Thus what with the public controversy between the Liggins and anti-Liggins parties--for many persons appear to have remained firmly persuaded that Liggins was the true author--and what with the more legitimate stimulus excited by the confirmatory excellence of _Adam Bede_, the public curiosity was thoroughly aroused, so that even before _The Mill on the Floss_ appeared in 1860, it had become pretty generally known who "George Eliot" was.
Here, then, would seem to be a fitting point for us to pause a moment and endeavor to construct for ourselves some definite figure of the real flesh-and-blood creature who, up to this time, had remained the mere literary abstraction called George Eliot.
It appeared that her real name was Marian Evans, and that she was the daughter of a respectable land surveyor, who had married and settled at Nuneaton, in Warwickshire. Here she was born in November, 1820; and it seems pleasant to reflect that but a few miles off in the same county of Warwickshire was the birthplace of Shakspeare, whose place among male writers seems more nearly filled by Marian Evans or George Eliot among female writers than by any other woman, so that we have the greatest English man and the greatest English woman born, though two centuries and a half apart in time, but a few miles apart in space.
Here, among the same thick hedges and green fields of the fair English Midlands with which Shakspeare was familiar, Marian Evans lived for the first large part of her life. Perhaps a more quiet, uneventful existence as to external happenings could hardly be imagined; and that Marian Evans was among the quietest of the quiet residents there seems cunningly enough indicated if we remember that when the good people of Nuneaton first began to suspect that some resident of that region had been taking their portraits in _Scenes of Clerical Life_, none seemed to think for a moment of a certain Marian Evans as possibly connected with the matter; and popular suspicion, after canvassing the whole ground, was able to find only one person--to wit, the Mr. Liggins just referred to--who seemed at all competent to such work.
Of these demure, reserved, uneventful years of country existence it is, of course, impossible to lay before you any record; no life of George Eliot has yet been given to the public. Sometime ago, however, I happened upon a letter of Marian Evans published in an English paper, in which she refers with so much particularity to this portion of her life, that I do not know how we could gain a more vivid and authentic view thereof than by quoting it here. Specifically, the letter relates to a controversy that had sprung up as to who was the original of the character of Dinah Morris--that beautiful Dinah Morris, you will remember in _Adam Bede_--solemn, fragile, strong Dinah Morris, the woman-preacher whom I find haunting my imagination in strange but entrancing unions of the most diverse forms, as if, for instance, a snow-drop could also be St. Paul, as if a kiss could be a gospel, as if a lovely phrase of Chopin's most inward music should become suddenly an Apocalypse--that rare, pure and strange Dinah Morris who would alone consecrate English literature if it had yielded no other gift to man. It would seem that possibly a dim suggestion of such a character may have been due to a certain aunt of hers, Elizabeth Evans, whom Marian had met in her girlhood; but this suggestion was all; and the letter shows us clearly that the character of Dinah Morris was almost an entire creation. The letter is as follows: