In Adam Bede, as well as in the Clerical Scenes and The Mill on the Floss, she describes types of character instead of actual personages; and yet so much of the realistic is embodied that more than one of her characters has been identified as being in a considerable degree a sketch from life.  This is true of The Mill on the Floss even more fully than of her previous books.  In Maggie she has portrayed one side of her own character, and made use of much of her early experience.  Lucy is said to be her sister, and two of her aunts are sketched in the aunts of Maggie—­Mrs. Glegg and Mrs. Pullett.  Her brother recognized the minute faithfulness of this story, as he did that of Adam Bede.  The town of St. Ogg’s is a good description of the tide-water town of Gainesborough in Lincolnshire.  The Hayslope of Adam Bede has been identified as the village of Ellaston, four miles from Ashbourne, in Derbyshire.  It is near Wirksworth, the home of Elizabeth Evans.

The local exactness of George Eliot’s descriptions is another evidence of her realism.  “It is not unlikely,” suggests Mr. Kegan Paul, “that the time will come when with one or other of her books in their hand, people will wander among the scenes of George Eliot’s early youth, and trace each allusion, as they are wont to do at Abbotsford or Newstead, and they will recognize the photographic minuteness and accuracy with which these scenes, so long unvisited, had stamped themselves on the mind of the observant girl.”  The historical setting of her novels is also faithful in even minute details.  The time of “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story” is at the beginning of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and it well describes the country customs of the earlier years of the present century. Adam Bede describes the first decade of the present century, while Silas Marner is a little later.  With “Amos Barton,” and The Mill on the Floss we are in the second decade of the century, before hand-looms had gone out or railroads had come in.  She has a fondness for these days of rustic simplicity, quiet habits and homely disingenuousness, and she more than once expresses a doubt if much has been gained by the introduction of machinery, suffrage and culture.  She regrets that—­

Human advancement has no moments when conservative reforming intellect takes a nap, while imagination does a little toryism by the sly, revelling in regret that dear old brown, crumbling, picturesque inefficiency is everywhere giving place to sick-and-span, new-painted, new-varnished efficiency, which will yield endless diagrams, plans, elevations and sections; but, alas! no picture.  Mine, I fear, is not a well-regulated mind:  it has an occasional tenderness for old abuses; it lingers with a certain fondness over the days of nasal clerks and top-booted parsons, and has a sigh for the departed shades of vulgar errors. [Footnote:  Amos Barton, chapter I.]

In Adam Bede, when describing a leisurely walk home from church in the good old days, she bursts out again into enthusiastic praise of the time before there was so much advancement and culture.