Page "George Eliot" Paragraph 14

In 1858 ( when she was 39 ) Amos Barton, the first of the Scenes of Clerical Life, was published in Blackwood's Magazine and, along with the other Scenes, was well received.

Her first complete novel, published in 1859, was Adam Bede and was an instant success, but it prompted an intense interest in who this new author might be.

Scenes of Clerical Life was widely believed to have been written by a country parson or perhaps the wife of a parson.

With the release of the incredibly popular Adam Bede, speculation increased markedly, and there was even a pretender to the authorship, one Joseph Liggins.

In the end, the real George Eliot stepped forward: Marian Evans Lewes admitted she was the author.

The revelations about Eliot's private life surprised and shocked many of her admiring readers, but this apparently did not affect her popularity as a novelist.

Eliot's relationship with Lewes afforded her the encouragement and stability she so badly needed to write fiction, and to ease her self-doubt, but it would be some time before they were accepted into polite society.

Acceptance was finally confirmed in 1877, when they were introduced to Princess Louise, the daughter of Queen Victoria.

The queen herself was an avid reader of all of George Eliot's novels, being so impressed with Adam Bede that she commissioned the artist Edward Henry Corbould to paint scenes from the book.