send it will, I am sure, be read with interest by Mr. Lewes, but I hardly ever read anything that is written about myself -- indeed, never unless my husband expressly wishes me to do so by way of exception. 577 I adopted this rule many years ago as a necessary preservative against influences that would have ended by nullifying my power of writing. Mr. Lewes reads anything written about me that comes in his way and occasionally gives me reports of what he reads if it happens to shew an unusual insight or an unusual ineptitude. In this way I get confirmed in my impression that the criticism of any new writing is shifting and untrustworthy. I hardly think that any critic can have so keen a sense of the short-comings in my works as that I groan under in the course of writing them, and I cannot imagine any edification coming to an author from a sort of reviewing which consists in attributing to him or her unexpressed opinions, and in imagining circumstances which may be alleged as petty private motives for the treatment of subjects which ought to be of general human interest.
But I am confident, dear Miss Phelps, that whatever you have spoken or written is free from any such characteristics as those I refer to -- nay, is full of a spirit animated and guided by a wide-reaching fellowship. I have only been led into this rather superfluous sort of remark by the mention of a rule which seemed to require explanation. It is perhaps less irrelevant to say, 'e0propos of a distinction you seem to make between my earlier and later works, 578 that though I trust there is some growth in my appreciation of others and in my self-distrust, there has been no change in the point of view from which I regard our life since I wrote my first fiction -- the [Scenes of Clerical Life.] Any apparent change of spirit must be due to something of which I am unconscious. The principles which are at the root of my effort to paint Dinah Morris are equally at the root of my effort to paint Mordecai. Enough of me and my doings.
You and Mrs. Stowe might well beguile me by your loving invitations to cross the wide Atlantic, 579 if it were not that Mr. Lewes's health is threatened in a peculiar way by any such perturbation of the heart's action as might come from a sea-voyage. It is this that hinders me from carrying out my longing to go to the East, 580 and that must forbid me equally from seeing your land of the Future. You speak of friends -- Mr. and Mrs. Fields of Boston -- to whom I should be glad to have my best remembrances offered when you see them.
Once more, dear Friend, believe in a gratitude which I will venture to call affectionate, from yours in sincerity
M. E. Lewes.
Signature
M. E. Lewes.
Citation
George Eliot, GE to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, London, 16 December 1876, Complete George Eliot Letters(2026), George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org, Accessed September 7, 2026. https://www.georgeeliotarchive.org/items/show/92294