I do not know that the particular method in which I have treated the letters has ever been adopted before. Each letter has been pruned of everything that seemed to me irrelevant to my purpose of everything that I thought my wife would have wished to be omitted.
It is evident, then, that Mr. Cross, in writing the Life of George Eliot, had no intention of consulting the interests of students of literature, nor the views of bibliographers; he even suppressed all mention of the "Brother and Sister" Sonnets; and yet he overlooked a detail from which a clue may be easily picked up. A letter written on September 25th, 1846, by Mrs. Bray to Miss Hennell, says:
Miss Evans looks very brilliant just now. We fancy she must be writing her novel.
What was this novel? That we shall never know; but it is morally certain that George Eliot, in the autumn of 1846, was experimenting in literature, fashioning her style, and the papers now presented to students, who will at once trace therein the 'prentice hand of our geatest woman writer, all date from this period.
The resuscitation to-day of a few of George Eliot's early writings is, perhaps, not inopportune;
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