Under his sympathetic influence she began to write fiction for the magazines, her first story being “Amos Barton” (1857), which was later included in the Scenes of Clerical Life (1858).  Her first long novel, Adam Bede, appeared early in 1859 and met with such popular favor that to the end of her life she despaired of ever again repeating her triumph.  But the unexpected success proved to be an inspiration, and she completed The Mill on the Floss and began Silas Marner during the following year.  Not until the great success of these works led to an insistent demand to know the author did the English public learn that it was a woman, and not an English clergyman, as they supposed, who had suddenly jumped to the front rank of living writers.

Up to this point George Eliot had confined herself to English country life, but now she suddenly abandoned the scenes and the people with whom she was most familiar in order to write an historical novel.  It was in 1860, while traveling in Italy, that she formed “the great project” of Romola,—­a mingling of fiction and moral philosophy, against the background of the mighty Renaissance movement.  In this she was writing of things of which she had no personal knowledge, and the book cost her many months of hard and depressing labor.  She said herself that she was a young woman when she began the work, and an old woman when she finished it. Romola (1862—­ 1863) was not successful with the public, and the same may be said of Felix Holt the Radical (1866) and The Spanish Gypsy (1868).  The last-named work was the result of the author’s ambition to write a dramatic poem which should duplicate the lesson of Romola; and for the purpose of gathering material she visited Spain, which she had decided upon as the scene of her poetical effort.  With the publication of Middlemarch (1871-1872) George Eliot came back again into popular favor, though this work is less spontaneous, and more labored and pedantic, than her earlier novels.  The fault of too much analysis and moralizing was even more conspicuous in Daniei Deronda (1876), which she regarded as her greatest book.  Her life during all this time was singularly uneventful, and the chief milestones along the road mark the publication of her successive novels.

During all the years of her literary success her husband Lewes had been a most sympathetic friend and critic, and when he died, in 1878, the loss seemed to be more than she could bear.  Her letters of this period are touching in their loneliness and their craving for sympathy.  Later she astonished everybody by marrying John Walter Cross, much younger than herself, who is known as her biographer.  “Deep down below there is a river of sadness, but ...  I am able to enjoy my newly re-opened life,” writes this woman of sixty, who, ever since she was the girl whom we know as Maggie Tulliver, must always have some one to love and to depend upon.  Her new interest in life lasted but a few months, for she died in December of the same year (1880).  One of the best indications of her strength and her limitations is her portrait, with its strong masculine features, suggesting both by resemblance and by contrast that wonderful portrait of Savonarola which hangs over his old desk in the monastery at Florence.