George Eliot wrote nearly all of her nonfiction prose during two widely separated periods in her life. As Marian Evans, in her mid thirties, she produced more than sixty critical essays that appeared in Victorian organs of heterodoxy such as the West-minster Review and the Leader. As the aging sibyl, after twenty years as a brilliant novelist and a mediocre poet, she wrote Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), largely a set of reflective character sketches. Although Eliot's famous novels most often evoke the daisied fields of her provincial childhood, both her early journalism and her late sketches are urban in tone, for, the novel settings notwithstanding, Eliot lived in or near London for most of her adult life.

Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans, was the youngest child of Robert Evans, agent for the estate of Sir Francis Newdigate, and Christiana Pearson Evans, his second wife. She grew up at...