Associating only with a small, select number of friends, George Darley passed his life in a solitary world largely of his own making. When he is discussed in the surveys of English Romanticism, he is inevitably described as a "minor poet," but even that designation is more than he expected. In a 20 September 1822 letter to Marianne Neail, a family friend, he wrote of his frustrations and expectations:

I have done nothing in the Literary way-want of funds, of introductions, of speech & address, of worldly knowledge & dexterity--of (last but not least) brains, has kept me & will keep me, a poor author--in faculties, appearance, & life.... I confide this secret to you first because you are a woman--and secondly because you are one in whose affections the confession will not injure me, tho it may in your respect. Keep my secret, however, as close as you would sigh for the youth...