the editor, ’I should like you to convey my gratitude to your reviewer.  I see well he is a man whose experience and study enabled him to relish parts of my book which I should despair of seeing recognized by critics in London back drawing-rooms.  He has gratified me keenly by laying his fingers on passages which I wrote either from strong feeling or from intimate knowledge, but which I had prepared myself to find passed over by reviewers.’  Soon after, The Times followed with an appreciative notice of the book which sounded its real merits, and did justice to the author’s originality of genius; and by the month of April the book was steadily running through a second edition.  Readers were beginning to realize that the Scenes of Clerical Life was not a mere chance success, but the work of a writer capable of greater and better things.”

It was Mrs. Lewes’s desire not to be known to the public in her own personality, hence her adoption of a nom de plume.  She shrank from the consequences of a literary fame, had none of George Sand’s love of notoriety or desire to impress herself upon the world.  It was her hope that George Eliot and Mrs. Lewes would lead distinct lives so far as either was known outside her own household; that the two should not be joined together even in the minds of her most intimate friends.  When her friend, the editor of the Westminster Review, detected the authorship of Adam Bede, and wrote to her in its praise, congratulating her on the success she had attained, Lewes wrote to him denying positively that Mrs. Lewes was the author.  Charles Dickens also saw through the disguise, and wrote to the publisher declaring his opinion that Adam Bede was written by a woman.  When this was denied, he still persisted in his conviction, detecting the womanly insight into character, her failure adequately to portray men, while of women “she seemed to know their very hearts.”

The vividness with which scenes and persons about her childhood home were depicted, speedily led to the breaking of this disguise.  One of her school-fellows, as soon as she had read Adam Bede, said, “George Eliot is Marian Evans;” but others were only confident that the author must be some Nuncaton resident, and began to look about them for the author.  Some portions of the Scenes of Clerical Life had already been discovered to have a very strong local coloring, and now there was much curiosity as to the personality of the writer.  A dilapidated gentleman of the neighborhood, who had run through with a fortune at Cambridge, was selected for the honor.  While the Scenes were being published, an Isle of Man newspaper attributed the authorship to this man, whose name was Liggins, but he at once repudiated it.  On the appearance of Adam Bede this claim was again put forward, and a local clergyman became the medium of its announcement to the public.  The London Times printed the following letter in its issue of April 15, 1859:  “Sir,—­The author of Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede is Mr. Joseph Liggins, of Nuncaton, Warwickshire.  You may easily satisfy yourself of my correctness by inquiring of any one in that neighborhood.  Mr. Liggins himself and the characters whom he paints are as familiar there as the twin spires of Coventry.—­Yours obediently, H. ANDERS, Rector of Kirkby.”