Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR The great authoress who called herself George Eliot is chiefly known, and no doubt deserved to be chiefly known, in England, as a novelist, but she was certainly much more than a novelist in the sense in which that word applies even to writers of great genius, to Miss Austen, or Mr. Trollope,—nay, much more than a novelist in the sense in which that word applies to Miss Bronte, or even to Thackeray, though it is of course true in relation to all these writers, that besides being much more, she is also, and necessarily, not so much. What is remarkable in George Eliot is the striking combination in her of very deep speculative power with a very great and realistic imagination. It is rare to find an intellect so skilled in the analysis of psychological problems so completely at home in the conception and delineation of real characters. George Eliot discusses the practical influences acting on men and women, I do not say with the ease of Fielding,—for there is a touch of carefulness, often of over-carefulness in all she does, —but with much of his breadth and spaciousness—the breadth and spaciousness, one must remember, of a man who had seen London life in the capacity of a London police magistrate. Nay, her imagination has, I do not say of course the fertility, but something of the range and the delight in rich historic colouring, of Sir Walter Scott's, while it combines with it something too of the pleasure in ordered learning, and the laborious marshalling of the picturesque results of learning,—though her learning is usually in a very different field,—which gives the flavour of scholastic pride to the great genius of Milton. Not that I think George Eliot's verse entitles her to be described as a poet, though the poetic side of her mind has been deep ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.