George Eliot

More Books

Five thousand copies of Adam Bede were sold the first two weeks, and sixteen thousand the first year. So excellent was the sale that Mr. Blackwood sent her four thousand dollars in addition to the first four. The work was soon translated into French, German, and Hungarian. Mr. Lewes' Physiology of Common Life was now published, but it brought little pecuniary return.

The reading was carried on as usual by the two students. The Life of George Stephenson; the Electra of Sophocles; the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, Harriet Martineau's British Empire in India; and History of the Thirty Years' Peace; Beranger, Modern Painters, containing some of the finest writing of the age; Overbech on Greek art; Anna Mary Howitt's book on Munich; Carlyle's Life of Frederick the Great; Darwin's Origin of Species; Emerson's Man the Reformer, "which comes to me with fresh beauty and meaning"; Buckle's History of Civilization; Plato and Aristotle.

An American publisher now offered her six thousand dollars for a book, but she was obliged to decline, for she was writing the Mill on the Floss, in 1860, for which Blackwood gave her ten thousand dollars for the first edition of four thousand copies, and Harper & Brothers fifteen hundred dollars for using it also. Tauchnitz paid her five hundred for the German reprint.

She said: "I am grateful and yet rather sad to have finished; sad that I shall live with my people on the banks of the Floss no longer. But it is time that I should go, and absorb some new life and gather fresh ideas." They went at once to Italy, where they spent several months in Florence, Venice, and Rome.

In the former city she made her studies for her great novel, Romola. She read Sismondi's History of the Italian Republics, Tenneman's History of Philosophy, T.A. Trollope's Beata, Hallam on the Study of Roman Law in the Middle Ages, Gibbon on the Revival of Greek Learning, Burlamachi's Life of Savonarola; also Villari's life of the great preacher, Mrs. Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art, Machiavelli's works, Petrarch's Letters, Casa Guidi Windows, Buhle's History of Modern Philosophy, Story's Roba di Roma, Liddell's Rome, Gibbon, Mosheim, and one might almost say the whole range of Italian literature in the original. Of Mommsen's History of Rome she said, "It is so fine that I count all minds graceless who read it without the deepest stirrings."

The study necessary to make one familiar with fifteenth century times was almost limitless. No wonder she told Mr. Cross, years afterward, "I began Romola a young woman, I finished it an old woman"; but that, with Adam Bede and Middlemarch, will be her monument. "What courage and patience," she says, "are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything!" "In authorship I hold carelessness to be a mortal sin." "I took unspeakable pains in preparing to write Romola."

For this one book, on which she spent a year and a half, Cornhill Magazine paid her the small fortune of thirty-five thousand dollars. She purchased a pleasant home, "The Priory," Regent's Park, where she made her friends welcome, though she never made calls upon any, for lack of time. She had found, like Victor Hugo, that time is a very precious thing for those who wish to succeed in life. Browning, Huxley, and Herbert Spencer often came to dine.