Beginning of Essay
George Eliot, pseudonym of Marian Evans (1819-1880) This article appeared in The Times Literary Supplement of 20 November 1919, and was reprinted in The Common Reader: First Series. Virginia Woolf also wrote on George Eliot in the Daily Herald of 9 March 1921 and ....

Middle of Essay
.... let fly. She became one of the butts for youth to laugh at, the convenient symbol of a group of serious people who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the same scorn. Lord Acton had said that she was greater than Dante; Herbert Spencer exempted her novels, as if they were not novels, when he banned all fiction from the London Library. She was the pride and paragon of her sex. Moreover, her private record was not more alluring than her public. Asked to describe an afternoon at the Priory, the story-teller always imitated that the memory of those serious Sunday afternoons had come to tickle his sense of humour. He ha ....